NEWS
- School quality has a mighty influence on neighborhood choice, home values [Washington Latin PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- School choice that goes too far
- Washington Post editors miss the mark regarding Nevada school choice plan
School quality has a mighty influence on neighborhood choice, home values [Washington Latin PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michelle Lerner
September 3, 2015
When Stephanie and Damon Dantzler, both Defense Department employees, returned to the United States after 12 years of living overseas, their priority when determining where to live was the school system.
“We had never lived in the D.C. area before, and with two teenagers, getting them into the best school was extremely important,” Stephanie Dantzler said. “We were living in temporary housing in Pentagon City at first, so we decided on Fairfax County, particularly the area around [Lake] Braddock High School.”
Moving for schools is a common practice for house hunters throughout the Washington area, sometimes even for home buyers without kids.
The Dantzlers quickly found that the homes were too small, too old and, most of all, too expensive. They moved on to Montgomery County and were considering some newly built homes in the northern part of the county when a friend suggested they look at Waldorf, Md.
They said they hit the jackpot in the Charles County community, where they bought a newly constructed home in December.
They sacrificed by making long commutes to work, Stephanie Dantzler said — hers is more than one hour each way, and her husband’s is 45 minutes each way — but they are completely satisfied with St. Charles High School, their home and their neighborhood.
“We found out that a brand new high school was being built, so we deliberately chose to have a new home built in the Fieldside neighborhood near the school rather than buy a new home that was already complete in another part of St. Charles,” Stephanie Dantzler said. The Dantzlers have a 12th-grade daughter who is on a year-long exchange program in Japan and an 11th-grade exchange student from Chile who will attend St. Charles High.
“Our son is a freshman in high school, so he will be part of the first class to go all the way through the new school,” she said.
Good schools are also a top factor among home buyers nationwide.
The 2015 National Association of Realtors Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends study found that the “quality of the school district” was the sixth-most-important factor influencing the neighborhood choice of home buyers around the country, but for buyers 35 to 49, the school district was the fourth-most-important factor.
A recent Trulia survey found that 35 percent of Americans with children under 18 indicate that their “dream home” would be in a great school district, while 12 percent of those without kids have that same dream. However, when the study separated out parents by age group, 46 percent of millennials and 28 percent of Gen Xers with children said their dream home would be in a great school district.
“We saw geographical differences, too, because where school quality is uniform the school district is less of a big deal,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist of Trulia in San Francisco.
Rob Carter, a broker with Century 21 Redwood Realty in Washington, says buyers often ask agents about “good schools.”
“It would be a Fair Housing law violation for a Realtor to make a judgment call about a school, so we direct them to visit school system Web sites for test scores and school ratings sites to find out for themselves which schools they want their kids to attend,” Carter said.
Still, many sources are available to buyers to evaluate schools before they buy a home.
Homes.com recently introduced “School Scores” to its Web site and mobile app, a school-ranking system with letter grades from A+ to D based on state test performance data from public schools.
Other popular sites include GreatSchools.org, U.S. News and World Report and school system Web sites. Leslie White, a realty agent with Redfin brokerage in Washington, suggests visiting school fairs and school open houses, reading parent blogs and chatting with parents at local farmers’ markets to learn more about schools.
“You can talk to the principal at different schools and visit neighborhood schools to get a feel for whether a school is a good fit for your child,” said Casey Aboulafia, a realty agent and vice president of Compass real estate in Washington. “In the suburbs, though, most buyers have already targeted specific school districts for their kids because of a school’s reputation.”
Importance of schools to buyers
Home buyers in the District face a complex system of traditional public schools, public charter schools and magnet schools with a range of quality from low performing to high performing schools found in every ward.
School choice in the District means that navigating school district boundaries is less important for parents who are willing to try out the public school lottery system for out-of-boundary placements and charter schools.
“Public charter schools offer 100 percent open enrollment without any residential restrictions,” said Darren Woodruff, chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “All you have to do is enter the lottery, and if space is available, you can go there. The only limit is the number of available seats.”
Even though charter schools are not neighborhood schools, Woodruff said that at least 48 percent of public charter school students in prekindergarten to 12th grade (16,011) attend public charter schools in their home wards, while 46 percent (15,565) attend schools outside their home wards.
Living within a school boundary is mandatory to attend most public schools, although some districts have magnet schools, and school boundary changes are sometimes necessary to address overcrowding or under-enrollment. New school boundaries in the District take effect this fall.
“Anecdotally, about 75 percent of the first-time buyers I work with are fixated on schools,” said White, the Redfin agent. “We need to layer together the boundaries of the school they want and their price point and the size of home they need, which can be challenging. In some cases, they need to rent longer to save more money to buy in a particular school district or look at other schools in a more affordable area.”
Many school systems offer special schools with a focus on technology and science or language immersion that appeal to parents and kids, said Jamie Coley, an associate broker with the Coley-Reed Team of Long & Foster Real Estate in Bethesda, Md.
“Schools are a huge driver of where people want to live, more so today than in the past,” Coley said. “Parents today are more active than ever in planning for their children’s education.”
