Comments : Urban Poverty on Educational Outcomes Jeffrey Kling

نویسنده

  • Jeffrey Kling
چکیده

Among the factors influencing the learning and developmental processes that lead to educational achievement, most scientists believe that the social environment plays a significant role. The importance of residential location in affecting children's education, however, is subject on which there is conflicting evidence and little agreement. Given the increase in the spatial concentration of poverty, however, this question has taken on increasing urgency. Study of this issue has been hampered for at least two main reasons. First, the range of variation in residential location is often limited among otherwise similar children. Second, the very fact that observably similar children (for example, same age and demographics) are living in different locations may reflect choices made by their families which are indicative of factors unobserved by an analyst. It is difficult to credibly identifying the importance of residential location as distinct from those unobserved factors. The research design in this paper utilizes a randomized demonstration program known as Moving To Opportunity (MTO), to address both of these issues. Section 8 rental vouchers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were provided by lottery to public housing residents. Some vouchers were valid only in low poverty neighborhoods and were bundled with counseling services (the Experimental group), while others could be used to move to any location (the Section 8 Comparison group). Those who did not receive a voucher (the Control group) retained their eligibility to continue to live in their original public housing project unit. The consequences of this design for research are that similar groups of families are living in vastly different neighborhoods, and that the randomization implies that, on average, the groups offered and not offered the vouchers through the lottery will be similar in both observable and unobservable characteristics. This is a tremendous advantage for these authors in having potentially convincing results that could identify the impacts of residential location on educational outcomes.

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تاریخ انتشار 2004