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The average public school building in America is now . In more than half of U.S. school districts, those buildings require . Too many students are trying to prepare for a 21st-century economy in facilities that are no longer capable of supporting a 21st-century education.

If communities continue treating facility investment as a secondary concern, they should not be surprised when families decide those schools are no longer the best place to educate their children.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given for three consecutive report cards, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure improved. Nearly four in 10 public school buildings were constructed before 1970. The funding gap to bring them up to a functional standard now stands at an estimated $429 billion — and it keeps growing because communities keep deferring the problem.

On the ground, that deferred maintenance looks like leaking roofs, asbestos ceiling tiles and mold scraped from between wall coverings. It looks like parking lots full of potholes, playgrounds with rusted equipment, and classrooms that are too hot in summer or too cold in winter because the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems failed years ago.

Another similarity most of these buildings share is a lack of any real technology infrastructure in an era when students cannot learn without one.

The physical condition of a school building is one of the primary drivers of the educational experience delivered inside it. And the research is catching up to what communities have been living with for years.

The economist Julien LaFortune, working with the Public Policy Institute of California, studied school facility investment using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and in test scores, attendance and surrounding property values after new school buildings were constructed.

What made LaFortune’s findings notable was that the gains were not primarily explained by changes in class size, teachers, principals or student composition. When researchers stripped away every other variable, what was left was the building. By his analysis, for every dollar invested in school facilities, the program increased housing values.

Research going back two decades has documented a between facility condition and teacher retention. When a school building deteriorates, the teachers with the most options leave first. The ones who stay are often the ones with nowhere else to go.

When a school is modernized, that dynamic reverses. Qualified educators who previously passed over the school begin applying, while teachers who are already there choose to stay. The result is a more experienced, more committed faculty working with better tools in a better environment — and students who receive stronger instruction as a direct consequence.

That instructional improvement shows up in measurable ways. Students in modernized facilities score higher on standardized assessments and miss fewer days of school. Researchers saw this trend emerge during COVID, when they first noted the correlation between better ventilation and . More recent studies have found that boosted math scores and reduced suspensions in schools — because student comfort matters. 

When those results become visible, other families in the community begin seeking out the school. As enrollment grows, schools gain the resources that come with a larger student population and the capacity to expand what they offer.

One example of this is the Detroit Public Safety Academy, a dropout recovery program. It’s a school designed specifically for students who have already left the system or are on the verge of leaving it. The program does not offer a GED. It instead delivers a full, certified high school diploma, the same credential that any other public school confers. Upon graduation, students walk directly into careers in public safety with real wages and real futures. The school now posts a 90% graduation rate among a population that had largely been written off, and Detroit’s public safety workforce has a pipeline it did not have before.

That model wouldn’t work in a building that is falling apart. The aging building underwent a dramatic renovation, which has enabled its success. Without it, the program wouldn’t exist, and those students wouldn’t have that pathway.

Modern workforce-development programs require modern facilities. A manufacturing lab equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms requires purpose-built space that a building from 1963 cannot provide. Forty-seven states . More than 11 million students nationally. The demand exists. In too many communities, the buildings to support it do not.

As enrollment grows and school quality becomes visible to the broader community, the effects extend beyond the school itself. Families relocate to be within a school’s attendance boundary. That increased demand for housing near high-performing schools drives up property values.

By tracking housing markets near improved schools, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that roughly $20 in housing value accumulates for every additional dollar in per-pupil spending — a signal of how much families are willing to pay to be near a school that works.

We tend to describe declining enrollment as the cause of deteriorating schools, but the arrow may point the other way more often.

Families leave schools that no longer meet their expectations. They move to districts with better facilities or choose alternatives that have multiplied over the past decade. The school loses students, loses funding and deteriorates further. That cycle is not inevitable. Modernize the building, and the sequence can begin running in reverse.

The question is whether communities are willing to treat the building as the starting point rather than the last priority. Children only pass through the education system once. They should not spend those years waiting for adults to decide that the building matters.

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