Elementary Education Article

http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/pdf/2587017.pdf

Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education

Sandra E. Black

May 1999

Summary:

Many people, such as economist, parents, policy makers, seek

information on the importance of the quality of a school. Sandra E. Black

attempts a different approach to determining the quality of schools other

than test scores and earnings. The way Black approaches her study is to

calculate how much more people pay for houses located in areas with better

schools. The first section of Blacks article introduces the topic, states her

control groups of the experiment, and the main finding of the study. The

main outcome reveals that a 5 percent increase in elementary school test

scores leads to an increase in the marginal resident's willingness to pay of

approximately 2.1 percent, or $3948 at the mean house price of $188,000.

The paper underlines the importance of quality schools to not only parents

but home owners and local politicians. The correlation boils down to an

increase in test scores increase the house value in the district.

The structure of her research is placed into five different sections.

Section two gives the basic methodology. Black compares houses in the

same city which eliminates the variable of different property taxes and

school spending. To avoid the pit fall of differing neighborhood characteristics

Black uses houses on the border line, very close to attendance district

boundary. This leads into section three that explains the data and summary

statistics. Black choose Massachusetts as her study sample because its

school districts are small, which leads to a relative homogeneity of

populations within districts. Her sample data consists of 22,679 single-family

residences within 39 school districts that have at least two elementary

schools that overlap grades and no system of intradistrict school choice. She

then drew the mean price for a

Standard home which was approximately 188,000. From that Black

calculated the school quality by the MEAP test that is given every two years.

The test is out of 16 for 4 different sections with a mean of 13.75 throughout

all of them. Sections four and five show the results. Black gives graphs and

table charts to show the calculation on the ultimate findings which were

stated in my first paragraph. In conclusion better test scores are found to be

capitalized in house prices. Although it is unknown what contributes to the

difference in scores, whether is the quality of the teachers, the facilities, or

the students capacity themselves, Blacks conclusion helps determine the

benefits of various educational policies.