Tallahassee Roundtable: Economic Segregation
Take-out Tuesday
Economic Segregation Local Roundtable Public Forum
Tuesday, May 13 - 5:30 to 7PM
St. John’s Episcopal Church, 211 North Monroe
We’ll talk about the results of our 9 month bipartisan conversation on this year’s topic, economic segregation.
Optional $5 contribution at door
Find the draft of our final report here
Panel Members:
Brian Armstrong, Nabors, Giblin and Nickerson
Jim Croteau, President and CEO, Elder Care Services, Inc., Former Leon Co. Schools Superintendent
Laurie Dozier, Mad Dog Design and Construction
Charles Connerly, Chair, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Florida State University
Pat Holliday, City of Tallahassee Neighborhood Services
Jim Mau, Provost, Florida International University, Florida Board of Regents - Retired
“The degree to which different economic classes live spatially apart from one another.”
Concepts:
Concentrated poverty, concentrated wealth.
Articles
Tallahassee Renaissance Partnership at a crossroads
The Community Neighborhood Renaissance Partnership was created about 10 years ago with the goal of getting local government institutions — the city of Tallahassee, Leon County, the three institutions of higher learning and the school district — to work with the United Way and local banks in an effort to revitalize poorer neighborhoods. The first neighborhoods targeted, both on the south side, were Providence and Apalachee Ridge, where the city bought property and in 2002 opened the technology center.
DESEGREGATION: THE NEW PLAN, The Louisville Courier-Journal
Seven months after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the district’s desegregation policy because it considered individual students’ race in assigning them to schools, Superintendent Sheldon Berman unveiled a new proposal — checked by the district’s lawyers — that he believes meets the court test.
In the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, Chief Justice Warren wrote that “we
must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.” In this study, I have followed that advice, taking a fresh look at decades of the most rigorous research and providing important new evidence using the NCLB data. The number of students and schools included in these new data is, to my knowledge, the largest ever included in an analysis of segregation.Each type of evidence points to the conclusion that minority students make greater learning gains in schools with more white peers—not because of race itself, but because of the economic and academic advantages of students in these schools and the important influence that classmates have on minority learning.
In New York, one of a number of schools addressing that lack of preparation is the Excellence Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant, which serves minority students from low-income families who live in some of Brooklyn’s most economically depressed neighborhoods
…Excellence’s success is measurable. Last year, the third-graders were the first in the school to take the standardized New York State Math and Language Arts Exams. Their performance was superb. Ninety-two percent of the students earned advanced or proficient scores in language arts, and 100 percent received advanced or proficient scores in math.
August 16, 2007 - Voters Back Supreme Court Limit On School Deseg 3 - 1
By a 71 - 24 percent margin, American voters agree with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that public schools may not consider an individual’s race when deciding which students are assigned to specific schools, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
Republican voters agree with the decision 79 - 17 percent, while Democrats agree 64 - 30 percent and independent voters agree 71 - 24 percent, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe- ack) University poll finds
Researchers Discuss the ‘Neighborhood Effect’, National Public Radio
Pulling Apart: Economic Segregation among Suburbs and Central Cities in Major Metropolitan Areas, The Brookings Institute
Research has linked living in high-poverty areas (independent of individual characteristics) with such negative outcomes as dropping out of school early, teen pregnancy, unwed births, unemployment, and crime victimization. Areas of concentrated poverty often lack job opportunities, health care services, good shopping, decent schools, and adequate municipal services.
From 1970 to 2000, % middle class in American cities & suburbs decreased 7%, but middle class neighborhoods decreased 17%. Why? Speculation that middle class neighborhoods are tipping either to richer or poorer neighborhoods.
“No city in America has gotten more integrated by income in the last 30 years,” said Alan Berube, an urban demographer at Brookings who worked on the report.
. . . (this) may be the result of increased opportunity for middle class black Americans. “Now, if they can afford it, they can move to higher-income neighborhoods. Dollars trump race. Many choose not to live around poor people.”
Schools are segregated again, by Jennifer D. Jordan, The Providence Journal
American schools across the country are more racially isolated than at any time before 1954, when federal courts demanded schools be desegregated, said Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and educator. The result, he said, is an inherently unequal and unjust education system.
