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| Carlos Santana Charter Arts School, North Hills, CA. Photo courtesy of HED. |
By Julien Lafortune
Since 1997, voters in Los Angeles Unified School District
(LAUSD) have approved a series of bonds dedicating over $27 billion in local
and state funding to the construction, expansion, and renovation of hundreds of
school facilities. This was one of largest public infrastructure programs in
the United States since the construction of the interstate highway system.
Through this bond program, LAUSD constructed 131 new schools at a cost of over
$10 billion. My colleague, David Schönholzer, and I study these new school
openings in Los Angeles to provide new evidence on the effects of improving
school infrastructure on students and neighborhoods (Disclaimer: this research is from an unpublished working paper that
is currently going through the peer review process).[1]
These new school facilities served a dual purpose. LAUSD
schools were notoriously overcrowded prior to the new constructions. Over half
of students attended school on a year-round, multi-track calendar meant to
allow existing facilities to reach 133% or even 150% of intended capacity.
Remarkably, by 2016-17 after the completion of the construction program, there
was only one school remaining on such a calendar.
Many schools in LAUSD were also in exceptionally poor
condition after decades of neglect and overcrowding. Stories of broken and
missing equipment, non-functioning restrooms, and inadequate climate control
were common. A 1999 review of facilities practices in LAUSD and other
California districts noted that the district’s school buildings were
“overcrowded, uninspiring, and unhealthy”.[2]
New school constructions alleviated these issues for many students, and additional
funding for school modernization generated improvements in the school
environment for many students attending school in existing facilities.
Despite the importance of school spaces to learning, there
is little agreement in the academic literature over the link between spending
on school infrastructure and improvements in student outcomes. Some studies
have found positive associations while many others have failed to find such
connections. Constructing new school buildings is often a multi-year project,
affects only a subset of students in a district, and leads to changes in the
school environments that affect students in ways that may not be immediately measurable.
For these reasons, much of the prior work is very limited in its ability to
determine the causal effects of new
school buildings.
In contrast, the enormous scale of the LAUSD program allows
us to use the new school openings as a “natural experiment” to tease out the
effects of new school openings on students, schools, and neighborhoods. We use
the records for millions of students who attended school in LAUSD between 2002
and 2012 and study how test scores, course grades, and attendance rates changed
after students switched into newly constructed schools in their neighborhoods. We
also use real estate sales records from hundreds of thousands of properties to
examine how neighborhood house prices respond to nearby new school openings.
Test scores improve after multiple years of exposure to new school facilities
We find that students who attended new school buildings saw
notable improvements in math test scores and modest improvements in English test
scores. These improvements were gradual, and accumulated with each additional
year a student spent in a new school building. In 2002, just as the first new
schools were beginning to open, students in LAUSD were far below their
grade-level peers in California in both English and Math. Our findings imply
that attending a newly constructed school for four or more years closes 45% of
the math achievement gap and 18% of the English achievement gap between LAUSD
students and the California average.
Average annual attendance is higher at new school facilities
In addition, students at new schools attended an average of
four more days per academic year than they had been previously. Elementary
school teachers at new schools also reported slightly higher levels of student effort
on student report cards. This suggests that improved student motivation is behind
at least some of the positive effects we find.
We rule out that these improvements are coming from better
teachers, principals, or peers. We also find students who switched from older buildings
or ones with a greater reliance on portables saw larger gains than those
students whose prior schools were in better physical condition. Overall, we
conclude that the improvements are primarily the result of better school
buildings, with reductions in overcrowding also an important factor. We
unfortunately lacked consistent data on the features of these schools, meaning
we could not conclusively determine which specific features of the new
buildings were most effective at improving student learning.
Turning to the housing market, we find that neighborhood house
prices increase by around 6% following a new school opening. Prices only
increase after the new school is completed – and only in the new school
catchment areas – providing compelling evidence that the new schools are highly
valued by parents and other local residents. Not all improvements from new
school buildings translate into changes in test scores or attendance, but the
increases in house prices reflect some of these more general improvements in
the school environment and in the broader neighborhood. We estimate that the
valuation of these improvements was so large that for each dollar of expenditures
the district undertook it generated around 1.6 dollars in return – a more than
worthwhile investment.
Our hope is that future research is able to build off these
findings to study exactly why better school buildings lead to student success –
and what specific aspects of school buildings are most effective at delivering
these. Nationally, millions of students attend schools that are in “poor”
condition, and estimates of the funding required to address these deficiencies
are often in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The improvements generated
from LAUSD’s school infrastructure program provide powerful new evidence that addressing
these deficiencies in our school infrastructure could lead to worthwhile
improvements in student learning, even taking into account the large upfront
costs of these investments.
Julien Lafortune
is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he
specializes in K–12 education. His primary areas of focus include education
finance, school capital funding policy, and educational tracking and
stratification. He has published research on the impacts of school finance
reforms on student achievement in the American Economic Journal: Applied
Economics. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California,
Berkeley.
[1]
Lafortune, Julien M., and David Schönholzer. “Measuring the Efficacy and
Efficiency of School Facility Expenditures”. Working paper, 2019.
[2]
Terzian, Richard R. “Recommendations for Improving the School Facility Program
in Los Angeles”. Little Hoover Commission,
1999.
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