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Linking Public Housing Revitalization to Neighborhood School Improvement

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Linking Public Housing Revitalization to Neighborhood School Improvement Linking Public Housing Revitalization to Neighborhood School Improvement Prepared for: The Annie E. Casey Foundation Martin D. Abravanel Robin E. Smith Elizabeth C. Cove The Urban Institute Washington, DC June 2006 The views expressed in this monograph are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. For more information about the Urban Institute, visit http://www.urban.org. Acknowledgments We are indebted to the late Art Naperstek—who was excited about the potential for better integrating community building, public housing revitalization and school improvement, and wanted to learn more. We also appreciate the support and advice offered by Tom Kingsley and Margery Turner of the Urban Institute at various points in this research, the research assistance provided by Aidan Ali-Sullivan, and the assistance of those with whom we met in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Tacoma, Tucson, and Washington, D.C. Finally, we are grateful to Cindy Guy and her colleagues at the Annie E. Casey Foundation for their interest in and support of this exploratory study of the linkage between public housing revitalization and neighborhood school improvement. The cover photograph in the upper left corner is of Atlanta’s Centennial Place, from www.atlantahousing.org/portfolio/index.cfm?Fuseaction=signature; the photograph to the right is of Atlanta’s Centennial Place Elementary School, from www.flickr.com/photos/karsh/122096573/. The inside page photographs, from top left to right, are: Milwaukee’s Parklawn, from www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/manuf_res/Parklawn.pdf; Milwaukee’s Central City Cyberschool, from www.midwestgreatlakes.cefpi.org/2006conference/Parklawn.pdf; Tacoma’s Salishan, from www.lorig.com/d_salishan.htm; Tacoma’s Lister School, from www.tacoma.k12.wa.us/schools/es/lister/; Tucson’s Posadas Sentinel, from www.housingresearch.org/hrf/HRF_News.nsf/982edc9f376438cd852569d0000 d00b7/b5aba346398ee53385256a16007aac98?OpenDocument; and Tucson’s Drachman School, from edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/drachman/Drachman%20Info/ School%20Photos.htm. Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………….….…1 Obstacles and Disincentives to Collaboration……………………………………..…1 Recent Encouragements to Collaboration…………………………………….….…..3 Currently Prevailing Notions of Public Housing-School Collaboration………..……4 Methodology for Exploring Public Housing-Schools Linkages……………………..7 Different Approaches to Linking Public Housing Redevelopment to School Improvement………………………………………………………………………....11 1. Preconditions………………………………………………………………...11 2. Collaboration……...…………………………………………………………15 3. Implementation………………………………………………………………21 4. Accomplishment and follow-on……………………………………………..30 Summary and Implications…………………………………………………………..40 References..…………………………………………………………………………..44 Introduction are at the flat bottom of the state. Even in the Appalachian areas, these schools are terrible So strong is the conviction of performers and we have a very some policymakers and practitioners that high rate of truancy. So people are effective public housing revitalization not being provided an opportunity to pursue the American dream.2 requires concomitant school improvement that in 2005 Senator Likewise, Richard Barron of the St. Barbara Mikulski introduced legislation Louis-based private development firm requiring all recipients of federal HOPE McCormack Barron Salazar emphasizes VI funds to establish, “a comprehensive that when families consider housing education reform and achievement options, their first consideration is strategy for transforming neighborhood affordability and their second is schools that serve . revitalized HOPE schools.3 He and his firm, accordingly, 1 VI sites into high-performing schools.” expend considerable effort finding ways Expecting such strategies to be to improve the schools that serve the developed through partnerships between revitalized public housing and other public housing agencies and local school mixed-income developments in which systems, Senator Mikulski is not alone in they are invested. believing this type of collaboration to be fundamental. Renée Glover, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Obstacles and Disincentives Housing Authority, testified before to Collaboration Congress that linkage between Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) and schools Linking school improvement is essential to promoting opportunity for efforts to public housing and associated public housing residents. neighborhood revitalization projects In all of the public housing seems so logical that, on first communities, there is a captive consideration, it may not be entirely