Breathing, bad for prices
There’s an amazing piece of research from last year that I want to write about this week. Barbara Biasi and colleagues, who do some of the best economic research on school facilities finance, published “What Works and For Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across The U.S.” last year.
It’s a banger! The headline coming out of this research is that targeted facilities spending decreases achievement gaps in test scores by up to 25%.
Specifically, HVAC projects increase test scores by an average of .2 standard deviations. That’s a big increase.
For poorer districts, it’s an even higher effect: HVAC projects increase test scores by .27 standard deviations.
This makes a ton of fucking sense when you think about it: I don’t like being in rooms where it’s hard for me to breathe and I feel uncomfortable temperature-wise. I find it hard to concentrate if I’m uncomfortable with the air around me. I find it very difficult to think, learn, and make difficult connections if I’m thinking about the air.
Air is a basic material condition of educational existence. Bad air means bad education.
And yet, the last fifty years of education policy discourse in this country have focused on everything except what’s literally in our noses. It’s the teachers! It’s the unions! It’s the public schools, we need charters!
No and no. It’s the air god damn it. And this research proves it. I’ve been talking about this for years now, since I’ve focused on HVAC investments during and after the pandemic. Air is a social relation! It’s structural ignorance to not consider infrastructure, specifically HVAC, when talking about making schools better.
This article highlights this relationship even more, and in a critical sense too, when it finds that HVAC projects in public schools don’t increase property values in those districts, whereas building athletic facilities increases those prices 17%.
That’s right, if you make it easier for kids to breathe it’s bad for private property prices, but build a football field and property value goes almost by a fifth. Lol. I think this really vindicates the critiques I’ve been making of the political economy of school finance.
There’s so much more in this article, you have to read it. I can pull out other good bits though since it’s kinda complicated, though.
Healthy and safety improvements in schools, as well as plumbing-roof-STEM facilities improvements, increase test scores by a .15 standard deviation. These kinds of facilities projects increase property values by 11%.
Increasing classroom space is probably the best bang for the buck in terms of test score and property values. Classroom space investments increase test scores by .1 standard deviation and increases housing values by 14%.
When it comes to poor schools, for every $1,000 increase in capital expenditure you get a .08 standard deviation increase in test score. Again, want to help poor kids do better on tests? Don’t open a charter school. Fix the public school facilities. It’s good for property values too in poor districts! Health and safety fixes increase housing prices by 27%. Increasing classroom space ups the housing prices by 22%.
These differences wouldn’t exist, I think, if we had a better allocation of credit for public infrastructure. The findings are as much a justification for facilities expenditure as they are an indictment on the way we allocate the resources for that expenditure. I have to imagine it’d be different without the municipal bond market regime.
The way Biasi et al get these findings is also super interesting. They use schoolbondfinder.com, a website that I amazingly hadn’t encountered. It tracks school bond referenda nation-wide and centralize contact information and historical data for the school districts proposing the projects.
After I read about it, I set up an appointment with the Amos Group who runs the website to get a tutorial, and yeah, wow, it’s helpful. While the site doesn’t track financial data like Bloomberg terminals, and it doesn’t track test scores/outcomes, but rather whether/how districts are putting up bonds for capital projects. Something to play around with.
In any case, if you’re out there trying to make the case for school facilities expenditure, this article is super helpful. And when I made a tiktok about it, I got the biggest response I’ve ever seen: almost 86,000 views and 15,600 likes, with hundreds of comments from teachers, students, parents, administrators, and others all over the country who experience bad learning conditions in their districts on a regular basis.
Something is really in the air and it’d behoove organizers and politicians to take advantage of this significant infrastructural frustration.