Education Week - March 26, 2014 - 20

WAR ON POVERTY: Progress & Persistent Inequity
"A COMPLETELY HOMOGENEOUS SCHOOL is not the real world-
economically, racially, and ethnically. ... I think most people understand that some diversity is
good. It's good to experience that as you're growing up and in the learning environment."
BRUCE CRISPELL, Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools
Beyond ZIP Codes: Should Districts
Step In When Housing Efforts Fail?
Some districts look for ways to promote economic integration of schools
By Evie Blad
When housing policies fail to break up
concentrations of poverty in cities, some
education researchers say school districts
should take an active role in making sure
their schools are economically diverse.
That's because schools with high concentrations
of poverty are statistically
more likely to have fewer resources,
higher rates of mobility and absenteeism,
and less support from parent groups.
"Economically disadvantaged students
come to school behind on average," said
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at
the Century Foundation, a Washingtonbased
think tank. "When you separate out
family and school effects, there's also this
large penalty associated with attending a
high-poverty school."
To distribute the enrollment of poor students
across schools, districts have turned
to alternative student-assignment plans,
weighted lotteries, and a method known
as controlled choice for enrolling students.
Proponents of such economic integration
frequently cite research on Montgomery
County, Md., a high-achieving district just
to the north of Washington that has been
praised for its decades-old scattered-site
housing plan.
Montgomery County has a median
household income of $96,985, according
the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community
Survey, which makes it hard for
some families to find affordable housing.
Despite high average income in the re-
gion, 34 percent of the 151,000 students
in the Montgomery County district qualify
for free or reduced-price meals.
Montgomery County's policy on moderately
priced dwelling units, initiated in
1974, requires that between 12.5 percent
and 15 percent of the units in residential
developments of more than 20 units be set
aside for low-income renters and for subsidized
public housing.
Heather L. Schwartz, a policy researcher
at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND
Corp., studied seven years of the school system's
achievement data for a 2010 report
for the Century Foundation. She found that
poor children randomly assigned to publichousing
units in low-poverty neighborhoods
and, consequently, to more economically advantaged
schools, outperformed their peers
at schools with greater concentrations of
low-income students.
Better Outcomes
"These results suggest that children
from highly disadvantaged circumstances
benefit from long-term exposure to advantaged
school settings," the report says.
Poor students in low-poverty schools outperformed
their similarly disadvantaged
peers in higher-poverty schools, even when
the latter schools received more money from
the district, Ms. Schwartz found.
At the time of the study, Montgomery
County designated its elementary schools
with the highest concentrations of poverty
as "red zone schools." Those schools had a
maximum class size of 19 in earlier grades,
instead of 23, and other resources meant to
counteract the effects of poverty.
Today, lower-income schools are designated
as "focus schools," and still have
smaller class sizes, said Bruce Crispell,
the district's long-range planning director.
Ms. Schwartz found that by the end of
elementary school, the initial gap in test
scores between children in public housing
who attended the district's schools
with the lowest-concentrations of poverty
(where fewer than 20 percent of students
qualified for free or reduced-price meals)
and the more affluent students in the district
was cut by half for mathematics and
by one-third for reading.
In the study, poor children in schools
where fewer than 20 percent of students
qualified for free or reduced-priced meals
had the greatest academic growth as measured
by standardized test scores, but academic
improvements dissipated for children
in schools with higher poverty rates.
Controlled Choice
Despite its heralded housing policy,
Montgomery County, like much of the
Washington metropolitan area, still has
drastically varying poverty rates in its
neighborhoods and schools. At the high
end, 94.3 percent of students in one school
qualify for free or reduced-price meals. In
a low-end school, 0.9 percent qualify.
The inclusive housing has affected
neighborhoods throughout the county, Mr.
Crispell said. But, while it has brought
some lower-income students into higherincome
neighborhoods, it has not led to an
even distribution of income levels districtwide.
The district sets economic diversity
as one of its priorities when it draws new
attendance zones, but it is difficult to create
balanced student populations in established
wealthy neighborhoods, he said.
"We have to deal with the land-use patterns
and the land wealth that exists," Mr.
Crispell said.
Nationwide, neighborhood income patterns
have spurred debates between
educators who favor targeting resources
toward high-need schools and those who
favor policies meant to even out the proportion
of poor children across schools.
Mr. Kahlenberg is among those who
favor the method called controlled choice.
Under such a policy, districts assign students
to schools through a lottery system
in which higher-income families are given
priority at schools with high-poverty enrollments,
and lower-income families are
given priority in low-poverty schools. In
some cases, families select preferences
from all schools in a district, and, in others,
they choose from a cluster of schools
near their home.
Because lower-income families are more
likely to favor schools close home, districts
should target schools with popular
programs to those neighborhoods to draw
higher-income enrollment, controlledchoice
proponents argue.
Such a program is in place in the
6,300-student Cambridge, Mass., district,
where the goal is for every school's enrollment
to reflect the district's overall economic
makeup.
Cambridge originally adopted its controlled-choice
plan to promote racial integration,
but it switched to an income-based
assignment method as federal courts began
ruling against the broad use of race in student
assignment.
Proposal in Washington
Mr. Kahlenberg said larger cities, such as
Washington, could use a modified version
of controlled choice to promote economic
diversity in their schools as young and af-
fluent people are increasingly attracted to
once out-of-favor neighborhoods.
The District of Columbia school system
plans to implement new student assignment
plans in the 2015-16 academic year.
It currently has defined school attendance
boundaries, but it allows some transfers to
out-of-boundary schools by lottery.
Mr. Kahlenberg co-authored a January
editorial in The Washington Post with Michael
J. Petrilli, the executive vice president
of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute,
a Washington-based research and advocacy
group; and educational consultant
Sam Chaltain, arguing that the new plan
should bundle some neighborhoods into
"controlled-choice zones." They also proposed
weighted lotteries for charter schools
to ensure that each school's share of poor
students would not drop below 50 percent.
The plan would prevent schools from
"flipping" from one demographic group
to another as neighborhoods change, Mr.
Kahlenberg said in an interview.
"Low-income families feel as though
they're being pushed out of schools, and
middle-class families are wanting to create
their own enclaves of students," he said.
But, under a Cambridge-like model, "the
gentrification could be a positive for the
low-income students."
But controlled choice has its critics.
Among them is Chester E. Finn Jr., the
president of the Fordham Institute. In a
recent blog post, he wrote that the idea
"smacks of nanny statism," and that it
would unfairly restrict parental choices.
"It restricts families' education options and
imposes a top-down, government-run, socialengineering
scheme based on somebody's
view of the value of racial and socioeconomic
integration," Mr. Finn wrote.
Coverage of educational equity and school reform
is supported in part by a grant from the HOPE
Foundation and the Panasonic Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial control
over the content of this coverage.
RISING RENTAL COSTS
Despite several decades of government efforts to
improve housing accessibility since the War on
Poverty, finding affordable housing is an increasing
problem for many families in the United States.
Research shows that housing costs have taken up a
growing share of household income for renters since
the 1960s. Moderately burdened renters are those
whose housing costs fall between 30 and 50 percent
of their household incomes. Severely burdened renters
are those whose housing costs exceed 50 percent of
their household incomes.
SOURCE: "America's Rental Housing: Evolving Markets and Needs"
by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University
Moderately burdened renters
Severely burdened renters
22.9%
11.9%
11.9
1960
13%
14
1970
17.7%
17.8
1980
19.6%
19.4
1990
18.4%
19.7
2000
27.3
2010

Education Week - March 26, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - March 26, 2014