Neighborhoods and Student Achievement | Feb 12th at 3:48pm
The panelists are talking about the difficulty of retaining high-quality students, teachers, and faculty in schools located in predominantly low-income neighborhoods. The idea of neighborhoods as a sorting mechanism for student achievement is troubling. Families with more resources are able to locate to areas that have better school districts whereas lower-income families are “trapped” in their school districts. Would inclusionary zoning policies help alleviate these problems? These policies require that new developments include affordable housing units along with market rate units.
John Petro is an urban policy analyst at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy where he heads up the Progressive Urban Model Policies (PUMP) Project. The goal of PUMP is to facilitate progressive change in cities by helping local activists, organizers, and elected officials replicate and expand model policies in a number of key issue areas in urban policy.
Libby on Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:25pm
I think Northampton, MA has used this strategy rather successfully. Of course it’s a smaller town. And the population there is very progressive and committed to community diversity and increasing the stock of affordable housing in general, so you don’t have the same level of political resistance that many others do.
Still worth a look at what they’re doing if you’re not familiar with the place. What they’ve done with the redevelopment of the old state hospital might be particularly useful for more urban area reuse projects.
JRoth in Pittsburgh on Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:26pm
I’m greatly underwhelmed by the argument that zoning is the solution to neighborhood/schooling issues. However you want to define the chicken/egg of wealthy* neighborhoods having good neighborhood schools, there’s no reality that will result in a private developer buying up expensive property in a “good” neighborhood to construct a lot of low income units so that poor residents of other neighbs can relocate.
Affordable units are often a part of urban housing developments, and rightly so, but more often as an anti-gentrification move; in an urban neighborhood with already-good schools, developers can turn a profit building new housing without any recourse to the public funding that would come attached to affordable unit set-asides. And, again, zoning’s got nothing to do with it - if increased density is permitted in “good” neighbs, it will be used to build more expensive units, not more affordable units.
The post below has it right - it’s about segregation. Neighborhood schools are good for kids, families, and neighborhoods. But segregated neighborhoods are bad for kids, families - and schools most of all. I just don’t know what the mechanism is for reducing urban segregation.
* Or at least solidly middle class - they don’t have to be enclaves