Dive Brief:
- Schools can be somewhat of a proxy for discussions about the racial makeup of communities, which gives real estate agents the power to steer certain families into or out of areas based on their race or ethnicity.
- NPR reports the practice can be compared to redlining, when government agencies explicitly refused to back mortgages in poor black communities and black house hunters were steered toward them, only now prospective buyers get their cues from color-coded school rating systems that are easily accessible from major real estate websites like Zillow, Redfin and Homes.com.
- School quality drives real estate values and vice versa, creating vicious cycles when wealthy individuals are encouraged to stay away from neighborhoods because of their schools — especially if the test scores that make up these ratings are themselves a proxy for race and poverty.
Dive Insight:
School segregation was getting better for several years following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Forced integration worked for a while. But in recent years, the nation has moved backward and a growing percentage of schools are more segregated now than were 14 years ago. A Government Accountability Office report that came out last May found the portion of schools jumped from 9% to 16% in that time period.
School ratings in the No Child Left Behind Era are based primarily on test scores. While the Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to assess schools based on a greater number of factors, it still asks that each state assign a summative rating to each school and district. This rating can take the form of an A through F letter grade, some kind of a number grade, or even a category designation like low, medium or high-performing. Dedicated teachers and a positive school climate could help a school’s rating, but it is hard to believe it will make too much of a difference on real estate websites. Unless people dig into the score, they won’t see mitigating factors beyond an initial designation.