elementary school. Those schools evident why the two would ever be unconnected. On reflection, however, it 1 Senate Bill S. 1513, To Reauthorize the HOPE VI Program for Revitalization of Severely 2 Distressed Public Housing, July 27, 2005. “Strengthening and Rejuvenating Our Nation’s Communities: The HOPE VI Program,” Hearing HOPE VI provides competitive federal grants to local agencies to support the transformation of before the Subcommittee on Housing and severely distressed public housing, encouraging Community Opportunity of the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of the agencies to seek new partnerships with private entities to create mixed-finance and Representatives, April 29, 2003. mixed-income affordable housing (Section 24 of 3 Phillipa Strum (ed.), Dealing with Race: The the U.S. Housing Act of 1937 (42 U.S.C. 1437v). Quest for Regional Cooperation, 2005, p. 35. 1 is clear there have been and are many “(s)uccessful collaborative alliances obstacles standing in the way of depend on a host of factors, many of collaboration between local housing which the partners cannot directly agencies and school systems. Proscio control,” including institutional (2004) describes an “unnatural disincentives, historical and ideological separation” between the community barriers, power disparities among development and school arenas that stakeholders, technical complexity, and dates back to the early 1960s. political and institutional norms. Likewise, Eisenberg (1995) points to The gulf between the two fields only differences in professional training and widened with the mounting alarm background, fear of loss of autonomy, over physical disintegration in the inner cities throughout the 1960s and and the inefficiency of cross- ’70s. The specter of dilapidated professional dialogue as having hindered neighborhoods and derelict buildings interorganizational cooperation, helping drew more and more federal attention to explain why school-community toward construction and renovation, housing assistance and financing, and partnerships have tended to fail over the urban infrastructure. Educators, long run. meanwhile, were focusing ever more narrowly on what happened inside With respect to the linkage of schools, classrooms and school systems, with little reference to other school improvement efforts to public work underway in the streets beyond. housing revitalization, there is both the To achieve social equity, courts problem that many school systems have increasingly mandated busing of children away from their not welcomed collaboration with others neighborhoods, further deepening the (Moore, 2001) as well as the fact that divorce between where children lived public housing authorities have often and where they learned. It was as if the future of neighborhoods had been isolated within, and disconnected somehow become all but unrelated to from, the communities in which they the future of the children living in operate. Despite the occasional them. programmatic demonstrations or special Indeed, informed observers of initiatives that compelled local housing school-community connections see agencies to connect with other numerous, significant barriers to community entities, PHAs have collaborative efforts between school generally been “other-directed”—taking systems and community-based their guidance and cues from the federal organizations. Despite the potential for Department of Housing and Urban synergistic benefits that could emerge Development (HUD), not the local from such interorganizational community. Although PHAs own and partnerships, Gray (1995) notes that manage their own developments, public housing policies and operations are 2 governed by federal rules, which are • A growing realization that there are often divorced from market forces and socially adverse and politically unacceptable consequences to local considerations. In the past, PHAs perpetuating neighborhoods with high have generally had little or no incentive concentrations of poverty and social to relate to, or collaborate with, other pathology; local entities—either public or private, • An increased recognition that there are which is why political and community shrinking resources with which to deal with such conditions (Eisenberg 1995); stakeholders often see public housing as and “federal property” governed by federal • A greater appreciation of the possibility rules, not a community asset or resource for achieving enhanced solutions to these responsive to local interests. problems through collaborative ventures—solutions that are otherwise infeasible for any single organization or The consequence has been that sector to solve through independent collaboration between school systems action (Gray 1995). and public housing agencies, even where both serve the same clientele and To a large extent, the federal geography and could benefit from each HOPE VI program, which supports the
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