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A significant factor for many people deciding where to live is the quality of the local school district, with superior schools creating a price premium for housing. The result is a "race to the top," as all school districts attempt to improve their performance in order to attract homebuyers. Given the importance of school districts to the daily lives of children and families, it is surprising that their evolution has not received much attention. In this provocative book, William Fischel argues that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans' desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders. The result has been a standardized, interchangeable system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers, one that involved parents and local voters in its governance and finance. Innovative in its focus on bottom-up processes generated by individual behaviors rather than top-down decisions by bureaucrats, Making the Grade provides a new perspective on education reform that emphasizes how public schools form the basis for the localized social capital in American towns and cities.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. An Asset-Market Approach to Local Government -- 2. Local Government's Corporate Form -- 3. Capitalization, Zoning, and the Tiebout Hypothesis -- 4. The Median Voter in Local Government Politics -- 5. Serrano and the California Tax Revolt -- 6. The Fruits of School-Finance Centralization -- 7. The Race to the Top in Environmental Protection -- 8. "Beggar Thy Neighbor" and Landfill Location -- 9. How Homevoters Remade Metropolitan Areas -- 10. Sprawl, Metropolitanism, and Local Control -- 11. Reforming and Reaffirming Local Government -- Case References -- General References -- Index.

An account of the origins of legal disputes over eminent domain based on the US Supreme Court decision in Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit. In Poletown, a group challenged the invoking of eminent domain to give General Motors (GM) the right to destroy residences in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit and to build a new plant there. It is argued that, contrary to the views of many, Poletown was not a case of industry abusing eminent domain law so much as it was a case of the federal government doing so. Although the building of a new plant by GM made little economic sense for GM and was harmful to residents in the immediate neighborhood, thousands of whom were displaced, it was made attractive to both parties by the federal government's heavy financing of the project. The recent Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London is similar. It is recommended that a judicial standard be applied in which it is asked whether local officials would condemn the property and open it to public use if the government funding came solely at the local level.

The paper outlines the 20th-century history of American zoning to explain how home-owners came to dominate its content and administration in most jurisdictions. Zoning's original purpose was to protect home-owners in residential areas from devaluation by industrial and apartment uses that had been made footloose by trucks and buses around 1910-20. Completion of the interstate highway system around 1970 made jobs and employees so mobile that suburbs adopted growth controls to stem the tide. If zoning is indeed a substitute for home-value insurance, it seems worthwhile to investigate the possibility of home-equity insurance to reduce the demand for exclusionary zoning.