The 2019-20 school year will mark the 12th enrollment increase in a row for DC’s traditional public and public charter schools. This year, the city’s schools are expected to add 2,800 students to classes from pre-kindergarten to grade 12.
That enrollment growth, however, isn’t tied to neighborhood change even though that commonly occurs in other school districts across the country.
Chelsea Coffin is director of the Education Policy Initiative at the D.C. Policy Center.
Four brand-new schools are opening this school year: Bard High School Early College DC in Ward 7, Ida B. Wells Middle School in Ward 4, Lee Montessori Public Charter School’s East End campus in Ward 8, and Mundo Verde Public Charter School’s 8th Street NE campus in Ward 5. In addition, Friendship Public Charter School and KIPP DC Public Charter School will open five new campuses, largely to serve students from charter schools that closed at the end of the 2018-19 school year.
The strong growth in public-school enrollment over the past decade is one of the many indicators that the District is becoming a popular place to live for families. Another indicator is the rate at which children and youth are increasingly attending DC public schools. Between 2010 and 2017, for each new school-age resident the city added to its population, public schools added about two new students (10,800 new K-12 students versus 5,100 new residents ages 5 to 17). As another sign of increased demand to live in the city, housing prices are on the rise: The assessment value of the average single-family home grew by $10 for every additional student enrolled during this same period.
DC has a high degree of school choice, with only 27% of students attending their neighborhood school; as a result, the city doesn’t always experience big shifts in school enrollment or housing values close to where children and youth are living. These patterns run counter to how changes occur in districts with little school choice, when an increase in the number of children in a neighborhood generally leads to gains in school enrollment and home values, depending on housing markets.
How are the city’s schools likely to absorb enrollment growth?
Looking at enrollment projections for the fall and past enrollment data, we can see that the new schools aren’t likely to contribute as much to growth as new schools usually do. Enrollment at schools that are opening this fall is expected to account for about 20% of the citywide enrollment growth. The rest of the enrollment growth this school year will occur at existing schools, which may grow by adding grades or classrooms in grades offered the previous year. This is a change from the historical pattern; over the past eight years, about half of enrollment growth occurred at existing schools.
However, enrollment growth is happening in neighborhoods that are different from where families live and where housing values are appreciating
On the surface, the city’s public-school enrollment is growing in tandem with school-age population and housing prices. In most districts with less public school choice, these three factors would move in the same direction at a neighborhood level as well. However, as a new D.C. Policy Center report, “D.C.’s Disconnect Between Citywide Enrollment Growth and Neighborhood Changes,” shows, enrollment is growing independently of population and housing value growth at the neighborhood level. Neighborhood by neighborhood, changes in enrollment are only weakly correlated with changes in school-age population and housing values, which means that fluctuations in enrollment do not indicate broader neighborhood shifts.
The disconnect between changes in housing values, school-age population and enrollment is critical because it shows that decisions about school enrollment and housing are made separately in most of the city. While some DC neighborhoods experience growth in school-age population or housing values together with an increase in enrollment, many neighborhoods undergo these changes in different ways.
For example, there aren’t any neighborhood clusters where all three factors are increasing quickly. Looking at the top 10 areas experiencing the most growth in each category, just four had the biggest increases in both enrollment and mean housing values — Congress Heights, Bellevue and Washington Highlands; Friendship Heights, American University Park and Tenleytown; Lamond Riggs, Queens Chapel, Fort Totten and Pleasant Hill; and Takoma, Brightwood and Manor Park. The overlap in terms of enrollment and mean housing values is even smaller: Only the Eckington, Bloomingdale, Truxton Circle and Edgewood neighborhood cluster is among the top 10 in both categories.
Why is this important?
In general, housing values are associated with perceived school quality. For example, one study examining differences in housing values at school boundaries finds that parents will pay 2.5% more for a house in exchange for a 5% increase in test scores. This is true in DC as well, where single-family homes are the most expensive if they are in-boundary for elementary schools with the highest test results and have the highest in-boundary participation rates. However, our analysis suggests that this pattern doesn’t hold true throughout DC, given that changes in public school enrollment are not associated with changes in housing values in DC at a neighborhood level.
One explanation for this finding is that DC has a high degree of public-school choice, which means that school quality is not factored as heavily into housing values. It’s also possible that families represent such a small share of buyers that any preferences they may have for a nearby school are washed out by other buyers (just a quarter of DC households have three or more persons).
Schools that open this year will contribute to enrollment growth in the current school year as well as future years as they fill to capacity. However, this growth is unlikely to be a bellwether or corroboration of changes occurring at the neighborhood level. Although public-school enrollment growth may be a part of the story about citywide growth, large enrollment changes by neighborhood generally don’t indicate broader changes in the school-age population or housing values in those same areas.
Chelsea Coffin is director of the Education Policy Initiative at the D.C. Policy Center.
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