A new study co-authored by a former University of Vermont professor concludes that parents are willing to pay more for houses in towns that offer school choice than in towns where the public school is their only option.
But some public school advocates are skeptical about those findings.
About 90 Vermont towns pay tuition vouchers for students who choose to attend a private school or a public school in a different town. Of those towns, 20 have no schools of their own. David Harrison, a professor of finance at Texas Tech University, used to teach at the University of Vermont, and he wanted to know whether real estate values are higher in Vermont’s voucher towns than in areas that do not offer school choice.
“And in these communities where we’re not locked into going to the local schools then we can see if the parents were willing to pay a premium in house values for doing that,” Harrison said.
Harrison and his co-authors did not survey specific parents, and they admit that the study does not take every real estate perk into account. It doesn’t draw distinctions, for example, between scenic and non-scenic properties.
The study looks at the prices for comparable houses in towns with school choice, versus towns without it. But it doesn't take every real estate perk into account. It doesn’t draw distinctions, for example, between scenic and non-scenic properties.
Instead, the study looks at the prices for comparable houses in towns with school choice, versus towns without it. For example, Harrison says, they looked at property values in Chittenden County towns where students must attend local schools, and other nearby towns with school choice.
“We would argue that parents are willing to pay a premium—our empirical results, our statistics support the idea—that parents in St. George or Westford, given that equivalent unit of housing, would be willing to pay a premium of 3, 4, or 5 percent of housing value for the ability to send their child to any of the high schools. So maybe they would select Champlain Valley Union. Maybe they would prefer to go in to Burlington; maybe they work in Burlington and it makes it easier on the parents to commute and so they’d want to choose Burlington High School or South Burlington High School.”
Or maybe, if they want a private school, parents would move to a place like St. Johnsbury, which has no public high school, and send their kids at state expense to St. Johnsbury Academy.
That is, in fact, happening so much that the St. Johnsbury school budget is straining to meet those tuition payments. The study’s authors do not examine whether towns benefit from an influx of parents who want vouchers. Harrison surmises that if school choice raises real estate values, tax revenues will also rise.
The study raises questions for Paul Cillo, President of the Public Assets Institute. He says most towns in Vermont do have good public schools, which is why 97 percent of the state’s students choose public education.
But Harrison’s study raises questions for Paul Cillo, President of the Public Assets Institute. Cillo agrees that many parents shopping for homes are also shopping for good schools.
“What doesn’t follow is that parents would move to a town that allowed them to use a voucher to commute to a good school in another town rather than move to a town that has a good school,” said Cillo.
And Cillo says most towns in Vermont do have good public schools, which is why 97 percent of the state’s students choose public education. He says the other 3 percent who use vouchers for private schools often live in rural places where public schools may not be available.
“As the report points out, the home values in these towns are about $75,000 below the state average. So living in a very sparsely populated town, by definition, is clearly not for everybody. You know some parents may actually like that, but clearly there isn’t a line at the door, otherwise they wouldn’t be sparsely populated towns,” Cillo said.
The study may be used by school choice advocates. But Cillo says most parents want a good public school rather than to be able to send their children elsewhere.
