Any school reformer who has ever gone shopping for a home understands two things: That housing prices are in part connected to perceptions about the quality of schools in an area, even if perception doesn’t match reality. It is why people in the Beltway will pay $800,000 or more for an aging shack in Fairfax County, Va. and ignore less-expensive and more-spacious homes across the way in Prince George’s County, Md., even though a closer look shows that the former fails to provide poor and minority students with college-preparatory education (and is low-performing compared to international peers).
So no one should be surprised that the Brookings Institution’s latest report on Zip Code Education policies show that families will pay more for a home near schools they perceive to be high-performing. The report points out that on average, prices for homes near a perceptively high-performing school are $11,000 higher than those for homes near failure mills and dropout factories. Some of this makes sense, especially when one considers that most families don’t have access to data systems that provide comprehensive information on school performance, especially for how well young black men fare in a particular school or district. Home prices become a substitute for more-reliable measures of school and teacher quality. This data alone explains why we must further develop school data systems that can help families learn make smarter decisions.
But the report, written by Brookings Associate Fellow Jonathan Rothwell, isn’t really about how families value education. It attempts to prove that land use and zoning rules are the critical reasons why so many poor and minority families can’t get access to high-quality schools. Whether the underlying analysis really supports Rothwell’s hypothesis is a different story.
For one, the report uses school performance data from 2010 and 2011 (provided through GreatSchools.org) that is neither longitudinal nor has been subjected to any form of Value-Added analysis. So the study can’t really prove that housing policy drives school zoning and boundary rules that perpetuate Zip Code Education. The study also doesn’t consider that schools aren’t the only concerns for home buyers (especially families). Commuting distances, access to stores and other lifestyle amenities, perceptions about quality of life in a particular area, and even levels of racial and economic diversity (or lack thereof) are also critical factors in housing. It’s one reason why home prices in cities such as Santa Monica, Calif., and Alexandria, Va. (the home base of Dropout Nation), are so expensive — even in spite of the mediocre performance of the districts that serve them.
Another problem with the study is that it essentially treats metropolitan areas as school districts — instead of accepting the reality that there are often several (often, even tens of) school districts contained within them — also skews Rothwell’s analysis. The metropolitan area surrounding the nation’s capital, for example, seems to have a far smaller achievement gap than that around New Haven, Conn. But if one looked closer at the achievement gaps (and restrictions on access to college-preparatory curricula for poor and minority students) within each of the districts within the metropolitan area — especially in Fairfax County — then a different story would likely emerge, with achievement gaps in some districts in the Beltway being as wide as those in the districts in its Nutmeg State counterpart.
Rothwell also fails to consider the reality that traditional districts are operations that are generally not controlled by municipal and county governments. This means that the decisions on school boundaries are often made without consideration of what municipalities do on the land use front. It also means that schools don’t factor much into zoning and land use policymaking while other concerns — from the desire of local governments to boost property tax dollars, to the interest of existing homeowners in artificially inflating home values, to the concerns of environmentalists and historic preservationists — most certainly do.
This points to a flaw in Rothwell’s solution of crafting home zoning policies that require more affordable housing to be built in communities with high-quality schools. Such an effort would require zoning agencies to seriously think about schools; there may be good societal and economic development reasons for them to do so, but it won’t happen until districts and other local governments are under the control of either a mayor or county board. Even if a city does this without having a district under mayoral control, the penchant for districts to change their zones means that poor and minority families (along with white, middle-class counterparts) could still end up sending their kids to a failure mills.
Then there is the fact that the analysis is driven by Rothwell’s underlying philosophy that socioeconomic integration is some sort of school reform. This is similar to what Heather Schwartz of the Century Foundation and the think tank’s education czar, Richard Kahlenberg, attempted to do two years ago in an analysis of schools in Montgomery County, Md.; in fact, Rothwell cites Schwartz’s report in his own study, and, like Schwartz, wrongly views correlation — that is, the tendency of schools in poor communities to be low-quality — as causation. Yet as Dropout Nation has consistently pointed out, socioeconomic integration — either in the form of magnet schools or inclusionary housing policies that require affordable housing to be built in wealthy neighborhoods — does nothing to actually address the systemic problems within American public education. Given the wide achievement gaps even within otherwise high-performing districts, the struggles minority families have with teachers and school leaders in getting their kids into Advanced Placement courses (and evade racialist ability tracking policies), and the reality that the quality of teaching can vary from one classroom to another, housing integration policies just won’t work in providing all kids with high-quality education.
Certainly Rothwell’s study, imperfect as it may be, points to some key solutions to ending Zip Code Education. One step lies in mayoral (and even county board) control of districts. In fact, one potential benefit of placing schools in city or county government hands is ability of a mayor or county executive to reshape how schools serve all communities. Another lies in expanding school choice and Parent Power. Expanding charter schools, along with launching voucher plans, can allow poor and minority families to help their kids get high-quality school options either within their communities or outside the neighborhood. Expanding intra-district and inter-district choice (the latter of which is on the agenda of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder) would also expand opportunities for all families.
Finally, we still must push the overhaul of how we recruit, train, evaluate, and reward teachers, along with revamping the rest of American public education. There is no reason why a zip code should have power to determine the destiny of any child.