Taj Mahals of Decaying Shacks: Patterns in Local School Capital Stock and Unmet Capital Need

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the condition of school facilities as a dimension of school finance adequacy, reliable measures of capital stock for large samples of schools are hard to come by. In this article, we offer new methods for (a) measuring the existing capital stock of public schools, (b) defining adequacy in school facilities, and (c) measuring the cost of bringing existing school facilities up to an adequate standard. We apply our procedures to all school districts in Michigan, one of the few states that offers no state aid to local districts for the construction of capital facilities. Our estimates indicate large variations in school buildings and facilities across local communities that are highly correlated with local property wealth. Because we use publicly available data that are recently available for school districts nationwide, these methods can be readily replicated for other states.