CALLIE CROSSLEY, host:

I'm Callie Crossley, sitting in for Michel Martin. You are listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

Coming up: a shakeup in the South African health ministry leads to questions about that nation's AIDS policies. That's later in the program.

But first, some surprising research about how neighborhoods affect academic achievement. A new study suggests that poor children may not improve performance in school just by moving to a more prosperous community. The research followed families involved in a program called Moving to Opportunity from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The children of these families, on average, showed no significant academic improvement after moving from poor to middle-class neighborhoods.

Joining us to discuss the findings is Xavier de Souza Briggs. He's an associate professor of Sociology and Urban Planning at MIT. Also with us, Stefanie DeLuca. She's a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who's written about the Moving to Opportunity program in Baltimore.

Welcome to you both.

Dr. STEFANIE DeLUCA (Sociologist, Johns Hopkins University): Hello.

Professor XAVIER DE SOUZA BRIGGS (Associate Professor, Sociology and Urban Planning, MIT): Thanks, Callie.

CROSSLEY: Let's begin with you Stefanie DeLuca. Can you explain the Moving to Opportunity program?

Dr. DeLUCA: The Moving to Opportunity program was in part motivated by some research carried out in Chicago in the late 1980s, early 1990s that showed that families who had moved from public housing projects into better neighborhoods in the outlying Chicago suburbs had significantly better outcomes in terms of children experiencing better schools. The results were found to be very compelling, and the architects of the Moving to Opportunity program decided to carry out a full-blown social experiment with a group that received the treatment and a group that received vouchers but didn't have to move to low-poverty neighborhoods.

CROSSLEY: What did you find from your research?

Dr. DeLUCA: When interviewing families, I found that there were number of families who did benefit in terms of their children being able to go to better schools, but I also found that parent's approached schooling choice decisions in ways that were unexpected. Often, the choice of where to send a child to school is not the most important thing on a family's agenda at any given time. Often, there were other concerns that had to be juggled like drug addiction, health issues, constant shuffling of family members and just trying to make ends meet.

CROSSLEY: Let me break out part of that. So as a middle-class family might look at an area and go for the school, the best school for their kids, poor families had other issues, you're saying to us.

Dr. DeLUCA: That's absolutely right. The subway and, you know, easy access to buses is very important, and also being close to other family members who could take care of children while mom is working.

CROSSLEY: Now not withstanding finding that out, did these - the overarching bottom line of this surprise you?

Dr. DeLUCA: I think it surprised a lot of us based on, you know, the theory from other research that would suggest that families moving from these very dangerous high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty neighborhoods, we expected to see a lot of good things happen, and you know, sort of assumed by osmosis that this would happen. So on the one hand, we were certainly surprised and disappointed because a number of other papers in the past that shown some kind of association between better neighborhoods and, you know, better individual outcomes, including work that I've conducted in the past. On the other hand, the program was a housing-only intervention. There were no, you know, attempts to give parents information about better schools.

CROSSLEY: Let me turn to you, Xavier de Souza Briggs. These findings seem to contradict commonly held beliefs about bad neighborhoods holding back kids. And so we're curious. What could account for this?

Prof. BRIGGS: I'll be honest, Callie, I don't find the move surprising at all, and the widely held beliefs are not very informed, this sort of folklore about how neighborhoods work. You got to keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, it's a myth that Moving to Opportunity got families to solidly middle-class neighborhoods. For the most part, that didn't happen, even at the outset.

CROSSLEY: What kind of neighborhoods did they go to?

Prof. BRIGGS: Well, they moved from extremely poor, very high crime, very distressed public housing neighborhoods, the areas that were exploding with violence in the early 1990s because of the crack epidemic - among other things - to somewhat poor, much safer neighborhoods. And like hundreds of thousands of other families, especially low-income families, the families in this program in many cases moved to the outer parts of cities or the inner, older suburbs -places that in many cases now have very middling school districts.

They're struggling with many city-like problems - gangs, school failure, school dropout. You add to that the choice factor that Stefanie talked about, the way the families thought about schooling, the fact that their own experiences and those of their friends and relatives - of people they turn to for advice about choosing a school - didn't make enrichment, you know, the sort of top of the list. If anything, it was security, consistent with how they chose their housing. They tried to keep their kids away from schools known for having gangs and that kind of thing. I think most parents would say that's really smart, but that is not going to get you school achievement.

CROSSLEY: So based on the kind of concerns that Stefanie has outlined and that you've just underscored, can a move like this in fact make a poor family feel more isolated, and could that affect school achievement?

Prof. BRIGGS: Well, we did interviews also with families and hung out with young people quite a bit in Boston, New York and LA, and there were some instances of that, but not too much. Most of these families continue to socialize with relatives and friends that they had left behind in the inner city. Their social worlds were still anchored there to a great degree. Others wanted to get away, frankly, from some of the people in their lives, including very needy relatives, people they were connected to that they thought were risky and needy that they wanted to get their kids away from. So you really had different kinds of choices that families made, and it was certainly not the general case that families felt isolated in these new communities.

