Urban School Reform as Housing Policy

The question of education reform tends to spark unusually vicious debates in American politics. Mention charter schools, test-based teacher quality assessments, smaller (or larger) class sizes, or anything else in this space and you’re asking for a fight. In part that’s because strong interest groups with a lot of money are on both sides of every question. It also undoubtedly reflects the fact that since we’ve all gone to school, almost everyone feels entitled to an opinion about what ought to happen there. But underlying the entire debate is actually a fair amount of consensus about the reality that our current system doesn’t serve poor kids well. Everyone agrees that high-poverty schools in high-poverty neighborhoods tend to produce bad results; the questions revolve instead around what to do about it. It’s an important debate, but it’s too rarely acknowledged that this inequity is built right into the structure of American housing policy.

To play dumb for a moment, one might ask why low-income parents don’t solve the problem of bad schools in poor neighborhoods by simply moving.