The U.S. is crisscrossed with unseen boundaries that can boost or bust the future of every student, can affect purchasing decisions about many Americans’ most important asset—their home—and can force teachers to lose years of retirement wealth for moving, even if they remain educators.

American schools look the way they do because of these boundaries, especially school district borders. We do not need to eliminate school districts to transform U.S. education for the better, but we do need to make America’s educational borders more permeable.

For students, access to high-quality schools often depends on their family’s wealth or income, which determines how likely it is that a family can afford a home within a desirable school district. This access can have generational effects on socioeconomic status and racial stratification of educational attainment. Intra- and interdistrict choice programs, magnet schools, open enrollment, and other school choice programs can reduce the negative impacts of these borders, but questions remain. Taxation, transportation, and school funding all need to be addressed to implement choice policies that involve students crossing educational barriers.

For homeowners, severing or weakening the link between homes and school assignment is a fraught proposition. School choice could be considered a form of wealth redistribution, as the research is starting to reveal that, depending on the program on offer, housing price disparities across school districts narrow when these school choice programs are implemented. Some homeowners who invested in a more expensive home for the sake of the in-district public school could see their property value decrease; but wealthier families would also face strong incentives to move into lower-quality school districts in order to take advantage of lower housing prices, boosting incomes, prices, and population in low-quality districts.

Teachers are affected by borders, as well: their pension border. Most retirement plans incentivize teachers to spend their entire career within one system; if teachers traverse sectors (for instance, if they move from a public school to a nonpublic school) or change states, they lose years of pension wealth.