He points to Boston’s integration program, Metco, which buses 3,000 inner-city students a year into high-performing school districts in the suburbs. About 90 percent of Metco students graduate in four years and continue on to college. The program currently has 16,000 students on its wait list, which Kozol says represents a third of Boston’s minority students.
Kozol wants leaders to strengthen and expand the school-choice provision of the federal education law, which permits students to transfer to another school if their home school gets low test scores for several consecutive year.
U.S. Losing Its Middle Class Neighborhoods, by Blaine Harden, The Washington Post
While it is true that blacks don’t need to sit next to whites to learn, segregated schools in America almost always have high concentrations of poverty. These high poverty schools - even when equally funded - lack other critical “resources” that matter even more than money: supportive peers, active parents, and great teachers with high expectations. . .
Significantly, all of these resources - positive peer influences, active parents, and good teachers - track more closely with the economic makeup than the racial makeup of the student body. Forty years ago, the well-known Coleman Report found that “the beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from the racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites.”
Across the country, about 40 school districts now use socioeconomic status [rather than race] as a factor in student assignment. In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina for example, the school board adopted a policy goal in 2000 that no school should have more than 40 percent of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch or more than 25 percent of students performing below grade level.Low-income and minority students in Wake substantially outperform comparable students in other large North Carolina districts that have failed to reduce concentrations of poverty. And Wake County’s middle-class students continue to thrive academically.
Wake County’s plan has the additional benefit of providing racial integration indirectly, which is desirable because we want schools not only to raise test scores but also to produce tolerant citizens. The socioeconomic integration plan produces almost as much racial integration as the district’s prior race-conscious integration program and it does so in a manner that even conservatives concede is perfectly legal.
For years, American education has tried to make separate schools for rich and poor work well, to little avail. The program in Wake County and other districts pursuing integration by income suggests that Brown doesn’t need to be buried. It needs to be reinvented.
John Edwards’s Plan to Reduce Economic Segregation, by Richard Kahlenberg of The Century Foundation
In fact, however, dozens of studies going back forty years have indicated that giving poor kids a chance to attend middle-class schools is probably the single most effective policy option available for raising their achievement levels and life chances. The seminal 1966 Coleman Report found that the most important predictor of academic achievement, after the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from, is the socioeconomic makeup of the school she attends—a finding replicated in an enormous number of studies since then.
Gautreaux v. Urban Renewal, 2003
Gautreaux vs. Chicago Housing Authority and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development alleged discrimination in locating minority housing projects in black inner-city neighborhoods and white projects in nonminority neighborhoods. The case went to the Supreme Court.
The remedy ultimately resulted in the Chicago Housing Authority moving 7,100 minority residents into the suburbs, to substantial resistance in suburban neighborhoods.
The idea is to spatially reduce poverty by creating lots of small public housing on regular blocks in regular neighborhoods, instead of large and dense public housing towers. This approach is called “scatter-site” housing.
Ultimately, the program was discontinued in 2002 for lack of funding. There is still substantial disagreement about the lessons of the 40-year “Gautreaux demonstration.”
Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration : Interim Impacts Evaluation
The Moving to Opportunity program provided thousands of poor adults and children an opportunity to use HUD vouchers to move out of public housing in high poverty neighborhoods to lower poverty neighborhoods. Using rigorous scientific methods, this study looks at the impact these moves have had on housing, health, employment, education, mobility, welfare receipt, and delinquency.
The results presented in this report show the impacts of moving to lower poverty approximately 5-years after the move. Within this relatively short timeframe, moving to lower poverty has had significant positive impacts on:
personal safety;
housing quality;
mental health and obesity among adults; and
mental health, staying in school, delinquency, and risky behavior among teenage girls.
There are, however, apparently some negative effects on boys’ behavior, and no statistically significant effects on employment outcomes for adults or educational achievement for children. Only marginal improvements were found in the quality of schools attended.
Margy Waller, a policy adviser in the Clinton administration, said that because so many Americans believe poverty results from bad personal decisions, it is better to address it in broader terms of improving social cohesion, reducing inequality and strengthening the economy, instead of focusing on “poverty.”
That is how Prime Minister Tony Blair has sold his anti-poverty plan in Britain. . .
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