Impact of schools on home values
A conundrum for many parents, though, is that schools with great reviews are often located in areas with high-cost housing.
“We know there’s a direct correlation between school quality and home values that’s pretty dramatic,” said David Mele, president of Homes.com in Norfolk.
“For example, where single-family homes have an average price above $1 million, such as Bethesda, Potomac and McLean, the most frequent School Score on our site is an A+. When the average price is $750,000 to $500,000, such as in Ashburn, Olney and Falls Church, the most frequent School Score is an A. The School Scores drop down to B+ when home prices go down to $250,000 to $500,000 in places like Bowie, Annandale, College Park and Dumfries. Places where the homes are priced under $250,000, such as in Bladensburg, Capitol Heights and Landover, have mostly C+ School Scores.”
The problem is, Mele acknowledged, that no one really knows which came first: wealthier homeowners or good schools.
“It’s hard to detangle the relationship between ‘good’ schools and higher real estate values,” Hepp said. “It’s a chicken-or-egg dilemma because you don’t know if the schools are better in a neighborhood because the parents participate more or if the schools were already good and therefore they attract higher-income families who are willing to pay more for their homes.”
Hepp points out that parents influence school quality, which can already be seen in the District, where more families are staying in the city than in the past.
Traditional public schools in the city have an impact on home values, particularly on homes in the Alice Deal Middle School and Wilson High School district.
“If you look at Tenleytown and AU [American University] Park, which feed into Deal and Wilson, a home that costs $800,000 would cost much less in another part of the city,” White said.
Aboulafia said the biggest emphasis for most buyers is on the high school.
“The Crestwood neighborhood was zoned for Deal and Wilson, but the entire neighborhood was moved to Roosevelt High School,” Aboulafia said. “The homeowners there were concerned that their home values would drop, but so far there hasn’t been any negative impact.”
Aboulafia compared data from July 2013 and July 2015, and the pace of sales is the same and prices have actually risen in the neighborhood in spite of the boundary change, perhaps because of overall improvements in D.C. schools.
Charter schools also have been the catalyst for community improvement, Woodruff said.
“We have high-performing charter schools in nearly every ward in the city,” Woodruff said. “We have families with upper, middle and lower incomes going to the same schools, and some of them are choosing to move to neighborhoods that they might not have known about if it weren’t for the charter school there.”
Woodruff said high-performing charter schools in neighborhoods that lacked quality schools are becoming anchors for community improvement even though they’re open to students from all over the city, and he referenced schools such as Washington Latin in Ward 4, Washington Yu Ying and Elsie Whitlow Stokes in Northeast and the Friendship charter schools in Wards 7 and 9.
“Friendship Tech Prep in Southeast is another example of a great new building in a lower-income part of the city that’s providing a great education but is also great for the community,” Woodruff said.
A more direct correlation between school values and prices is evident in Fairfax County, the region’s largest school district, where home buyers pay a premium to live in a home within the boundaries for Langley High School and McLean High School, two of the highest-ranked schools in the area, Carter said.
“I recently worked with sellers of a home in Vienna that had been zoned for Langley High School in McLean and then rezoned for South Lakes High School in Reston,” Carter said. “That rezoning had a catastrophic impact on pricing. The home was originally priced at $1,050,000, which was comparable to similar homes when the neighborhood fed into Langley. We had to look at comparable homes that fed into South Lakes, which were priced in the $800,000s. We ended up selling that house in the low $900,000s; about $125,000 less than if was still in the Langley district.”
Carter says buyers in sought-after school districts are paying a premium for those public schools.
“We live in an area where people care a lot about school rankings and where they are willing to pay extra to send their kids to schools with the best rankings,” Carter said.
In the planned community of St. Charles, Md., the new high school that opened in 2014 has been attracting buyers like the Dantzlers to the area even though as a new school it has yet to be rated.
New-home builders have begun adding more homes to the area in part because of the opportunity to be located near the flagship school for science and technology, said Craig Renner, vice president for marketing and public relations for the St. Charles Companies. Sales have jumped in the community since the high school opened.
“Buyers in St. Charles are excited by the idea of the ‘bright shiny penny’ of the new high school, and it’s a big factor in deciding to live here,” said Dontae Carroll, regional vice president of Long & Foster Real Estate for Prince George’s County and Charles County, Md. “The new facilities and the emphasis on technology are very attractive to parents.”
In Montgomery County, buyers often focus on moving into the Walt Whitman, Bethesda-Chevy Chase or Churchill High Schools, Coley said.
“Buyers, especially if they are moving out of the city because of the schools, often want to live close to D.C. or Bethesda,” Coley said. “They look at the school rankings and then the homes and find that the prices are extremely high. Some decide to squeeze into a smaller place or make their budget work, but others look farther out in the suburbs where the schools also have great scores and their money goes farther.”
Aboulafia said more of her buyers want to stay in the city, try out the D.C. schools and participate in improving the city’s schools.
“Some of my buyers decided to stay in the city because they were happy with their lottery results,” Aboulafia said. “Another set of buyers mapped out the neighborhood boundaries for schools they liked and insisted we only look for homes in those areas.”
