The Challenging Mathematics Of Producing Economically Integrated Schools

I remarked on Twitter late last week that it would be helpful to integrate certain education policy debates with housing policy controversies. After all, the super-naive answer to poorly performing public school systems is that families should just move. Every metropolitan area in the country includes a wide array of school districts and many districts contain a wide array of schools. Of course in practice that answer's not available to poor families, but there are policy reasons that it's not possible.

But the Century Foundation took an important look at this issue with Heather Schwarz's report (PDF) "Housing Policy Is School Policy: Economically Integrative Housing Promotes Academic Success In Montgomery County, Marland" about the education policy benefits of Montgomery Country's inclusionary zoning. The benefits here are substantial, but this passage also serves as an indication of how difficult to math is:

The academic returns from economic integration diminished as school poverty levels rose. Children who lived in public housing and attended schools where no more than 20 percent of students qualified for a free or reduced price meal did best, whereas those children in public housing who attended schools where as many as 35 percent of students who qualified for a free or reduced price meal performed no better academically over time than public housing children who attended schools where 35 to 85 percent of students qualified for a free or reduced price meal.

This is important stuff. But note that 21 percent of American children are in households below the federal poverty line and the cutoff for receiving the reduced price school lunches is family income of less than 185% of the federal poverty line. Under the circumstances, it would be literally impossible for all children to go to schools where fewer than one fifth of the kids come from lunch discount families. On the contrary, if poor children were spread evenly across schools nobody would be attending a low-poverty school. Since education is tethered to geography in so many different ways, I think housing policy is nonetheless necessarily part of the picture when you're talking about schools. But there's no way to solve the problems of high-poverty schools merely by dispersing people. You need to actually attack the poverty, and you need to actually get better outcomes out of schools.