CROSSLEY: You're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Callie Crossley, in for Michel Martin.

We're talking about how neighborhoods impact the school performance of poor kids. I am joined by Xavier de Souza Briggs of MIT and Stefanie DeLuca of Johns Hopkins University. Stefanie, did these students encounter new troubles in their new schools?

Dr. DeLUCA: Well, it seems that some of the young people who moved to better schooling environments is measured perhaps by smaller classrooms and higher academic standards did experience some trouble understanding the new standards. And one of the mothers in one of my interviews talks about how it took her a while, you know, while she was frustrated, you know, to understand that, you know, that there were higher standards to get the same grades in the city that he was, you know, that he wants you to get in the suburbs. You know, and then remember, a lot of these children remained in the same kind of school districts that they were in when they first, you know, signed up for the program. And so similar troubles continued to develop.

CROSSLEY: Given what we know, Xavier, about new troubles, what kind of support would a poor student who made a move to a middle-class school need?

Prof. BRIGGS: Well, certainly, you could put in place mentoring programs, additional counseling. By the way, the intervention could have from the beginning, as Stefanie says, have been broader than housing only. One could have had some housing counseling, a bit on schools and the school choices and how to choose the best school for your child. This is a tricky problem, though, when a kid goes through a really big transition.

We're seeing two things here. On one hand, many of these kids did not make a very dramatic transition in terms of school - maybe not dramatic enough. On the other hand, Stefanie's talking about some kids that had trouble. And she, a few minutes ago, told you the history of this and how it was inspired by a court order desegregation program in Chicago. In that instance - and that program was at a peak in the 1980s, the kids went through extremely dramatic transitions, many of them going from inner city Chicago public housing or neighborhoods nearby out to solidly middle-class - neighborhoods that deserve that label -solidly middle-class school districts, in some cases 30 miles from inner city Chicago.

And those kids described to researchers how they faced profoundly different standards. And they had been on the honor roll in some cases in inner city Chicago, and now they found themselves achieving below grade level. But you know what? They were more likely to finish high school than go on to college at the end of the day.

CROSSLEY: Which leaves me to ask - busing was one attempt to move minority kids into schools with better resources. Did that worked and are there bear results when you only move the children to schools as oppose to moving to the whole families to better neighborhoods?

Prof. DE SOUZA: I'll give you my take. I'd be curious to know what Stefanie thinks. I mean, the best available evidence is that careful efforts to bus kids from inner city environments out to truly high-performing school districts on average have dramatically positive effects, but there isn't the political will to sustain those programs. The logistics of them can be a nightmare. Some kids are on the bus for hours and hours. There are voluntary programs in place in different parts of the country. But really, there's been a rolling back and a retrenchment against bussing for many, many years, and it was not popular in some corridors to begin with.

Over the long haul, housing solutions look like better solutions. For most families in America, there isn't a conscious choice of a school. There's a choice of the community, and the school comes in the package. But to get there, we'll need to change the way we run affordable housing programs, the way we develop communities, the way we think about what it means to have a competitive and inclusive suburb. And we're not there yet.

CROSSLEY: Stefanie, what do you think?

Dr. DELUCA: You know, I agree with everything that Xav just said, and it's important to recognize, in terms of the court cases that have come down over the decades, that housing policy issues and education policy issues, concerns and the effects of both housing education on family and children have not been linked. The early cases - the Brown case in the '50s, for example, was focused primarily on education, didn't consider housing. And a lot of the legal scholars note that concerning where people want to live is too tricky for the courts to handle. And so a lot of the most important cases in desegregation and the educational (unintelligible) did not consider housing. And I think that that kind of connection - that was an opportunity missed, and in many ways paralyzed the ability for some of the desegregation legislation to have a full impact.

CROSSLEY: Xavier, if - as the new study suggests, moving kids who are at risk does not raise their test scores, moving them to a more prosperous neighborhood. What will work?

Prof. DE SOUZA: There's a long list of ways through better teacher collaboration, smaller class sizes, different interactions with kids, different expectations, after school programs. But I think if we want to ask the question how do you expand the geography of opportunity for people so that they can live in communities that are safer, where the schools are better, where they have better job prospects, better health prospects and so on? And there is an important connection between housing and schools, but we would need to use our housing tools to get families to the kinds of communities that have really strong schools and then help their kids succeed there.

CROSSLEY: Xavier de Souza Briggs is a professor of sociology and urban planning at MIT. He joined us from MIT Video Production and Digital Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stefanie DeLuca is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. She joined us here in our studios in Washington.

Thank you both.

Dr. DeLUCA: Thank you, Callie.

Prof. DE SOUZA: Thank you.

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