Essentials Magazine Essentials Fall 2019 | Page 30

The Impact of New School Facilities
Figure 2: Average annual attendance is higher at new school facilities
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Years of exposure to new school facility
Days attended
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 thou-
sands of properties to examine how
neighborhood house prices respond to
nearby new school openings.
We find that students who attended
new school buildings saw notable im-
provements in math test scores and mod-
est 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.
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
30 essentials | fall 2019
new schools also reported slightly higher
levels of student effort on student report
cards. This suggests that improved stu-
dent motivation is behind at least some of
the positive effects we find.
We rule out that these improvements
are coming from better teachers, princi-
pals, or peers. We also find students who
switched from older buildings or ones
“.... neighborhood
house prices
increase by around
6% following a new
school opening. “
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 build-
ings 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 build-
ings 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 neigh-
borhood. We estimate that the valuation
of these improvements was so large that
for each dollar of expenditures the dis-
trict undertook it generated around 1.6
dollars in return – a more than worth-
while 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 improve-
ments generated from LAUSD’s school
infrastructure program provide power-
ful 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.
n
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 educa-
tional 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.