Jim Gibson's testimony

QUALITY SCHOOLS, HEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS AND THE FUTURE OF DC

October 6, 2008

Jim Gibson Remarks

• There are several key issues I want to touch on briefly in this short timeframe as topics that will likely figure in our discussion. They are:

o First, an admittedly simplified characterization of the District of Columbia political economy

o Second, highlight some interactions and correlations with race and ethnicity in the workings of our economy

o Third, the interactions of these dynamics in the context of the metropolitan region

o Support for the premise that our current demographic trends represents a context for creative reforms

o Finally, putting on the table the age-old challenge of getting the public school system to work collaboratively with the community and other agencies of government to do what has to be done

• First, the District's economy is starkly stratified. It's composed primarily of:

o On the one hand, high-skill, high-wage jobs concentrated heavily in policy analysis, information management, government administration, and international finance, and

o On the other hand, our economy is also fueled substantially by conventions and meetings, tourism, office support services, health services, and higher education - all of which rely heavily on low-skill, low-wage workers

o Both sets of functions are vital to the workings of the city's economy over the long haul

• Second, the white population of the city comprises overwhelmingly ­although not exclusively - the high-skill, high-wage workers in our resident work force

o While there is a substantial portion of minorities in this upper tier, they reside mostly in the suburbs rather than the city, thus,

o Higher-income neighborhoods in the District tend to be majority white, and house some of the most highly skilled and highly paid professionals in the United States

o Lower-income neighborhoods tend to be majority black and Hispanic and are where most of our lower-skill, lower-wage workers and their families reside

o Neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are virtually exclusively black

o The small percentage of lower-wage white workers in the city tends frequently to make class-based issues appear to be race-based issues

Third, placing the District in the larger context of the region, a number of

critical factors stand out:

o Washington's suburbs are among the richest in the United States, while a number of the inner city's neighborhoods are characterized by high levels of inter-generational poverty

o Contrary to much popular opinion, the city of Washington remains the region's principal job center, having the largest share of jobs ­by a good margin - of any jurisdiction in the region, the majority of which are held by suburbanites

o Uniquely among cities throughout the country, when a person moves out of the District to the suburbs, 100 percent of the taxes paid by that person - even though that person may remain employed in Washington - is lost to the city (as opposed, say, to Atlanta, where when a person moves from the city to the suburbs, a portion of the taxes that person pays to the State of Georgia, goes

to pay the expenses of Atlanta's courts, higher education, the state share of

Medicaid, prisons, highways, etc.; states typically also provide direct cash transfers into the budget of the city – thereby providing for higher wage earners in the region to contribute to the cost of public services needed by the city's higher density of lower income families).

o Ironically - as some of you may realize - Washington's fiscal meltdown in the middle nineties resulted overwhelmingly – Marion Barry's behavior notwithstanding - from the exodus of hundreds of thousands of middle class blacks - and their taxes - from the District mostly to Prince Georges County beginning in the early seventies and running through the middle nineties

o Now, as the region has grown - spurred initially by the exit of population and businesses from the District to the suburbs beginning in the fifties - so have regional traffic congestion and onerous commuting conditions - and, lately, high gas prices

o The central city - once characterized as "the hole in the middle of the suburban donut" - turns out sixty years later to be a highly preferred regional location

o As we've heard, young professionals - mostly without children ­are drawn by our high-end occupational structure, cultural amenities, and excellent mass transit

o And older, now-childless, "empty nesters," riding the enormous multi-decade appreciated value of their suburban homes, have likewise been flocking back to the convenience and amenities of the city

o They've essentially been buying out the living spaces and putting pressure on the rents of the working class and lower-income families who didn't make it to the suburbs in the earlier wave and also spurring a residential building boom in previously underdeveloped parts of the city

o These newcomers bring substantial spendable income, are supporting more cultural activities, restaurants, retail activity, and more personal services jobs

o Importantly, this is also a population that isn't dependent on expensive public services

o Thus, the city's tax base is becoming increasingly stronger

Now, a key proposition of the research we're discussing tonight is whether city policy should seek to retain more of the younger families when they begin to have children by revitalizing our neighborhoods and strengthening our schools

o Actually, one has to assume this would also attract middle class families from the suburbs with income levels above those of residents currently in our lower income neighborhoods

o Presumably, because such families would have higher incomes, that would put additional gentrification pressures on existing working class and lower-income families in an increasing number of neighborhoods

o That is, unless the city could mount highly effective affordable housing strategies that far exceed our current levels of production

o Also, it would seem reasonable to assume that this new crop of families would substantially increase the demand, and the costs, for more public services

