Mixing Learners

I’ve told this story before. Back in the 90’s, Jerry Weast, Montgomery County, Maryland’s school superintendent, started digging around trying to find out why his students were suddenly scoring higher than expected on their reading and math tests. He looks at the district curriculum. He looked at classroom instructional strategies, He examined formative testing. Although all of those were in good shape, he found the real reason reading and math test scores increased across the board, for all students, was because Montgomery County had changed their housing policies, making it possible for poor families to live inside attendance zones that were historically middle-class neighborhoods. Likewise, middle-class families that moved into historically lower-income neighborhoods positively impacted their local public school scores in reading and math. The mixture of middle-class and poor families in Montgomery County neighborhoods improved their public schools.

Now, new research published in The Atlantic suggests that bringing rich and poor together offers greater benefits than just increased tests scores.

“Few places illustrate the aspirations and failures of American housing policy as well as the Techwood Homes in downtown Atlanta – one of the first federal housing projects. Its completion, in 1935, even drew the attendance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who switched on its electricity. To make way for the development, the old slums – in which roughly a quarter of residents were Black – had been cleared away. But the 604 new units were for white tenants only until 1968, when civil-rights laws forced integration. Like the ramshackle shacks it replaced, Techwood fell into disrepair. By the 1990s, Techwood had resegregated, becoming almost exclusively Black, and turned into a byword in Atlanta for urban decline. Gates and windows lay shattered; resident complained of squalid living conditions; drug trafficking and gang violence were out of control.”

“In 1993, Atlanta received one of the first grants awarded by the federal HOPE VI program – which aimed to knock down the most decrepit public-housing projects in America and replace them with better housing – to demolish and rebuild the Techwood Homes. The demolitions took place just before the city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics. If you went to Techwood’s site today – sandwiched between Georgia Tech and the Coca-Cola museum – you would see a commemorative plaque but almost none of the original brick buildings that fell into dilapidation. Instead, you would find yourself in Centennial Place, a mixed-income community with subsidized apartments alongside private, market-rate housing. It was intentionally designed to reduce the isolation of the urban poor – and it’s succeeding.”

Activists and some academic critics criticized HOPE VI as a state-sponsored gentrification program, doomed to harm the people it was intended to help.

But a new study from a group of researchers at Harvard, Cornell University, and the Census Bureau have found the benefits to children living in the new low-density housing project are considerable.

“Their earnings in adulthood increased by 2.8 percent for every year they lived in the new developments instead of the old ones, the researchers calculated. This holds even when the researchers compare siblings within the same family. Overall, children whose families moved into revitalized units earn 16 percent more than they otherwise would have earned, they are 17 percent more likely to attend college, and boys are 20 percent less likely to go to jail in adulthood. The future-income increases alone greatly exceed the up-front cost of rebuilding, the authors argue.”

“’Distressed public housing projects were essentially islands that had limited social interaction with nearby communities,’ the paper argues. ‘The HOPE VI program built a bridge to surrounding communities, allowing public housing residents to benefit from interacting with those residents.’”

It seems like Atlanta’s Techwood neighborhood is exhibiting the same results as Montgomery County did back in the 1990s – especially when it comes to kids from poor families and their futures. Mixing incomes groups seems to help raise all ships, but especially those poor kids who have a new lease on life – just because neighborhood zoning practices have changed.

The bad news is that the Trump administration isn’t interested in funding this type of improvement.

“The Trump administration has called for a 43 percent reduction in public-housing spending. It is especially hostile to the idea of using federal funds as an explicit tool to break up concentrations of poverty. The lessons of HOPE VI provide a tantalizing clue [reminder] about how social mobility can be engineered in America by building bridges between rich and poor. How unfortunate it is that the current administration is unlikely to even try.”

Til tomorrow. SVB