Using Targeted Private School Choice to Eliminate Pockets of Persistent Urban Poverty

There has been a small but growing body of accidental evidence1 that aligns with anecdotal evidence and intuition that private school choice expansion (PSCE) can be a much-needed, fast-acting economic development catalyst for persistent pockets of urban poverty. The alignment has been accidental. There have been no economic development effect-motivated school choice expansions. That’s important for three reasons: 1) Evidence that private school choice expansion (PSCE) can quickly yield economic development and environmental benefits for areas of concentrated poverty could create a pathway around the political gridlock blocking genuine experiments in universal, low-restriction private school choice; 2) The PSCE-development connection raises a lot of questions that may need answers before the implied policy reforms can be optimized and gain widespread acceptance; and 3) Traditional-method-based attacks on persistent urban pockets of severe, concentrated poverty have a disappointing track record. To avoid de facto policy abandonment of large swathes of many cities,2 we desperately need a dependable, quick, low-cost way to deliver place-focused economic development. The purpose of the paper is to provide a preliminary assessment of the basis for proposals to use PSCE to quickly foster immediate economic development, including a sporadically active proposal for Atlanta’s low-income communities (LIC). Section 2 discusses the connection between the readily observable family income stratification of urban areas3 (persistence of deep pockets of poverty) and variability in the quality of assigned traditional public schools (TPS). PSCE reduces the importance of that variability to families making residence choices. For examples, I use evidence from Atlanta, San Antonio, and Memphis. Before section 4 describes the theory and evidence underlying our claim that PSCE is a promising alternative to traditional approaches to severe pockets of urban poverty, section 3 explains why we need an alternative. Section 5 explains the intellectual and political significance of the empirical evidence that would result from deployment of PSCE to attack pockets of persistent urban poverty. Many of the PSCE deployments would likely qualify as actual, modern low-restriction examples of universal private school choice. Section 6 briefly notes the potential environmental significance of poor-place-targeted choice expansion (PSCE).