Now, given this context, a question which is not clearly addressed in sufficient detail by the research is specific kinds of steps the city must take to develop a stronger base of family strengthening support services and human capital investment in our lower-income residents and neighborhoods - both in the children and the parents - in essence, it does

not sketch the contours of a "two-generation" investment strategy

• Yet, the reality is that the city's economy will continue to need low-skilled workers to park the cars, clean the offices, drive the taxis, prepare and serve food, empty the bedpans, man the hospital kitchens and university cafeterias - and otherwise perform the myriad of services required by the city's tourism, conventions and meetings, and other national capital, cultural, health care and educational functions

o This is not necessarily an adverse situation for the city, since a substantial segment of out population are low-skilled adults with children. They need those jobs just as much as our economy needs them

o The real issue is that we should be committed - as a matter of policy - to the proposition that, inter-generationally, the children of these workers should be prepared for entry into the middle class and provided a chance at professional and higher paying jobs

o We can use our strengthening tax base to mount the kind of serious, creative "two-generation" child and family investment strategy needed to reduce persistent inter-generational poverty

o However, I can't totally say there isn't an implication in the strategy proposed in the study that we perhaps should, instead, devote a significant share of our strengthening tax base to invest, perhaps first, in middle class families with children - including some from the suburbs.

o This could, in my mind, compete with the city's ability to invest in a substantial two-generation approach to strengthening and stabilizing for the long-term lower-income families who already reside here

o Unless we closely examine what it takes to accomplish that and incorporate what we learn into the overall approach promoted by this study, reality suggests that we are likely talking about further pressures to move lower-income families out of the city – more gentrification

o Whatever route we take, we need to be more explicit in seeking to realistically address the implication of this approach for improving the performance of the District's other vital municipal services – the Employment Services Department, and of a number of others

• Finally, if we are to take the premises of the research as seriously as they warrant, we can't put our heads in the sand with regard to the public schools' somewhat lamentable history and culture when it comes to embracing approaches that entail serious, longterm

reciprocity and collaboration with the frameworks of other systems - like community, non-profit, and government services whose missions are to foster comprehensive family strengthening services and community-wide economic, human and social capital investment.

The philosophy of school system leaders has long seemed to be: "Our Children, Our buildings - We don't open up; we don't reach out"

Mark Schneider's comments

Mark Schneider’s Comments on Quality Schools, Healthy Neighborhoods and the future of DC.

There is much to like about this report. What I find particularly important is the way in which the authors are doing two things:

o First they are trying to link together housing and school patterns and develop policies cognizant of the intimate links between these two sectors. Currently, far too often there are housing experts and there are education experts and never the twain shall meet. Bridging this gap is a fundamental contribution. I will return to the risk of this argument later, but the report outlines a bold challenge.

o Second, this report also treats charter schools as “facts on the ground” – recognizing that they are an integral part of the public school system of the District—note that I chose the term “public school system” carefully, because charter schools are public schools and have to be thought of that way. Moreover, charter schools are not going away. So future reports have to take the tone and the stance of this report—what ever is happening in the growing DC charter school sector will have effects on the traditional public schools and DC charter schools have to be thought of as an additional tool in any development strategies the city pursues. Making believe this is not so and treating charter schools as a temporary problem, like some kind of flu, simply doesn’t work. This report deserves considerable credit for treating charter schools as part of the system rather than a problem for the system.

But by training I am an academic. That means I don’t go to panels to heap praise on reports but to examine critically assumptions, arguments, data, conclusions and the like. Not surprisingly, I have comments about several assumptions of the study that I hope will spark discussion.

My comments fall into three broad categories:

1. What is the vision of the city that this report endorses and is it the only one, let alone the right one?
2. what can we reasonably expect from the policy recommendations that are laid out?
3. Can the emphasis on linking schools and communities actually distract us from improving the schools?

Point one: there is an implied assumption is that DC wants and needs more children and more students.

• On page 4, two reasons are given for this:

a .The District of Columbia cannot sustain continuing declines in school enrollment in conjunction with expanding school supply and rising public investment.

