Integrated effort to fight housing, school barriers?

The potential benefits of economic integration in schools, on the other hand, are illustrated in a study published last week by The Century Foundation. The report focuses on Maryland’s Montgomery County, where, thanks to an inclusionary zoning regime begun in the 1970s, affordable residences — some of them owned by the local public housing agency — are scattered across both low- and moderate-poverty neighborhoods, and feed into both low- and moderate-poverty schools. Researcher Heather Schwartz, using data from 2001 to 2007, found that public housing students in both types of schools started out well behind their peers. But by sixth grade, the students who happened to attend more affluent schools had closed half the achievement gap in math, and made similar though smaller gains in reading. By contrast, students from public housing who attended schools with higher levels of poverty had made up no ground — even though the district had directed extra resources to schools with greater need. (The data also suggested that students in public housing benefited simply from living in middle-class neighborhoods, Schwartz found, but those results were not statistically significant, and were about one-third as great as the gains from attending middle-class schools.) The study suggests that, in Montgomery County at least, the most powerful educational intervention is economic integration — but there is an “enormous disconnect,” Kahlenberg said, between that insight and the direction of federal education policy.

Montgomery County’s experience shows, again, how housing and school policy are inextricably linked. (Indeed, Schwartz’s report is titled “Housing Policy is School Policy.”) Just as the existence of white suburban oases facilitated school segregation in the 1960s and ’70s without schools in those oases having to actively turn students away, the county’s mix of inclusionary zoning and public housing facilitated the integration of classrooms with no explicit effort on the part of the school district.

But as powerful as the program is, it is also small-scale: in a county that now has over 360,000 residences and nearly 1 million inhabitants, the inclusionary zoning program has in three decades generated about 12,000 affordable units, some of which no longer hold that designation. The county’s public housing agency owns fewer than 1,000 public housing residences, about 700 of which were produced by inclusionary zoning — “a drop in the bucket,” Schwartz noted in an interview. And as the county has grown larger and more diverse, debates about how to allocate scarce resources are becoming more fraught, said Nancy Navarro, a county councilwoman and former school board president. There is increasingly pressure to direct new investments in affordable housing to places where property values are lower, which would likely mean more low-income students attending higher-poverty schools.

In light of the pressures toward segregation in both schools and communities, it is hard to imagine a successful integration agenda, in the long run and at any significant scale, that does not take both sides of the equation into account. To that end, advocates like PRRAC’s Phil Tegeler call for strategies — such as pairing quality magnet schools with public housing developments — that aim to foster integrated schools as part of a path to integrated communities. But federal education policy is instead steering resources to charter schools, which, some research suggests, may actually intensify segregation.

For all the Administration’s talk about comprehensive approaches to urban policy and its invocation of the Civil Rights struggle, with respect to racial and economic integration, an uneven picture is emerging. And, halfway through Obama’s term, important questions remain unanswered: On the housing front, will incentives and inspiring language be accompanied by enforcement when it is needed? In education, will federal policy adopt approaches designed to open up seats in middle-class schools to more students? And most importantly, will policy-makers in these two related fields pursue an integrated vision that truly takes integration seriously?