Study: Year-round school calendars could hurt home prices
Published November 19, 2015
by John Newsom, Greensboro News-Record, November 19, 2015.
Anyone who has ever shopped for a house knows this rule: The better the test scores at the neighborhood school, the higher the home prices.
A new study co-authored by an economist at Elon University has found that another factor — a school’s calendars — can have a small but noticeable effect on how much houses cost.
The study, scheduled to be published in the December edition of an international economics journal, finds that homebuyers pay a premium of up to 2 percent to get a house in zones where schools operate on a traditional calendar instead of a year-round schedule.
For a $250,000 house, the price difference works out to be about $5,000.
“Homeowners seem to have a preference for this attribute in schools,” said Katy Rouse, an assistant professor of economics at Elon University and a co-author of the study.
Students in North Carolina traditionally go to school from late August to early June, with more than two months off in the summer.
Year-round schooling has grown more popular as school districts look for ways to boost achievement. Year-round schools give students regular breaks of several weeks throughout the year, but pupils don’t get an extended summer vacation.
During the past 25 years, the number of year-round schools has grown eightfold. According to a 2014 federal report, about 3,700 public schools in the United States — roughly 4 percent of the nation’s total — use a year-round calendar. Roughly 40 percent of year-round schools are in the South. (Guilford County Schools once had a handful of year-round schools but phased them out.)
While Rouse studied for her doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill in the mid-2000s, she lived in Cary when the fast-growing Wake County Public School System dramatically expanded the number of year-round schools.
The Wake school system uses use a multitrack system, where students in the same school are on different calendars and the building is in use year-round. The schools are more expensive to operate, but the school system can save money by building fewer schools.
Many parents hated the change, which received intense media coverage. (“It was on the news all the time,” Rouse recalled.) A group of parents sued the school system, which ultimately prevailed before the N.C. Supreme Court.
Fascinated, Rouse did research on year-round schools after she joined the Elon faculty. Her previous papers have examined the academic impact of year-round schooling (She found that it seems to have no effect on student performance.) and whether year-round schools alleviated the effects of overcrowding on achievement. (She said it helps take the edge off the worst problems associated with crowding.)
For this paper, she worked with Brooks Depro, an adjunct professor at Elon and a senior economist at RTI International, a research institute in Research Triangle Park.
The two economists examined four years of Wake County home sales, from 2006 to 2010. After controlling for test scores, student demographics and the size and quality of the houses, they found that houses assigned to year-round schools sold for slightly less than houses where schools are on traditional calendars.
“These results suggest policymakers should take another look at the unintended consequences and trade-offs associated with school calendar changes,” they wrote in their paper.
That policy issue, Rouse said, might be that lower housing prices erode a community’s tax base and offset the savings from building fewer schools.
But Rouse said the research didn’t determine if the price difference was a permanent feature or a one-time event that might close over time as families get used to the schedules.
Also unclear is if the price difference would remain if all Wake County public schools went to a year-round schedule. Less than a quarter of the school system’s s schools go year-round.
Previous research into the relationship between schools and real estate values has focused largely on test scores.
Rouse said researchers should consider at least one more factor: the calendar that schools use.
“It shows,” she said, “that these school calendars are important factors in these (homebuying) decisions. ... The choice of calendars was reflected in home prices, at least in the short term.”
