Moving to Educational Opportunity: A Housing Demonstration to Improve School Outcomes

Moving to Educational Opportunity: A Housing Demonstration to Improve School Outcomes Megan Gallagher Simone Zhang Jennifer Comey November 2013 1 Acknowledgements This work was funded by the Ford Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation. The authors are grateful to the advisory group for its contributions to the review of this paper and the design of this pilot demonstration. The advisory group consists of Stefanie DeLuca (Johns Hopkins University), Ingrid Gould Ellen (New York University), Jennifer O’Neil (Quadel Consulting), Barbara Sard (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities), Heather Schwartz (RAND Corporation), Phil Tegeler (Poverty & Race Research Action Council), and Paul Teske (University of Colorado). The authors would also like to thank Mary Cunningham for her thoughtful review of this paper; Erika Poethig and Chantal Hailey for participating in the advisory group meeting on May 9, 2013; and Graham MacDonald and Pamela Lee for contributing feedback and background research. The What Works Collaborative is a foundation-supported research partnership that conducts timely research and analysis to help inform the implementation of an evidence-based housing and urban policy agenda. The collaborative consists of researchers from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, and the Urban Institute’s Center for Metropolitan Housing and Communities, as well as other experts from practice, policy, and academia. Support for the collaborative comes from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of those funders listed above or of the organizations participating in the What Works Collaborative. All errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. 2 Introduction The United States faces long-standing economic and racial achievement gaps in education (Barton and Coley 2010; Reardon 2012). Over the past two decades, attempts to narrow these gaps have prompted expansions in school choice policies. Open enrollment, school vouchers, and charter school options have all been implemented to create more options for children to attend high-quality schools. For low-income and minority populations liv ing in neighborhoods with weak schools, these policies have been viewed as tools to break the link between residential location and school access. Despite the rapid expansion of these policies, the majority of students still attend schools zoned based on their residence (National Center for Education Statistics 2009). Moreover, a substantial body of research suggests that low-income and minority households do not take advantage of school choice policies in the way policymakers expect and that these policies accordingly do little to reduce school segregation (Briggs 2005; Sohoni and Saporito 2009). As a result, low-income and minority students remain concentrated in low-quality schools (Orfield and Lee 2005; Rothwell 2012). Given the persisting connection between residential location and school attendance for low-income and minority children, housing policy still matters greatly in shaping educational trajectories and outcomes. One housing policy tool with the potential to increase access to high-quality schools is the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, a tenant-based federal rental assistance program that helps families with limited resources afford decent housing in the private market. While the HCV program holds promise for securing better educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, earlier housing mobility demonstrations have suggested that merely giving low-income families the opportunity to move does not guarantee access to improved neighborhoods and schools (Ellen and Horn 2012; McClure 2010). The most rigorously studied housing mobility program, the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (or MTO) demonstration, showed that moving low-income families to lower-poverty neighborhoods does not translate into families accessing and benefitting from improved schools. This paper presents a housing search assistance pilot program aimed at helping voucher-holder households access high-quality, low-poverty schools. The proposed pilot tackles two broad challenges—how to narrow the achievement gap and how to maximize the returns of housing assistance—confronting education and housing policy, respectively. Drawing on lessons learned from earlier housing demonstrations and education research, this paper identifies a set of promising str