Linking Public Housing Revitalization to Neighborhood School Improvement

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Abstract

A 2007 proposal to reauthorize HUD’s HOPE VI public housing revitalization program requires local housing agencies to establish partnerships with school superintendents. The purpose is to devise comprehensive educational reform and achievement strategies for improving schools serving HOPE VI neighborhoods. Five situations where HOPE VI revitalization and school improvement have already occurred, however, suggest wide variation; each was context-sensitive and tended to be an opportunistic experiment cut from different cloth. Absent a uniform model, there is a need to know more about what incentives, which local stakeholders, and what kinds of partnerships produce improved educational outcomes before establishing uniform requirements.

Introduction

So strong is the conviction of some policymakers and practitioners that effective public housing revitalization requires concomitant school improvement that in 2005 Senator Barbara Mikulski introduced legislation requiring all recipients of federal HOPE VI funds to establish, “a comprehensive education reform and achievement strategy for transforming neighborhood schools that serve . . . revitalized HOPE VI sites into high-performing schools.” Expecting such strategies to be developed through partnerships between public housing agencies and local school systems, Senator Mikulski is not alone in believing this type of collaboration to be fundamental. Renée Glover, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, testified before Congress that linkage between Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) and schools is essential to promoting opportunity for public housing residents.

In all of the public housing communities, there is a captive elementary school. Those schools are at the flat bottom of the state. Even in the Appalachian areas, these schools are terrible performers and we have a very high rate of truancy. So people are not being provided an opportunity to pursue the American dream.

Likewise, Richard Barron of the St. Louis-based private development firm McCormack Barron Salazar emphasizes that when families consider housing options, their first consideration is affordability and their second is schools. He and his firm, accordingly, expend considerable effort finding ways to improve the schools that serve the revitalized public housing and other mixed-income developments in which they are invested.

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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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