Education Week - March 26, 2014 - 18

WAR ON POVERTY: Progress & Persistent Inequity
For Housing Programs,
Challenges Are Stubborn,
And Successes Few
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
communities, or remaking neighborhoods
altogether-has demonstrated
limited results in improving educational
outcomes for children.
"Even as school choice has increased,
three-quarters of [poor] students still
attend the neighborhood public school,"
said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow
at the Century Foundation, based in
Washington. "So to the extent that our
housing is segregated by race and socioeconomic
status, our schools are going to
be segregated by race and socioeconomic
status.
"It is possible to make high-poverty
schools work," he said, "but it's extremely
difficult."
No Safety Net
Ms. Mills, now a full-time student in
a medical-technician program, has lived
in a two-bedroom apartment at Potomac
Gardens for 3½ years-one of the longest
periods of stability for the 37-yearold
mother of four since she dropped out
of high school in 9th grade. She had two
children when she moved in, and she's
had two more since.
In prior years, she worked as a wait-
ress, moving her children from one temporary
housing situation to another, she
said-a house that her relatives shared
with a group of drug users, homeless
shelters, rented rooms, and a one-bedroom
apartment that she and her then
two children shared with a friend. The
$1,000-a-month rent there strained the
two adults' budgets.
Research shows situations like Ms.
Mills' aren't uncommon.
"When people think of the nation's
public-housing program, they think of a
housing safety net," said Linda M. Couch,
the senior vice president for policy at the
National Low Income Housing Coalition,
in Washington. "They think if you're really
down on your luck that you'll have a place
to go so that you won't be out on a street
with your kids.
"In that sense, the programs have
failed," she said. "They meet a very small
portion of the country's need. Simply because
you are eligible for them does not
mean that you have access to them."
Federal public-housing programs, administered
by a patchwork of state and
local agencies, typically target rental aid
to those earning less than 50 percent of
the area's median income. An estimated
19.3 million families were eligible for the
assistance in 2011, but only 4.6 million
received it, according to a December 2013
report by the Joint Center for Housing
Studies at Harvard University.
'A Silent Crisis'
In what U.S. Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development Shaun Donovan
has called a "silent crisis," the country's
lowest-income renters have seen their
real incomes fall steadily in recent years,
while the cost of rent grew faster.
Households that receive rental assistance
typically pay 30 percent of income
in rent, with government subsidies paying
the rest. Housing agencies consider
rent costs unaffordable if they make up
a larger share of income.
In 2011, nearly 51 percent of U.S. renters
paid more than 30 percent of their income
for housing, up from around 41 percent
in 2001, the Harvard study found.
And the problem is more severe in
cities like Washington, where neighborhoods
once deemed undesirable are now
home to young professionals who are
driving up housing costs.
The Department of Housing and Urban
Development, or HUD, sets the fair-market
rent for a two-bedroom apartment in
the city at $1,412, a rate that prices out
minimum-wage workers.
President Johnson acknowledged the
link between housing and education
50 years ago this month in an address
to Congress detailing his anti-poverty
plans.
"What does this poverty mean to those
who endure it? It means a daily struggle
to secure the necessities for even a meager
existence," he said. "It means that the
abundance, the comforts, the opportunities
they see all around them are beyond
their grasp. Worst of all, it means hopelessness
for the young."
Although public-housing initiatives
were designed to lift children out of poverty,
many families who use them still
live in largely poor neighborhoods, and
many of their children attend high-poverty
schools as a consequence.
Poor children are also more highly mo-
bile, frequently changing schools or skipping
class when new living situations
suddenly move them farther away.
Even when Ms. Mills lived in homeless
shelters, she said, she made it a priority
to wake up early and ride public buses
with her two school-age children as far
as she needed so that their school didn't
change, even if their living situation did.
But many parents in similar situations
don't-or can't-make that sacrifice, educators
say.
Changing Approaches
The 352-unit Potomac Gardens, constructed
a year after President Johnson
declared a war on poverty, takes up
an entire city block in the Capitol Hill
neighborhood.
It has a reputation for crime and violence-Ms.
Mills remembers once walking
her children past a pool of blood on
the sidewalk outside her building. In the
early 1990s, the city erected an eightfoot,
prison-grade iron fence around the
property to keep out drug dealers and
other criminals.
Large-scale multifamily public-housing
projects like Potomac Gardens have
fallen out of favor in the last 50 years as
federal and local housing agencies moved
to a scatter-site approach aimed at distributing
low-income residents through-
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18 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 26, 2014 | www.edweek.org
out mixed-income neighborhoods.
As an alternative to large public hous-
ing developments, HUD crafted rules in
1974 for tenant-based Section 8 housing
vouchers, which subsidize privately
owned, market-rate units for qualifying
tenants. (See program glossary on Page
19.) Today, about 2.3 million households
use the assistance, now known as housing-choice
vouchers.
But voucher users are still often clustered
in areas with great poverty, housing
advocates say.
A study published in November 2012
by the Washington-based Poverty and
Race Research Action Council found
that children in the nation's subsidizedhousing
programs live near schools with
greater numbers of poor students. Researchers
separately tracked a pool of
participants in each of the major federal
housing programs and found their children
attended schools where a median
of between 67.1 percent and 82.1 percent
of students, depending on the housing
program, were poor enough to qualify for
free or reduced-price lunches. In those
schools, between 19 percent and 31 percent
of students scored at or above grade
level on state-mandated standardized
mathematics tests, the study found.
Those figures compare with a median
subsidized lunch rate of 45.9 percent for
all schools in the study and a median
of 53 percent of students scoring at or
above grade level on state math exams.
Researchers studying schools in Montgomery
County, Md., an inner-ring suburb
of Washington, found that children who
live in subsidized housing in low-poverty
neighborhoods and who attend low-poverty
schools academically outperform their
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