If Cities Want to Grow, They Need Strong Schools

State and local leaders often treat schools as family issues, separate from conversations about attracting companies, building a workforce, or growing the tax base. That’s a mistake. A local school district can do as much as any of those levers to determine whether families and businesses invest in a community.

School districts don’t just educate children. They help attract families, shape communities, support economic development, and build tomorrow’s workforce. If cities want to grow, they need to pay attention to their schools.

1. Schools help families decide where to live

House-hunting as a new parent made me see local schools differently. Even living in a state known for school choice, where families aren’t locked into one assigned school, a strong local school system mattered to me. Choice widens the menu, but it doesn’t erase the instinct: Parents want to plant roots somewhere that schools are good. That instinct shows up in the data too. Homes (opens in a new tab) in strong school districts tend to sell faster and are priced higher. This matters for cities. More families mean more customers for local businesses, more homebuyers, and a larger tax base to support the services residents depend upon.

2. Schools matter when cities compete for businesses

Amazon (opens in a new tab) picked Virginia for its HQ2 even though other states offered billions more in incentives. What put Northern Virginia over the top was the workforce pipeline: Virginia’s bid included Virginia Tech’s commitment to build a nearby Innovation Campus, and an Amazon executive later said the state’s long-term talent strategy helped it stand out. That pipeline doesn’t start in college. It starts with the K-12 system that feeds it.

And it’s not only about workforce readiness. Employers know their own recruiters will get asked about local schools by every candidate with kids. A company can offer a great salary and still lose a hire because the family didn’t like what they found when they looked up the school district. Schools are part of the economic development pitch about whether a city can attract and keep businesses.

3. Schools become the center of a community.

I started my career as a teacher where I taught students whose grandparents, and then parents, had walked the same halls. Some of my coworkers had taught two or three generations of the same families. That doesn’t happen by accident. A good school becomes the thing a neighborhood organizes itself around: where parents meet each other at Friday night football games and school plays, where a teacher becomes a trusted adult for decades, where a family’s whole history in a place gets written one graduating class at a time. Research (opens in a new tab) backs up what any teacher already knows: Students who participate in these activities tend to have better attendance, higher GPAs, and higher graduation rates than students who don’t.

Schools are also an anchor most people don’t think of as one. Public schools employ roughly 7 million people (opens in a new tab) nationally and in most counties the district is the largest employer in town. They’re also where people vote, where a city holds public meetings, where a community sets up shelter when a storm hits. When a city lets that kind of institution fall apart, it’s not just losing test scores. It’s losing the glue that keeps people from leaving.

4. Schools prepare the people who will drive future growth.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce projects the country will face a shortage of more than 6 million workers by 2030 if current trends hold. Every one of those future workers starts in a K-12 classroom, years before a company ever posts the job.

I saw that connection get made up close. When I worked in the Virginia governor’s office, I worked on legislation to strengthen high school graduation requirements and expand pathways into career and technical education. The loudest voices pushing for it weren’t educators; they were employers who wanted graduates to leave high school prepared for college, careers, and the workforce. Schools don’t just educate kids. They build the talent pipeline employers are counting on to fill jobs.

Schools are not separate from a city’s growth strategy. They are part of it. Investing in schools means investing in the families, communities, and workforce that make a city thrive.