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Education Next: Relocating Poor Families to More Affluent Neighborhoods Doesn't Necessarily Lead to Improved Student Achievement

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 August 2007, 09:20 CDT

New research published in the fall issue of the Hoover Institution's journal Education Next shows that relocating poor families to less poor neighborhoods may not be enough to lead to improved academic achievement for those families' children.

A randomized evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program -- a federal housing program piloted in five major U.S. cities that sought to relocate poor families by providing housing vouchers -- shows that, contrary to expectations, moving families out of high-poverty neighborhoods has no overall positive impact on children's learning.

Using data on more than 5,000 children between the ages of 6 and 20, researchers Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Jeffrey Kling, Greg Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn compared the educational outcomes of children whose families were offered housing vouchers through a lottery with those of children in families who entered the lottery but were not offered vouchers.

During the first four years of the program, more than 4,000 families applied for the housing vouchers in the five pilot cities -- Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. A lottery was used to randomly assign each family to one of three groups: those receiving unrestricted housing vouchers that could be used to rent in the private market in any neighborhood; those receiving restricted vouchers that could be used only in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent; and those who did not receive either voucher.

Families using a restricted housing voucher moved to neighborhoods with poverty rates 28 percentage points lower on average than the neighborhoods of similar families who didn't receive a voucher. For families using the unrestricted vouchers, the average poverty rate was 17 percentage points lower than the neighborhood in which they would have lived.

The improvements in the schools attended by the children of families using vouchers were more modest. Children in restricted voucher families attended schools with only slightly higher scores on state exams. The schools also had about 10 percent fewer minority students and almost 13 percent fewer students eligible for the federal lunch program. Unrestricted vouchers produced changes about 30 to 50 percent as large.

The MTO program, however, had no overall impact on student test scores. For children whose families had a restricted voucher, no statistically significant increase was seen in combined reading and math test scores. There was also no evidence of an advantage for children whose families had an unrestricted voucher. Neither were the impacts of the program more favorable for younger children, who had spent fewer years in high-poverty neighborhoods and were thus possibly more amenable to change.

In addition, no statistically significant differences were found in behavior or attitudes toward school between children from families with and without vouchers. Students from both restricted and unrestricted voucher families and the control group had similar numbers of behavior problems and were as likely to have repeated a grade, been suspended in the last two years, or had a parent or guardian called to the school to discuss a problem the child was having.

The authors suggest various reasons for the program's limited benefit. Families who used vouchers took steps later that undid some of the potential advantages of their initial moves to middle-class neighborhoods in subsequent moves. Moreover, many families who remained in their new neighborhoods found that the poverty rate increased around them.

Although families with vouchers moved to less impoverished neighborhoods, most did not move to racially integrated ones. School choice may have allowed families that moved with vouchers to continue sending their children to schools in their old neighborhoods.

Notably, the neighborhood improvements did not involve moving to truly affluent neighborhoods. It may be the case that children from low-income families who moved into high-income suburbs would experience notable improvements in academic achievement. Moving poor families to neighborhoods that, while less poor, have schools that are only marginally better than those in the original neighborhoods is unlikely to solve the children's academic problems, note the authors.

Read the complete research article, "New Kids on the Block: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment," online at www.EducationNext.org.

Lisa Sanbonmatsu is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Jeffrey Kling is senior fellow and deputy director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Greg Duncan is professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is professor of child development and education at Columbia University.

To discuss the findings directly with the authors, contact Teresa Wheatley at 202-797-2966.

Also online at www.EducationNext.org is the accompanying feature story, "All over the Map: Explaining educational outcomes of the Moving to Opportunity Program" by Stefanie DeLuca of Johns Hopkins University.

DeLuca and her colleagues conducted in-depth interviews with families who participated in the Baltimore MTO program to find out why the program did not have the expected results for educational achievement.

DeLuca's interviews portray the frightening conditions many MTO families saw in their children's schools and the concerns they had for their children's well-being. Yet, as DeLuca explains in the article, these fears and realities did not always translate into efforts to remove their children from those environments.

"Poor mothers and their children juggle myriad extreme conditions, and schooling is not always on the top of the list," writes DeLuca. "Murder, crippling drug addiction, suspicious landlords, diabetes, and depression took center stage in the lives of many, if not most, MTO families we interviewed. While neighborhood change could be a necessary condition to protect children and improve their schooling, it is not sufficient in light of the deep morass of issues that characterizes the lives of the urban poor."

DeLuca points out that the Baltimore MTO interviews provide a reminder that poor families "are not just wealthy families without a bankbook. Poor parents often have less information about school choice programs and school quality than do middle-class parents. Poor families may approach opportunities, and in particular may secure schooling for their children, in ways that diverge from many research models of educational decision making."

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

Source: Business Wire

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