School quality and Massachusetts enrollment shifts in the context of tax limitations

New England Economic Review, July-August, 1998 by Katharine L. Bradbury, Karl E. Case, Christopher J. Mayer

However, just as for school quality, the observed pattern of enrollment changes may result from other characteristics of these communities. That is, Proposition 2 1/2 may have disproportionately affected communities that might otherwise have failed to attract public school children. To look at how the variety of economic, demographic, and fiscal forces described above influenced families with school-age children as they sorted themselves out among communities and made choices about public versus private schooling, one needs more than the single-variable cross-tabulations reported in Tables 2, 3, 7, and 8. The regressions explored in the next section of the paper explain community enrollment changes, controlling for beginning-of-period demographics, and allow quantification of the magnitude of some of these influences.

III. Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Influences on Enrollment Changes, 1980-85 and 1990-95

As the discussion in the preceding section makes clear, many factors would be expected to influence families' residential location choices, and the importance of various factors might differ for families with children compared with childless households. To examine the attractiveness of specific community characteristics to families with children, regressions are estimated to explain net enrollment changes in grades ! through 8 between 1980 and 1985 and from 1990 to 1995. Net enrollment change, the dependent variable, is defined as the difference between the actual percentage change in enrollment in grades 1 through 8 and the predicted enrollment change, where the predictions are calculated as the percentage difference between the number of resident children ages 1 to 8 and the number ages 6 to 13 at the beginning of the period (1980 or 1990).(10) Net changes over each five-year period reflect movements of families with school-age children among communities and shifts in private school enrollment patterns.(11) The equations are estimated across 321 cities and towns in Massachusetts; 30 of the state's 351 communities with total 1980 enrollments under 150 have been excluded.(12) Appendix Table A2 reports variable means and sources.

Basic Influences: Local Public Sector Attributes and Developable Space

Families with school-age children are likely to care more about school quality than families with no children. Whether enrollments are generally declining or rising, net enrollment changes are likely to be greater (more positive) in higher-quality districts, other things equal, as mobile families attempt to move their children into the better public schools.

Whether the constraints imposed by Proposition 2 1/2 would have differential effects on households with children as compared with childless households is less clear. Nonetheless, like any other factor that alters the attractiveness of individual communities, Prop 2 1/2 constraints will affect public school enrollments indirectly as families make their locational choices on a variety of grounds, and then send their children to local public schools. As discussed in the previous section, cities and towns forced into a cutting mode early on and those that faced tighter restrictions going into the 1990s might be more attractive if Proposition 2 1/2 provided a needed restraint and direct voter control of tax increases that were positively valued by residents, or they might be less attractive to potential residents than communities that were able to make spending decisions independent of the levy limits imposed by Proposition 2 1/2.(13)