Tag Archives: Schools

Maybe Urban Schools Aren’t So Bad

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by Michael Lewyn

It is conventional wisdom that big cities have problems retaining the middle class because of poor schools.  But many older cities labor under a disadvantage that their suburbs don’t have — lots of students from underprivileged background.

A recent study suggests that when one controls for social class, Chicago schools are actually not so bad. This study compared the test scores of Chicago’s elementary schools with those of other Illinois schools with similar poverty rates, and calculated a “Poverty-Achievement Index” (PAI) based on this comparison.  As it happens, 55 of the 100 schools with the best PAIs were in Chicago- which is to say, their test scores were better than those of suburban or small-city schools with similar student bodies.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

More Evidence That Urbanists Should Support School Choice

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A recent scholarly article , “School Choice Programs: The Impacts on Housing Values” reviews literature relating to the impact of charter schools and other types of school choice programs on housing values. The article discusses studies from Minnesota, North Carolina, New York City, and Vermont (among other places) and finds that the traditional American “neighborhood school” system, which locks children into nearby schools, creates a hierarchy of housing values: places with disfavored schools (as a practical matter, anyplace urban or socially diverse) experience degraded housing values, while places with highly reputed schools (usually suburbs) become more desirable.

By contrast, the authors find that school choice programs disrupt this hierarchy.  For example, in Minnesota students can now attend schools in any school district in the state. Even though transportation difficulties prevent many students from taking advantage of this program, property values rose in school districts with weaker academic reputations. Similarly, in New York City the presence of charter schools and magnet schools increased values for nearby property, regardless of the prestige of nearby public schools.

These findings suggest that school choice will make areas with less prestigious schools more desirable — an important finding for weak-market cities with weak public schools.   Today, parents often shun such cities because of their weak public schools.  If school choice programs of various types allow parents to stay in the city without sending their children to typical urban schools, cities will become more desirable.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Critiquing the “Twenty Percent” Argument

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(Cross-posted from www.planetizen.com)

I just received a email newsletter raising the decades-old argument that public transit gets too much federal support because transit gets 20 percent of federal funding for surface transportation, but its share of trips and transportation mileage is far lower.

One obvious retort to this argument is environmental: highway spending, by encouraging automobile travel to car-dependent places, increases vehicle miles traveled (VMT), thus increasing pollution—not just greenhouse gas pollution, but also more heavily regulated types of pollution such as carbon monoxide and particulate matter. To the extent that highway spending increases such social harms, one dollar of spending may be one dollar too much, let alone the tens of billions of dollars currently devoted to roads.

In addition, highway spending can create other negative side effects: for example, where jobs track new highways but public transit does not, a “spatial mismatch” exists between the pre-highway population and jobs; population was located in more urban areas, but the highway has shifted jobs into outer suburbs and exurbs. To the extent people react to this spatial mismatch by buying cars and driving more, they have suffered additional costs caused by government action. To the extent people too poor to buy cars cannot reach work, they have suffered an even more severe cost: the loss of job opportunities.

Furthermore, the “20 percent” argument overlooks both the impact of past spending and the existence of current non-transportation policies that effectively subsidize highways and sprawl.

In the first half of the 20th century, government at all levels spent liberally on highway, but streetcars (the leading mode of public transit in most of the United States) were a private industry, which meant that government’s job was to tax and regulate it. So in many places, roads got not only the money devoted to roads, but also the implicit subsidy that government created by taxing and regulating the competition. And over the course of the 20th century, transit received far less than 20 percent of government transportation spending. Continue reading →

Learning from Kansas City

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Kansas City, Missouri (where I am a visiting professor for the current academic year) is a medium-demand city: a city with more successful neighborhoods than Cleveland or Detroit, but one still dominated by its suburbs to a greater extent than more successful cities. One reason the city keeps losing people to its suburbs is the low reputation of the city’s school district. In the city’s affluent southwest side, only 27 percent of K-12 children attend public schools. Moreover, many people who would otherwise live in those neighborhoods have moved to Kansas so they can send their children to the overwhelmingly white public schools of Overland Park, Leawood, and other suburbs. Why are Kansas City’s schools so unpopular?

I recently read Complex Justice, a book by political scientist Joshua Dunn about Kansas City’s schools. While much of Dunn’s work focuses on litigation strategy and judicial decision making, he also makes a few points relevant to the problems of urban school districts.

In particular, Dunn shows that some of the city’s public schools became all-black almost as soon as desegregation took place. For example,Kansas City’s Central High School was almost 90 percent white in 1955, and by 1965 had only 16 white students (out of over 2000). Similarly, Paseo High School was 6 percent African-American in 1959 and 97 percent African-American in 1969. So it appears that Kansas City’s whites were ready to move out as soon as blacks moved in—a fact that suggests that whites decided that a school was “bad” as soon as a critical mass of African-Americans moved in. Continue reading →

The Death of Neighborhood Schools?

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by Nathaniel M. Hood

We need an entirely different approach to where we locate schools and how we build them. Our current model – notably in small and mid-sized towns – is that of the destruction of our neighborhood schools in favor of the suburban campus model.

The campus model is a burden on our system: built on an inhuman scale, unwalkable by design, with a disregard to long-term operational costs and devaluing our existing neighborhoods.

An example is happening in my hometown of Mankato, MN. If the school district decides to go through with their new plans, they should immediately start applying for a Safe Routes to School grant. They’re going to need it.

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The blue square on the bottom left is Mankato’s new school; right on the corner of US Highway 22 and County Road 83. The yellow squares are soybeans that may become Mankato’s newest low-density residential neighborhood. This should be cause for concern, beyond that of its speculative nature, and I can speak from experience. Continue reading →