Putting school choice in parents' hands helps neighborhoods. How it works.

by Lee Barfield and Bartley Danielsen, Guest Columnists, The Tennessean - Gov. Bill Lee has a unique opportunity to combine good education policy with effective economic development and environmental policy for low-income communities across the state.

Public school assignment policies currently place heavy burdens on low-income neighborhoods. Since children are assigned to schools based on where they live, financially secure families leave areas with bad public schools and cluster in areas with good schools.

For example, the most recent census shows that Williamson County has 34 percent more children ages 5-to-9 than should be expected given the number of preschool children. Next door, Davidson County has 16 percent fewer 5-to-9 year olds than we should expect.

As wealthier families "vote with their feet" for high-quality schools, their neighborhoods thrive. Jobs are plentiful, incomes are higher, crime rates lower and grocery shelves are stocked with healthy options. Those left behind in concentrated poverty suffer from joblessness, lower incomes, higher crime rates and food desert conditions.

Children who grow up in these neighborhoods suffer life-long consequences, and it's not just because their schools are bad. Recent research finds that growing up in concentrated poverty is even more damaging than attending a high-poverty school, probably because we spend much more time in our neighborhoods than in our schools. You get the picture. When school assignments end up concentrating poor people in poor neighborhoods, everyone in those neighborhoods suffer.

Of course, there are solutions. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development proposes requiring suburbs to build more low-income housing so that inner-city families can be transferred into these communities.

This program has proven to be effective for younger children, but it is expensive to implement on a large scale.

Fortunately, a less expensive option exists - one with the environmental benefit of attracting middle-income families back into cities.

Recent research shows that school-choice programs have a significant positive impact on communities that lack good public schools because their programs allow families to disentangle housing choices from education choices.

When parents can choose their child's schools, they are no longer concerned about a bad school assignment. They can choose a more convenient neighborhood near work, enjoying a shorter commute (an environmental positive) and maintaining a higher quality of life.

And this effect is not limited to dense urban areas. Positive neighborhood effects from school choice programs have been found in suburban and rural communities too.

Tennessee legislators are now discussing whether (and how) to adopt Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs. From an economic development perspective, ESAs are the most flexible (and therefore most powerful) school choice tool ever developed. ESAs don't just allow parents to choose a better education option for their child, they allow parents to choose the absolute best option that they can find.

Recently, Environmentalists for Effective Education and the American Federation for Children have worked together to develop a blueprint for implementing "Tennessee Economic Development Zone ESAs."

This program would ensure that residents of low income neighborhoods have access to ESAs. Initially, almost all of the recipients would be low-income families because financially secure families have avoided these neighborhoods. But over time, these neighborhoods will benefit from increasing diversity.

Of course, some critics argue that only the poorest children should get an ESA. The children of doctors, nurses and engineers should be excluded. But this misses the bigger issue. We should celebrate when our communities are economically and culturally diverse. We all know that ending concentrated poverty benefits poor children and brings jobs for parents.

The best way to fix the problems of high-poverty neighborhoods is to reform how education is delivered in them. Economic Development ESAs are good education policy, good environmental policy and good job creation policy.

Lee Barfield is a retired attorney who lives in Nashville and serves on the board of directors for the American Federation for Children. Dr. Bartley R. Danielsen is president of Environmentalists for Effective Education, and a finance and real estate professor at North Carolina State University. 

Originally published in The Tennessean

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