Education Week - January 16, 2013 - 7

EDUCATION WEEK

discussions of other studies looking
at student behavior, school climate,
and school safety. The event, “Closing the School Discipline Gap: Research to Practice,” was organized
by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto
Derechos Civiles at the University
of California, Los Angeles. Findings
from Education Week’s 2013 Quality Counts report, “Code of Conduct:
Safety, Discipline, and School Climate,” also were presented at the
daylong meeting.
Especially for students with
several out-of-school suspensions,
schools must get at the heart of the
behavior problems triggering the
suspensions and work on ways to
engage the students in their learning, Mr. Balfanz said. Multiple suspensions, he said, only add to the
students’ disengagement and likelihood of quitting school altogether.
At some schools in the
200,000-student Hillsborough
County, Fla., district, dropout-prevention and student-intervention
specialists monitor students who

are disciplined, failing courses, and
repeatedly absent, said MaryLou
Whaley, a supervisor in the district’s
Title I office. Schools have long
recognized that trio of factors as a
recipe for educational disaster.
“When they’re compounded, it’s
that much more difficult to walk
across the stage” and collect a diploma, Ms. Whaley said. The specialists work on connecting students with the proper supports to
resolve those issues.
That is especially critical in the
pivotal 9th grade year, when the
transition from a more sheltered
middle school can result in students floundering in a sea of freshman anonymity, Ms. Whaley said.
In one student’s case, she said, a
specialist talked with the youth’s
teachers and asked them to be sure
to check in with the student and
see that he was OK every day.
“Not all teachers like all students,
and not all students like all teachers: That’s the real world,” she said.
“It’s so important to be noticed.”

a third fewer violent crimes than
their original ones.
In some of the research presented by the panel, a team led
by Jens Ludwig, an economics
professor at the University of
Chicago, found that, for adults
in the program, moving to a new
neighborhood with a poverty rate
at least 13 percentage points
lower than that in their original
community translated to better mental and physical health.
The improvement to the families’
well-being was equal to getting
a pay raise of $13,000—a huge
boost for participants, who had
an average income at the time of
$20,000 a year.

to wealthier neighborhoods, the
researchers found the students
remained in schools that looked
much like the neighborhoods
they’d left: Enrollments were on
average 90 percent minority, and
70 percent of students were receiving subsidized school meals.
Mr. Katz pointed out that neighborhoods and schools are closely
tied. Communities that have a
broader mix of income levels are
better able to support school improvements than those with concentrated poverty, he said, and
American communities are showing increasing signs of economic
segregation even within the same
racial groups.
“Increasingly, poor minority
families are only living with other
poor minority families,” he said.
“These children appear to be increasingly isolated in who they
grow up with and who they go to
school with.”
Another study this past fall of
four major federal housing programs echoes the Moving to Opportunity results. It found that
most children who moved to a
better neighborhood through a
public-assistance program often
didn’t end up in a higher-quality
school.
Ms. Currie of Princeton also suggested that the lackluster results
for children may point to hidden
strengths in their original neighborhoods. Ironically, children in
high-poverty neighborhoods may
have had more targeted services,
such as federal Title I education
aid, home visits, or other programs.
“Our bottom line is, there’s
growing evidence that neighborhood conditions really do matter
to poor families—they matter for
health and well-being—but we
shouldn’t view them by themselves as an anti-poverty program,” said Mr. Katz.

Little Help for Children
Their children were also more
likely to say they felt safe at home
and in school and to witness less
violence or fewer drug sales in
their new neighborhood.
But, by and large, those improvements didn’t transfer to academic achievement for the children of families who moved.
Through the program data, Mr.
Katz, Mr. Ludwig, and other researchers have been able to track
adults and children who moved
through the program and compare their outcomes with those
for families who received no help
or standard housing assistance
in their original neighborhoods.
From 2008 to 2010, the researchers surveyed more than 5,100
young people ages 10 to 20 whose
families had participated in the program, including 457 students ages
10 to 12 and 4,644 ages 13 to 20.
They found that girls whose
families moved to wealthier neighborhoods had lower rates of obesity and better mental health than
those who didn’t, but were doing
no better academically than girls
whose families had not moved.
For boys, the move appeared to
hurt: They were less likely to be
on track to graduate and more
likely to smoke than boys whose
families had not moved.
But, while the families moved

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“Long-Term Neighborhood
Effects on Low-Income
Families: Evidence from Moving to
Opportunity.” www.edweek.org/links

JANUARY 16, 2013

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Education Week - January 16, 2013

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