Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.
Here is the paper, and thanks to Sven Wilson for the pointer.
Maybe neighborhood effects have already “set” by age 6? I haven’t read the paper so I can’t say if that’s a feasible alternative…
The title is spot on- Its “family” not “neighborhood” – or more fundamentally, nature over nuture. I submit that the conventional wisdom about education is entirely and completely wrong.
Sending a 90IQ student to Harvard will NOT make them smarter or more successful. Likewise, ON AVERAGE, sending poor children to better schools will have little or no effect on their performance.
Aside from some small percentage of poor who only need a legitimate boost to get themselves going, poor people are poor, GENERALLY SPEAKING, because they are not as smart, ON AVERAGE, as more wealthy people.
That is a harsh truth that far too many people refuse to see, to all our detriment.
In one way, this study actually supports vouchers, by countering an important anti-voucher hypothesis.
One anti-voucher hyppothesis is that vouchers would incude “cream-skimming,” where good students would leave public schools, and the bad students in public schools would suffer for lack of quality peers. This study indicates that npeer effects in education may be very small, which indicates that the cream-skimming argument against vouchers may not have much force.
you’ve eliminated any willingness to pay and therefor distributed the benefits of education (via random lottery) to those who do not value them.
Dubner and Levitt published a similar result in _Freakonomics_,
where out of all poor Chicago elementary school students who entered
a lottery for a chance to attend public school in a better
neighborhood, students who “won” the lottery did not perform any
better than students who lost and had to remain in their bad
neighborhood schools. However, the students who entered the lottery
(whether they won or not) outperformed the students who did not
enter the lottery.
Great post thankyou.
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