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Abstract:

Despite the well-documented and highly theorized link betweenfamily resources, residential location, and access to high-achieving publicschools, past research has not measured ​how thisrelationship varies across metropolitan area housing markets. This study fillsthe gap using a novel, granular dataset of over 7 million housing sales recordslinked to block-level measures of the academic achievement of locallyaccessible schools. We find wide variation in the cost of accessinghigh-achieving public schools across 121 large metropolitan areas. Metropolitanhouse price competition for school access is more intense in areas with higherincome inequality, in areas fragmented by many small school districts, and instates where property taxes tie more closely to local school revenue.Importantly, we also find that economic and racial gaps in school access differwidely depending on the metropolitan area where families live. We provide anovel metropolitan-level dataset to accompany these findings and conclude witha call for researchers to investigate how macrolevel conditions moderate theeffect of schools on children's outcomes.