Your Child’s Education Shouldn’t Depend On Your Mortgage

Late last year, the National Association of Realtors released its annual survey showing that only 24% of home buyers have children under the age of 18—a record low—while the age of first-time home buyers has crept up to 40 — a record high.

In other words, Americans are feeling the squeeze, especially those in the peak of their childbearing years.

Making that squeeze even worse is the fact that schools in most of the country are locally assigned, so where you buy a home determines where your kids go to school — which makes homeownership for parents of children under 18 more expensive, since homes in good public school districts generally cost more than homes in bad ones. A home on one block can cost tens of thousands of dollars more than a similar home on the block over, solely because of school zoning.

Parents, and people who want to become parents, want to give their children at least as good a life as they had growing up — ideally a better one. But 80% of Americans — double the share as 20 years ago — fear that their children’s lives will not be better than their own. Anxiety about whether they’ll ever afford a home in a district with schools they trust further feeds that fear.

That tension doesn’t only hurt parents, but would-be parents too, often making parenthood itself feel out of reach. That’s both a human tragedy and a policy failure — one that school choice can, if not solve, then at least ameliorate, as a recent Independent Women report on pro-family policy argues.

When a boundary between two towns determines whether your child goes to a functional school or a dysfunctional one, choosing on which side to live feels tantamount to choosing your child’s entire life trajectory. Most parents who can pay for the best won’t risk it — so housing costs in the “good school” town keep climbing, even as perfectly good homes sell for far less just one town over.

Look at the case of the Memphis, Tennessee metro area, circa 2013: after a merger of school districts changed zoning boundaries, economists at Rhodes College studied home prices and school quality and found that a house’s value rose by about 3-4% for every standard-deviation increase in the quality of the school it was zoned to.

That’s fine for parents who can comfortably afford that extra 3-4% price hike, on top of high interest rates, down payments, and all the other costs that come with home ownership. But what about everyone else?

The problem is, people who can only afford homes in the “bad school” town are left with a handful of unenviable options: rent indefinitely in a town with good public schools, buy in a cheaper town with worse public schools and cross their fingers that their kids’ education turns out okay, delay having children until they can afford to buy a home in the town with good public schools (which might never happen), or pay more than they can afford for private school.

This is where school choice comes in. It lifts the burden from hardworking families by making a boundary between two towns just that — a line with no bearing on whether or not their child learns to read and do math. When parents know their kids aren’t locked into the residentially assigned public school, and can instead opt for a public charter school or use voucher dollars toward a private one, they can breathe a little easier.

Put simply, access to school choice means parents don’t have to choose between living in a district with bad schools versus living in a district with good ones; they can rest assured that regardless of where they live, they have access to whatever the education marketplace in their area offers, which raises the quality of schools across the board. And that means the mad-rush housing market in good school districts cools down a bit.

The research backs this up. A paper published in the “American Economic Journal: Economic Policy” found that the price premium good traditional public schools add to nearby homes falls by about four percentage points after charter school expansion. That is to say, once real alternatives to residentially assigned public schools exist, the pure real-estate advantage of living inside a given public school zone shrinks.

Even setting aside home ownership statistics, ZIP code shouldn’t determine the quality of a child’s education. But the brutal housing market of the 2020s makes the case for school choice even more urgent. Buying a home is already high-stakes for young families; it shouldn’t also be the deciding factor in whether — or how many — children they have. Expanding school choice is one of the clearest policy levers to ease that pressure and make this country more family-friendly — and more pro-child.

***

This is part of a series of op-eds based on Independent Women’s new report, “Flourishing Families: An Agenda to Help Families Thrive.” The report, found here, details ways to support families without direct government subsidies or radically distorting the tax code to redistribute resources to families.

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women and a senior contributor to IWFeatures.com.