Who Needs Good Public Schools?

Who needs good public schools.......maybe everybody. From the Miller-McCune blog site:


Few things ignite a community quite like this question: if you don’t have children in the local public schools, should you have to help pay for those schools?

researchers studied data from the Soul of the Community survey, a Knight Foundation project that queried 20,000 people from 26 cities and towns across the country in 2008 and 2009 about what makes them attached to their communities and what creates, in their eyes, strong, healthy, and happy places to live.

The researchers discovered a strong correlation between community satisfaction and quality schools. The better the schools (as people perceive them), the more satisfied people are with their communities — and this is true whether they have children attending them or not. This positive relationship holds even after the researchers controlled for other community and individual characteristics, suggesting, they write, that “public school quality uniquely contributes to community satisfaction” above and beyond other common explanations, such as high rates of homeownership or job availability.

The researchers believe it’s not simply the case that good schools happen to be located in good communities. Rather, public schools actually contribute to that satisfaction — and for everyone.