Success: Over the meadow and through the woods?
The newest Atlantic (not yet online) contains an article about Memphis’s experience with shutting down its noxious projects and offering housing vouchers to their low-income inhabitants, who use the vouchers to move to other areas of the city. The concept has been applied across the country. In Memphis, though, it’s had the unfortunate effect of spreading all over the metropolitan area what were once isolated concentrations of crime. And overall crime rates in the city are way up.
Motivating housing voucher programs is the idea that if high-poverty, high-minority, high-crime neighborhoods are dispersed—if the residents of those neighborhoods move to more economically and racially integrated settings—than deleterious activity will wane. It’s an idea that’s been extended to k-12 education, too: If poor or minority students are removed from all-minority, high-poverty neighborhoods (and their schools), they’ll do better academically. But it’s not that simple. Nor is it true that other forms of shuffling kids from school to school to improve classroom “diversity” does much for the educational prospects of the shuffled. Dangerous neighborhoods are dangerous for a variety of reasons, but at the core it’s because they’re inhabited by... criminals, who, when transplanted to better neighborhoods, are simply able to steal better merchandise. Bad schools are bad not because of who sits next to whom, but mostly because of the... bad teachers and bad administrators who work in them. And good schools are good largely because they’re staffed by people who are good at what they do.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Liam, you had me all the way until the end when you failed to mention students culpability (as well as teachers and admins) when it comes to academic achievement. While I wouldn’t label the kids as “bad,” having grown up in the inner city, I know there is a lot of anti-intellectualism within student culture that has nothing to do with how great a school or classroom is run. I continue to be shocked with how infrequently the idea of holding students accountable for their behavior and achievement is mentioned throughout the edu-blogosphere.
Of course, there are people who acknowledge this but assume nothing can be done about student attitudes. I think this shows a profound lack of innovation. Perhaps its easy for me to say that though, since I’m pretty sure I’ve come up with a solution...
June 8th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Have you read Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books? Highly recommended.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I wonder what percentage of people who live in the projects aren’t criminals.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Carol and Corey are both correct.
Education theorists should learn from this experiemnt. The first generation of people who exercized their choice were a self-selected group. As in magnet schools that “Cream,” the process of choosing is a selection porcess.
I hope you didn’t miss the mathematical description of what caused the dispersal to increase crime. When people from the highest risk populations move into neighborhoods that are challenged but stable, it can change the critical mass, and push the neighborhoods over “the Tipping Point.” True believers in educational choice overlook that dynamic. Some even think that a school with 50 to 60 to 70% poor is a “high poverty school.” The more that you cream off students and parents who understand the value of education, the more you increase the critical mass of problems in neighborhood schools. After the extreme proliferation of choice, our neigborhood high poverty schools have become “the alternative schools for alternative schools.” I don’t begrudge the opportunities for poor kids who go to magnets, but I teach at a school where students who have been kicked out of districts from all over the county, as well as Oakland and LA and sent back to Oklahoma to live with relatives, are dumped at all times of the year. In that situation, principals - who are not bad - are not allowed to suspend dangerous and chronically disruptive students. As they are told, “those kids have a right to be somewhere ...” If your so-called “good” principals and teachers faced our challenge, under the rules we live under, they wouldn’t have any more success.