Childless home buyers and schools
Home buyers without children are less focused on schools, but they don’t always ignore them.
“Buyers who don’t have kids and don’t plan to are split about 50-50 in their interest in schools,” Carter said. “About half say they don’t want to pay extra to live in a school district they’re not using and they’d rather buy a better house in a different community. But the other half recognizes that school quality has an impact on home values.”
The correlation between highly rated schools and higher home prices has been documented, including a Redfin brokerage report in 2013 that found that homes in neighborhoods with top-ranked schools cost about $50 more per square foot than homes in communities with average-ranked schools.
“It would be wise for first-time buyers to consider the importance of schools in case they have kids in the future and for the impact on resale value,” Carroll said. “But it’s not really top of mind compared to their interest in amenities, commute times and what their lifestyle will be like in a new home.”
School choice that goes too far
The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
September 6, 2015
SOME PARENTS of students who attend private and parochial schools in Nevada are debating whether to pull their children out of their current schools and have them attend public schools for 100 days. It is not that they are dissatisfied; instead, the temporary switch would make the students eligible to return to the private schools with their costs underwritten by public tax dollars. That such an opportunity exists goes to the heart of what is wrong with Nevada’s new voucher program. By subsidizing families who do not need aid, the state wastes public money that would be better directed to low-income students in academically struggling schools.
Republicans who control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion in Nevada passed the unprecedented voucher program, which will allow all parents of public school students — no matter their income — to use state funding earmarked for their children to pay for a private education, including even home schooling. The money — about $5,000 annually per student — would be deposited into an education savings account that can be used for state-approved expenses, with unspent money allowed to roll over and be saved to pay for college tuition. The only requirement is enrollment for 100 consecutive days in a public school; some parents see even that as too onerous and are pushing for workarounds that would allow children in private and parochial schools to qualify.
The law is being challenged in court on grounds the state constitution bans use of public funds for sectarian purposes. Its supporters meanwhile hail it as the ultimate in school choice, allowing education funding to follow students to the schools that work best for them. We believe in school choice, and we have strongly supported the federally funded voucher program that helps poor, mostly minority children in the District attend private or parochial schools. But a universal voucher program that gives precious education funding (Nevada is among the nation’s worst when it comes to support for education) to middle- and high-income families who on their own would choose and can afford private education is neither sensible nor sustainable.
There is also the worry the program could worsen the existing gap between poor and well-off students. Low-income students will get a slightly higher subsidy, and a separate tax credit program provides additional resources, but it is unclear if that will be enough to help them get into competitive, high-quality private schools. If they do not, they may well be faced with attending under-resourced public schools or private schools with cut-rate tuition and quality. That is not much of a choice.
Washington Post editors miss the mark regarding Nevada school choice plan
parentshaveschoolchoicekidswin.com
By Mark Lerner
September 8, 2015
Twenty five years ago I leveraged practically every cent our young family had and missed my younger child’s fourth birthday to attend a conference on libertarian political theory held at Dartmouth College organized by the CATO Institute. There, I asked executive director David Boaz whether private school vouchers should initially be introduced to assist those living in poverty or whether their adoption should be offered to each public school student. He advised that they should first be provided to low income students so that more of the general public would rally around their use.
Much has changed, in a positive way, for public education reform since that time. The Friedman Center for Education Choice estimates that there are now 25 school voucher programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia that enroll over 148,000 kids. In addition, the same organization reveals that currently 3,000 students take advantage of educational savings accounts in five states, with another 202,000 pupils benefiting from 20 tax-credit scholarship arrangements found in 16 localities. Finally, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools details that during the 2013 to 2014 school term over 2.5 million students attended charter schools.
Recently, Nevada passed an educational savings account plan available to almost all families, independent of income. The editors of the Washington Post claim this is too much. “By subsidizing families who do not need aid, the state wastes public money that would be better directed to low-income students in academically struggling schools.”
The problem for the Post is that wealthy parents can afford to send their children to private schools so, according to the newspaper’s editors, it is not right to reimburse them up to $5,000 a child for the cost. But this is actually an antiquated view of how public education is funded in America today.
For example, in the nation’s capital we provide all public school students essentially a scholarship to attend the traditional public or charter school of their choice equal to the amount dictated by the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. Could you imagine the outrage if we told taxpaying citizens that they had to cough up the money to send their children to some of our high performing facilities just because of how much they make?
This issue becomes even more relevant considering what took place just a few days ago in Washington State. Their Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional, because, according to the Associated Press “charter schools don’t qualify as ‘common’ schools under Washington’s Constitution and can’t receive public funding intended for those traditional public schools.” The decision creates chaos for the 1,200 kids already enrolled in the nine charters that have been established. Our local charter school support organization, Charter Board Partners, opened a Seattle office in 2014.
The ruling by the Seattle Supreme Court came after a year of deliberation and was based upon the fact that charters are run by a non-publicly elected board of directors. Instead of seizing on a particular governance structure or whether affluent families can take advantage of educational savings accounts we should re-focus our attention on the benefit of our children. We should allow families to send their kids to the school of their choice.
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