• But this is an adjustment problem: an adjustment in attitudes and an adjustment in capital stock. You may need to go through this adjustment to get to a smaller public school sector. So it’s patently clear that expanding school supply in the face of declining enrollment is a sure loser, but why does supply need to continue to increase if demand continues to fall? We can rebalance the system by increasing the number of children or by continuing to reduce the supply in an orderly fashion. Which is the right strategy is a serious question.

b. The report argues that a community’s ability to retain and attract families with children is an indicator of public confidence in the future.

· This is a questionable assumption. There are alternate visions of what a dynamic city in the 21^st Century should look like and how central the role of children is.

o First children are expensive. Alice Rivlin in 2002 produced some rough calculations that adding an average single, non-poor adult resident would increase the District’s revenue, net of the cost of additional services for that added resident, by about $4,300. An additional two-earner couple would bring in almost $13,000 net of added costs. If the city’s population of middle- and upper-income singles and childless couples increased by 50,000, the net annual increase in the District’s revenues over operating expenditures would be in the neighborhood of $300 million. It would be possible both to improve public services and reduce tax rates.

o In contrast, a new family with two moderate-income earners and two children would have net cost to the city’s budget of just over $6,200, because the added expenditures (mostly for schools) would exceed added revenues. This budgetary strain would require increased revenues from other sources.

· Again: Children are expensive not only to parents but to the city as a whole.

There is another vision of urban growth than the one presented in this report. I’ll draw on Richard Florida’s work regarding the “Creative Class”.

Florida defines the creative class as “a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries---from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts.”

About 30 percent of the entire U.S. workforce is in this creative class and their average salary was about twice that of a member of the working-class member or service-class.

Not surprisingly, cities that have large numbers of creative class members are also among the most affluent cities in the nation—and maybe not coincidentally they have low numbers of children.

On page 3 of the report, the authors note that the number of children in DC as a share of total population (20 percent) ranks among the lowest of the 50 largest cities nationwide. Only five other cities rank as low or lower (Boston, Honolulu, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle).

If you go to the Brookings Report that is the source of this data, you will find among the cities with the highest percentage of children are Fresno, El Paso, Las Vegas, and Oklahoma City.

Richard Florida provides a different ranking—what he calls his creativity ranking: Among the cities with the highest rankings: San Francisco—number 1, Boston number 3, Seattle number 5, Washington DC number 8.

Among the cities with the lowest creativity rankings—you got it: Fresno, El Paso, Las Vegas, and Oklahoma City.

The point is not that we don’t want good schools and vibrant neighborhoods—of course we do, and children have a human and civil right to a high quality education. It’s a question of how many children we want in the city and it’s that we need to think much more carefully about envisioning the future of a unique city such as DC and what kind of growth policy we want to pursue.

On page 43, the report takes what seems to me a moralizing tone in support of its vision of more children in the city:

“To some, it might seem acceptable (or even ideal) for DC to become a city largely composed of singles, couples without children, and empty nesters. However, many others believe that cities need families with children to thrive. Families with children tend to be highly motivated and economically successful. Families also bring diversity to cities, use and encourage expansion of public spaces, and help create strong communities.”

But there are lots of ways to encourage public spaces, diversity, economic growth, and strong communities—and many of them aren’t built on expanding the number of children in the city.

Second related point: what should we expect of these policies?

while I believe that a lot the suggestions in the policy brief make sense and may indeed work, I come at this with a heavy dose of skepticism. My professional career pretty much is coterminous with the growth of today’s profession of policy evaluation. Among the leading lights in establishing this field was the late Peter Rossi. His iron law of evaluation as he put it is “the expected value of any policy intervention is 0.” In simple English this means that most government policies we try don’t work.

There are lots of reasons for this low expectation:

People never act the way we want them to. They constantly thwart all our best desires. And government policies are often designed to run counter to fundamental economic and demographic trends that are often so much stronger than any policy tools we have.

Linking this expectation with the demographic future of DC, let me turn to an article in the September 28th edition of the Charlotte Courier Journal. The reporter Warren Smithot wrote about: “The coming depopulation of America's schools”

His motivating question was whether or not the declining school age population found in cities such as Boston, DC, and San Francisco will hit Charlotte despite its location in the South and a whole raft of family friendly policies.

He writes:

Not only could this depopulation of schools happen, it probably will. Nationally, the birthrate has dropped to the point that our current birth rate is barely above what demographers call the "replacement rate." America's population has shown modest growth over the past few decades, but almost all of that growth has been because of longer life spans, not more children. In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of school-aged children in America is expected to fall significantly over the next 10 years, and possibly precipitously over the next 30 years.

