Do Better Neighborhoods for MTO Families Mean Better Schools?

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Abstract

One expected benefit of moving poor families from the concentrated poverty of some inner city neighborhoods to better, less poor neighborhoods, was that the children would attend better schools, with more resources and more advantaged peers who might be models for hard work and higher achievement. This brief looks at the schools MTO children attended after their move, how they did or did not differ from the schools in their pre-move neighborhoods, and what factors mattered to families choosing schools for their children.

Introduction

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, highest crime communities—distressed public housing—and used housing subsidies to offer them a chance to move to lower poverty neighborhoods. The hope was that moving would provide these families with access to better schools, city services— police, parks, libraries, sanitation—and economic opportunities. Participation in MTO was voluntary. Those who volunteered were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: a control group, a Section 8 comparison group, or an experimental group (see page 11 for description of groups).

MTO focused on moving families into better neighborhoods and was not specifically targeted at improving educational outcomes. However, based on the findings from a housing desegregation program called Gautreaux (Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000), MTO program designers expected that if families moved to low poverty communities, children could have access to better, more resource-rich schools with more advantaged peers, and that this access might lead to the children working harder and achieving more (Kaufman and Rosenbaum 1992). On the other hand, children who moved to new neighborhoods and schools might respond negatively to competition from their more advantaged peers (Jencks and Mayer 1990; Rosenbaum 1995), or teachers might single out the newcomers for sanctions (Carter 2003; Skiba et al. 2000). MTO examined what happened.

Two early studies of families in the Baltimore and Boston sites one to three years after random assignment showed promising results for experimental movers, especially significant improvements in school quality (Katz, Kling, and Liebman 2003; Ladd and Ludwig 2003). In Baltimore, there was also evidence of positive impacts on reading and math scores. Follow-up research on the entire sample of MTO families at all five sites was conducted in 2002, about five years after the MTO families moved (Orr et al. 2003).

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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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