The Echo

Housing Policy Is School Policy


By Richard D. Kahlenberg

In recent weeks, the nation’s education reform community has been enthralled by Davis Guggenheim’s film “Waiting For ‘Superman,’” which disparages teachers’ unions and celebrates the lotteries used to get into high-poverty charter schools. ("'Superman' and Solidarity," this issue.) The empirically dubious message is that the nonunion character of charter schools will save low-income students, even though only 17 percent of charter schools outperform regular public schools.

New research, however, suggests that what really works is winning a different kind of lottery: the one jurisdictions like Montgomery County, Md., hold to provide a chance for low-income public-housing students to live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and attend superb (and unionized) public schools.

The Maryland district’s schools, in suburban Washington, are nationally acclaimed for promoting both excellence and equity in education. Affluent Montgomery County students perform very well academically, and the district’s low-income and minority students outperform comparable groups in the state, making the system one of five finalists for the prestigious Broad Prize in education this year.

Much credit has appropriately been given to the district’s investment of substantial extra resources in its lowest-income schools, but the county also has a long-standing inclusionary housing policy that allows low-income students to live in middle- and upper-middle-class communities and attend fairly affluent schools.

Thus, Montgomery County offers an interesting experiment: Do low-income students perform better in higher-poverty schools that receive greater resources, or in more-affluent schools with fewer resources? Which matters more for low-income students: extended learning time, lower class size, and intensive teacher-development programs—all made available in Montgomery County’s higher-poverty schools—or the types of advantages usually associated with wealthier schools, such as positive peer role models, active parental communities, and strong teachers?

In a just-released Century Foundation study by Heather Schwartz, an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corp., the results are unmistakable: Low-income students attending lower-poverty elementary schools (and living in lower-poverty neighborhoods) significantly outperform low-income elementary students who attend higher-poverty schools with state-of-the-art educational interventions. By the end of elementary school, Schwartz finds, public-housing students in the lowest-poverty schools cut their initial, sizable math-achievement gap with nonpoor students in the district by half. For reading, it was cut by one-third. In math, students in public housing achieved at 0.4 of a standard deviation higher in more-affluent schools than in less-affluent ones, which is substantially larger than the 0.1 effects size often found for educational interventions. The study, “Housing Policy Is School Policy,”did not specifically measure the effect of the inclusionary housing program on the achievement of middle-class students, but Montgomery County’s nonpoor students are among the highest-achieving in the state and the nation.

For the rest of the story and access to the supporting documents go here :  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/10/20/08kahlenberg_ep.h30.html?tkn=TPMFAfOIKivSN3%2Fll591ajs%2FTM2suzIFuXj3&cmp=clp-edweek