And here Smithot highlights the policy rub:

In Charlotte, city leaders are spending more than $400 million on new schools. They received this money by claiming to voters two years ago during a bond campaign that Charlotte's school population will grow by 50,000 over the next decade. However, in three of the last four years, enrollment growth has been significantly less than projections. Now, Charlotte, a growing city in the "New South," has new and renovated schools that are barely half-full.

In short, Charlotte’s policy to build new schools to attract and retain families is running up squarely against a fundamental demographic trend compounded by the growth of the creative class who are flocking to the queen city. Would you bet on demography or government policy?

My bet is that demography and economics will win over policy. Moving from Charlotte to DC, my bet is that we should continue to expect a shrinking population of children in DC and that we should plan for closing more schools in an orderly fashion, taking into account the reality of a vibrant charter school movement.

Third major point there is a fundamental vision in this report linking of schools and communities here that is both tantalizing and scary.

Tantalizing because the theory of action underlying this work is exciting and because to the extent it is correct, we can envision a synergy between schools, parent, children and the community writ large that can solve many problems at the same time. We can envision a situation where social capital is built in the schools and generalizes outward and we can envision the reverse situation where social capital and human capital in neighbors translate into better and more productive schools.

However, is this putting too much a burden on schools?

For example, in my work on charter schools in DC, I found that parents in charter schools were much more likely to talk to their child’s teachers and principal and other parents than similar parents in traditional public schools, and charter school parents were more likely to trust school officials to do the right thing for their children, but none of this social capital translated into behavior or attitudes in the community at large. In short, building the bridge between school and community is a hard task.

There’s also the question of how does this bridge work in a city where charter schools are becoming more and more the norm. Charter schools break the community/school link by destroying catchment zones. There is a cost here—in the suburban community where my kids went to school, talking to other parents while waiting for the school bus was an important part of life, but there was only one school in the district and it was a good one. Breaking up this linkage may be a sad thing to do but this is one of the costs of allowing parents to choose their children’s schools from a larger set of schools beyond the neighborhood.

Also, how would stronger community/school linkages work in some of the most effective schools we know of, where schools create alternative communities. I’m thinking of David Whitmore’s recent book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, which has the unfortunate subtitle Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. This book presents a profile of six schools that have beat the odds and there are some common characteristics. But one of the shared characteristics is the extent to which they have built strong communities within the school.

This leads to a fundamental question: What is the appropriate balance between focusing on building a strong within school community versus trying to build both a community in the school and an external community at the same time. If we can’t do both, which one is more important?

Perhaps we should work as hard as we know how to identify what works in schools and rather than spreading our energies and efforts even further by looking at school community links where we probably have an even weaker knowledge base about what works and for whom.

I admit that I, like many others, am struggling with how this balance might work, but this report should get credit for raising the issue, but this is a question that will require lots of thought and work and, yes, experiments, to see how best to build the bridges between quality schools and healthy communities.

Vision for DC's Future: Thoughts from the release event

Thanks to all who attended last night's public release of the Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods report. We had representation from a broad range of communities - teachers, education researchers and advocates, housing researchers and advocates, DC government folks, and others. Several interesting questions were raised that I'd like to share here:

1. What is the "right" vision for the future of DC? Do we want to become a more family-friendly city? What would be the benefits or the downsides to policy that encouraged families with children to remain or move to the District?

2. Should charter schools be encouraged not to locate near high-performing schools, but instead in neighborhoods that currently lack high-performing schools? How could this be accomplished, given that charters often locate where space is available on the private market?

3. How can we expect families to stay in the city when many housing units (especially those that are affordable) are small? Maybe where births are rising, the city should concentrate more family-friendly (larger) housing units.

4. When we talk about families making school and housing choices, how many of these choices are by force, because of economic circumstances? How can everybody benefit from the District's prosperity, and who is making the decisions about who is "we"?

5. What can the studies showing links between better schools, better neighborhoods, and lower crime tell us about efforts for greater policy coordination? Are there examples in other cities where this work is being successfully done?

I will post the panelists' remarks separately.

Release Event - October 6

Tonight at Oyster Bilingual School, the Study Team will present key findings and recommendations from its 18-month long study, Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods. A panel of national experts will respond to the study, address how the District can become a model for the nation by focusing on the interconnections among quality schools, affordable housing, and healthy neighborhoods. We hope this event can serve as the beginning of a public discussion about what kind of city we want the District to be.