Public School Closures, Commuting Constraints, and Maternal Labor Market Access

• In Event: School Choice, Student Mobility, and the Geography of Opportunity

Abstract

Mothers’ labor market opportunities are shaped by the need to coordinate paid work with daily child care responsibilities, yet the causal role of public school locations in constraining parents’ workplace choices has been difficult to identify. This project provides the first causal evidence that school locations affect where and whether mothers choose to work.
Using administrative data on household residential and workplace locations along with children's assigned school location, I first show that mothers, but not fathers or people without children, tend to choose workplaces that are relatively close to their child's school, and that this relationship varies by mother's educational attainment. To provide causal evidence of the link between school and work locations, I use permanent school closures as plausibly exogenous shocks that reassign children to new schools while families’ residential locations remain fixed in the short run, generating variation in total commute distances. Combining nationwide data on school attendance boundaries and closures with Census employment data, I estimate the effects of school closures on parents’ workplace locations, employment, and earnings, with a focus on gender and spatial differences. I find that closing a school and reassigning a neighborhood to a new school causes workplaces for parents in that neighborhood to shift towards the new school. The effect of this change in workplaces on household earnings and employment rates depends on characteristics of the parents, the neighborhoods surrounding the new and old schools, and the commute distance. To quantify welfare implications, I build a model where households choose residential and workplace locations, incorporating the fact that parents care about the distance between their child's school and their workplace. When districts choose schools for closure, there is a tradeoff between assigning more children to higher academically performing schools and increasing commute  to school distances, which induces some households to leave the labor force entirely. Using the estimated model, I formulate the school district's problem to solve for the welfare-maximizing set of schools to close in several cities that previously had large school closure programs, and compare how the optimal set compares to the actual set of closed schools. Finally, I test several counterfactual policies that could reduce the harm of school closures, including expanded busing, co-location of charter schools in traditional school buildings, and creation of smaller neighborhood schools.

Author

• Rachel Widra, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author