Reply to Failing Schools Almost Impossible to "Turnaround"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"DC is a place with fantastic job opportunities, there for the taking..."

Agreed, but most of DC's (and by that I assume you mean the region) job opportunities are in the burbs. That's where the majority of the region's poor should be living.

Instead we pen them up in a handful of neighborhoods in the center city and wonder why they don't act like suburban middle-class. As regional poverty continues to "suburbanize" we're going to see better and better outcomes for the regions poor. We'll also see better-funded (since they'll be a suburban voting-block) and more effective programs (since there will be less concentration) to help them.[/quote]

Who's penning anyone up?  I don't see concertina wire and guard towers to keep anyone in those neighborhoods against their will.  If it were me growing up in those neighborhoods, I'd be doing anything and everything to get myself OUT of those neighborhoods and into a more livable, workable and affordable circumstance - and there are plenty of more livable, workable and affordable places to be.  Having grown up poor and having lived in some pretty bad neighborhoods, I speak from experience.[/quote]

If you don't understand the economic and social factors that keep poor people (and their children) in bad neighborhoods, and how that was historically shaped, I'm not sure I can help you.

There's a reason poor folks talk about "making it out" of the ghetto. And why there's been a massive outflow of middle-class African Americans from the city.  It started with the Fair Housing Act of 68 which finally made overt housing discrimination illegal, but that emigration continues to this day. When poor people move into the middle-class the move to the suburbs; when they don't, they don't. It's pretty much the economic success story of the last half-century.

As you say, there are plenty more livable, workable, and affordable places to be. DC's housing policy should be to allow it's poor citizens to move where they would like, and where they have the best shot of successfully moving out of poverty. That place is in suburban housing, subsidized by generous housing vouchers.

Anyone who doesn't understand this dynamic is trying very hard not to do so.[/quote]

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