The Environmental Case for School Choice

Among the main reasons families with young children move out of cities and into suburbs is that urban areas often have terrible schools. Cities lose people and working parents face long commutes back into downtown. There's a cost to the environment too as more infrastructure has to be built to serve people over larger areas.

"There's a tremendous amount of money spent on infrastructure just to get people from where they live to where they work, "says Bartley Danielsen, founder and president of Environmentalists for Education Reform and associate professor of business management at the North Carolina State University Poole College of Management. "If people could live near where they work, then their lives would be better and the lives of people in cities would be better."

To reverse the flight to the suburbs, Danielsen argues, cities must convince parents to stay downtown by providing more school choice and educational alternatives.

Danielsen recently sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss the environmental benefits of school choice and its potential to revitalize American cities.

About 5:30 minutes.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Joshua Swain. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Alexis Garcia.

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