Improved Neighborhoods Don't Raise Academic Achievement

"It is assumed that if poor families move to better neighborhoods their children will perform better in school, but until now the data to support this proposition have been difficult to isolate and even more difficult to interpret with anything like a consensus. In Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment (NBER Working Paper No. 11909), Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Jeffrey Kling, Greg Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn analyze a rich mine of information regarding such families but find no academic improvement for any of the children.

The data, collected in 2002, arise out of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's experimental Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing program in the late 1990s. In this program, three groups of low-income families in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago were offered housing assistance via lotteries.

...Their results indicate no evidence of improvement in reading scores, math scores, behavior problems, or school engagement overall for any age group."

[Editor's note: The full paper is available online for a fee; but a detailed abstract is available at the link below for free.]