Relocation Programs, Opportunities to Learn, and the Complications of Conversion

Abstract

Since 1976, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has relocated low-income children of color from public housing communities to less racially and economically isolated neighborhoods in an effort to improve their developmental opportunities. This article provides the first comprehensive evaluation summary of seven relocation programs and the reasons why six of them failed to replicate the educational successes of the inaugural Gautreaux program. The author argues that children were not able to convert potentially greater opportunities to learn into educational success after they resettled due to four complications, including an absence of threshold effects in destination neighborhoods, the existence of cultural discontinuities, incompatibilities between HUD and educational policy and between educational institutions, and the uncertain relevance of neighborhoods and schools as sites of educational production.

Gentrification and Academic Achievement: A Review of Recent Research

“…In the decades that followed, an outburst of scholarship emerged that endeavored to test the hypothesis that living in a high-poverty neighborhood was detrimental to children’s academic achievement (Aaronson, 1997; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, & Aber, 1997; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand, 1993; Jencks & Mayer, 1990; Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000; Plotnick & Hoffman, 1995; Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002; Sampson, Sharkey, & Raudenbush, 2008). Indeed, this scholarly fascination with the educational impacts of high poverty neighborhoods and the associated disadvantages contained therein has continued to the present (Crowder & South, 2011; Duncan, Boisjoly, & Harris, 2001; Johnson, 2010, 2012, 2014; Pearman, 2017; Sampson et al, 2008; Sharkey & Elwert, 2011; Wodtke, Elwert, & Harding, 2016; Wodtke, Harding, & Elwert, 2011). Considered in its entirety, this body of scholarship, which became part of the so-called neighborhood effects tradition, has revealed that growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood has an adverse effect on children’s educational outcomes beyond that of growing up in an economically disadvantaged family (see Durlauf, 2004; Ellen & Turner, 2003; Sastry, 2012; Sharkey & Faber, 2014, for comprehensive reviews of this literature).…”

How Do Promise Neighborhoods’ Strategies Align With Research Evidence on Poverty and Education?

“…Studies of these seven initiatives offer mixed evidence on the ability of changes in nonschool social policy to affect change in academic performance (DeLuca & Dayton, 2009; Johnson, 2012). Gautreaux offered evidence that rather small changes in policy could dramatically change lives, but the initial results of MTO dampened much of that enthusiasm.…”

“Expressive Cool” and the Paradox of Black and White Males’ Neighborhood Socialization Toward Education

“…Although both experimental (O. Johnson, 2012b) and inferential studies (O. Johnson, 2008) have shown that the relationship between residency among the middle class and the achievement of Black males is not always a positive one, Harris (2006) shows that African Americans in a predominantly middle-class location often hold optimistic educational attitudes.…”

“…Other qualitative studies describe how achievement ideologies manifest among adolescents living in mixed-income and middle-class neighborhoods (Harding, 2010; Ogbu, 2003; Pattillo-McCoy, 1999). Although both experimental (O. Johnson, 2012b) and inferential studies (O.…”