Article from Vox here. The part I think is most interesting, because it’s backed by data, is a little more than halfway down the article – Montgomery County, MD, did an experiment in which 1 out of 8 houses in new subdivisions must be “moderately priced”, and 1 out of 3 of those moderately priced houses must be offered to the public housing authority first, to be used as low income housing. A researcher looked at those low income children raised in these nicer neighborhoods and how they compared to low income children in low income neighborhoods over about a 7 year period, and found that for the low income children in nicer neighborhoods, the “achievement gap” (test score differences between the district average and low-income neighborhoods’ average) for those low income children was cut significantly – 1/3rd to 1/2 or so, depending on the test area (reading, math, etc.).
That sounds to me like a really big deal – same parents, same income, but going to school in a better neighborhood with higher-income kids results in significantly higher outcomes.
Maybe it seems like “duh”, but the county’s policy also seemed like a good one – how could this be expanded so that more children, or all low income children, benefit?
The article says that the families who could move wherever they wanted did less well than those who were given no option but to move to the nicer neighborhoods.
The article warns against the assumption that this is a large-scale solution. Although I am sure that raising children in an environment that does not look on poverty as normal is going to help them.
Interesting article and I think on a macro sense it is an important topic. I don’t doubt the findings, but this part struck me as wrong:
UBI wouldn’t pull everyone out of poverty. It may increase the poverty line, but poverty as defined would still exist. In addition, over time as equilibrium were achieved, all else being equal I’d expect to have similar situations where lower income folks would be segregated by choice or because they have no other choices.
In addition, while the article talked a great deal about the impact on those moving to higher income neighborhoods, it made no mention of the impact if any on the metrics of the existing people in those neighborhoods. I suspect people with means would simply relocate and start the cycle anew should their neighborhood take on increasing number of lower income folks.
And especially on the schools. The article showed that the transplants (so to speak) did better than those that stayed in their poor neighborhoods, but still were below the district average. No doubt people in the district would complain about people dragging down the average. Like they complain about dragging down property values.
I live in Washington State which has a fairly strong economy (lots of natural resources, it’s a trade and travel hub, strong tech sector) but it’s in the top ten states in terms of unemployment. It’s because residents keep wanting to raise the minimum wage. When you raise the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate poverty, you just create fewer lower wage opportunities in the short term and in the long term you create inflation, so that your new $15/hr wage only buys what your $10/hr wage used to. It’s equilibrium just like you said.
The article says they were studied over five to seven years - IOW from the beginning to the end of elementary school. How long can you keep them in school? IOW they started off way behind, and never caught up, although they got closer than the ones left behind.
Okay. But if the study went long enough, and traced the children of those children, especially if they had similar benefits, then they might find (or might not) that the gap continued to close.
It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect an instant closing of the gap, right? A slow, steady closing is probably the best we could hope for, it seems to me.
Of course, but that’s not what Shodan is discussing. He’s pointing out that if the gap at the start is 20 points, and the students that moved into ‘nice’ neighborhoods close the gap at 1 point per year, at the end of K-12 education there will still be a 7 point gap, which is better than a 20 point gap but doesn’t eliminate the issue.
Personally, I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good, especially in education situations.
In many places it is already as you describe. Every school in the state/district gets the same amount of money per student. However, the schools in the poor part of town perform far worse than the schools in the rich part of town, despite both schools having the same amount of funding.
It was. Presumably this is further evidence that parents/students/environment are big factors in student success and not just teacher performance. (Teacher performance is still important, and there are still good and bad teachers, but they are not the only or even the biggest factor in student achievement).
I think part of the point is that it’s the neighborhood as well as the school – improving a school might help a little, but if the neighborhood is still shitty, that neighborhood is going to hold back many/most of the children who live there.
Not disagreeing with this, but even if the gap were to shrink, that’s not necessarily a net benefit. If the starting point was 10 and 30 at the beginning, and at the end it’s 23 and 30, that’s one thing. If at the end it’s 22 and 29, that’s still a 7 point gap, but I’d say that’s worse than 23 and 30. If the end result is 12 and 19, that’s also a 7 point gap - but that’s not necessarily better than the status quo on balance.
While this is true, the only way it would not be a net benefit was if it happened like you described, by which the kids that always were in nice neighborhoods ended up with lower scores because of the inclusion of poor kids transplanted into the nice neighborhoods. If that happened, I don’t think the plan would be considered a success by any definition of the word.
Sure, but outside of new development, you can’t really mandate the composition of housing, and nor can you really mandate housing prices either.
I have a feeling it’s cultural norms and attitudes more than anything else that cause the lesser performance of poor students, and what’s happening here is that these students are being thrust into an environment where success is expected and encouraged, and they respond accordingly, rather than according to the low expectations and crabs-in-a-pot mentality of the typical poor neighborhood.
What this says to me is that the issue is more with the communities than the schools themselves; I see this in my own neighborhood, where the predominantly upper-middle class schools have high marks, even when there are up to 30% or so of low-income students. Similarly, the predominantly low-income schools have abysmal scores, despite getting the same funding from the same school district. In one case I can think of, the lowest scoring school is literally a mile as the crow flies from one of the highest scoring schools, and the only real difference is in the families whose children attend the schools.
I’d think a good solution might be to identify the highest percentage of low-income students that don’t drag a school’s performance down, and load every school with that percentage.
Not sure what to do with low income students above and beyond that percentage (i.e all schools are at the highest percentage that doesn’t hurt performance); triaging them together into a school that we know is going to be cruddy is heartless, but it’s equally bad to deliberately screw up otherwise good schools and hurt other students’ chances for success by overloading them with more low-income students than the school can handle.
That is one option that is already being used in Michigan for a couple decades. It certainly takes the aspect of school funding being lower in poorer areas out of the equation. It doesn’t take some of the other issues that can be associated with bad neighborhoods out of the picture though.
Another option is something that has already been happening to some extent. In 2012 HUD modified rules governing vouchers to support better portability. That’s after some bipartisan legislation that helped enable some of it. Obama in his last budget request asked for what was effectively budget dust (it was measured in millions, IIRC two digit millions, not billions) for some trial programs to increase support and information for poor families to actually take advantage of that portability. Paul Ryan even included increasing portability in his Republican Congressional campaign branding, a “Better Way”, that everyone ignored in the middle of the shit show that was the last cycle. IMO an approach that maximizes that choice and market forces will have less potential negative than one that just outright regulates aspects of zoning and the housing market.
Better yet increasing support for the use of HUD voucher portability is something that isn’t a divisive partisan issue. It’s the kind of then that all of us can write our reps about, regardless of party, with some chance of actually affecting change. Since it’s in a federal program it is low hanging fruit for that change being very broad.
I’m very much in favor of equalizing school funding, and I think that our system of funding public primary education with property taxes is a great injustice, but it wouldn’t achieve the same results.
I live in New York City (where the public schools are funded equally), and I’m heavily invested in the state of our schools, having a daughter who will start school very soon.
There are so many other factors. Teachers (here) get to choose (to some extent) their schools based on seniority. Nobody wants to teach in the schools in the most miserable neighborhoods in the city, so those schools are staffed by young, inexperienced teachers.
Schools in the poorest neighborhoods have a high rate of violent incidents, and they seem to have a higher (very high) incidence of disruptive behavior on the part of students in the classroom. That’s hard to pin down, because, while violent incidents have to be reported (and are sometimes under-reported because principals want to have good numbers for their schools), “disruptive” incidents don’t have to be reported. There are no useful stats.