A recent Education Next article highlighted research that looked at the NYC voucher program. The study asked the question,“How can we improve academic achievement and college attainment for disadvantaged students?” assuming the goal of the voucher program was to get more kids to college.
For those purely interested in college attainment, this is a useful research question and goal. But reality is, although college attainment is one measure of quality of life outcomes, those who designed the voucher program likely had much bigger, broader goals in mind than college attainment. For those interested in better life outcomes and economic mobility, there are more measures of success than college attainment.
Take, for example, the research of Raj Chetty, a professor of Economics at Harvard University. Although he is not specifically studying the use of vouchers, he is interested in the upward mobility based on where children grow up,
Moving within one’s metro area from a below-average to an above-average neighborhood in terms of upward mobility would increase the lifetime earnings of a child growing up in a low-income family by $200,000. Children who grow up in better areas are also less likely to be incarcerated and are less likely to have teen births.
In other words, changing the lives of disadvantaged children means considering things like teen birth, incarceration rates, lifetime earnings, etc. Quality of life goals are much broader than college degree attainment. And based on these measures, a child’s future is significantly impacted by where he or she lives and the education opportunities available in that neighborhood.
Of course, for poor families, where one lives affects where one is assigned to school. In fact, some policy-makers have tried to move high-poverty families out of poor neighborhoods and poor schools, but, as you can imagine, it is nearly impossible to move all poor children out of poor places.
Instead, other research asserts that we can change the level of social capital in a neighborhood by freeing the neighborhood from the control of the school assignment. It is the system of school assignment that creates the social isolation for those in high poverty neighborhoods with weaker school systems.
By breaking the connection between high poverty neighborhoods and weak schools, poverty becomes less concentrated and raises the future prospects of everyone living in truly disadvantaged conditions. Freeing neighborhoods from bad schools broadens the social networks of families in those communities as others move back. And changing people's social circles changes their social capital.
In fact, when the Education Next article described the “truly disadvantaged,” it cited research where the problem with the poorest neighborhoods was social isolation. From the Education Next piece,
In a classic study, William Julius Wilson emphasized the “social isolation” of deeply impoverished, racially segregated neighborhoods, where quality schools, suitable marriage partners, and “exposure to informal mainstream social networks and conventional role models” are in short supply.
But then, instead of measuring whether there was an economic impact or a shift in social capital, the article only measures the “success” of school vouchers by education attainment. All other measures that could quantify economic impact in the community are left out.
Again, the question circles back to the purpose and goal of someone implementing school vouchers. Education researchers are too often only focusing on education-related outcomes. But those studying economic impact on families and communities think more about impacting the larger problems outside the classroom such as financial segregation and lack of opportunity for mobility.
By giving low-income communities access to high-quality education, researchers like myself are more interested in families' access to better education and the ways more education options improve neighborhoods overall rather than only measuring educational attainment. As put by Raj Chetty, “Ultimately, we must make investments to make all communities areas of opportunity.” There are other ways in life to measure success in life beyond college attainment. By improving neighborhoods together, we are improving lives.