Educational failure is one of the costliest and most visible problems associated with ghetto poverty. We explore whether housing assistance that helps low-income families move to better neighborhoods can also improve access to good schools. Research on the Gautreaux housing desegregation program indicated significant, long-term educational benefits, yet results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment showed no measurable impacts on school outcomes for the experimental group. We use interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to explore this puzzle.Most MTO families did not relocate to communities with substantially better schools, and those who did often moved again after a few years. Where parents had meaningful school choices, these were typically driven by poor information obtained from insular social networks or by cultural logic centered on avoiding ghetto-type school insecurity and disorder, not garnering academic opportunity. Those factors may not shift if poor families with less educated parents are served by a relocation-only strategy.

For roughly half a century, policymakers and researchers have debated the impacts of place, and in particular of inner-city neighborhoods, on employment, education, and mental and physical health. Research on programs that help people move to better neighborhoods has suggested that such programs can improve the life chances of low-income, mostly minority adults and, in particular, their children. One important way children might benefit is by having access to better schools. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) in 1994 in five cities-Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (see text box on page 11)-to try to improve the life chances of very poor families by helping them leave the disadvantaged environments that contribute to poor outcomes in education and employment. The demonstration targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highestcrime communities-distressed public housing-and used housing subsidies to offer them a chance to move to lowerpoverty neighborhoods. The hope was that moving would provide these families with access to better schools, city servicespolice, parks, libraries, sanitation-and economic opportunities. Participation in MTO