St. Louis’ Schools Need Middle-Class Students

A couple of days ago I did a post about government’s role in shaping the suburbs through federal lending policies, including an excerpt from the excellent book, Cities Without Suburbs, by David Rusk. Today I bring you more from Rusk, this time on education:

In 1966, sociologist James Coleman released his path-breaking study, Equality of Educational Opportunity. Sponsored by the then-U.S. Office of Education, the Coleman Report concluded that the socioeconomic characteristics of a child and of the child’s classmates (measured principally by family income and parental education) were the overwhelming factors that accounted for academic success. Nothing else – expenditures per pupil, pupil-teacher ratios, teacher experience, instructional materials, age of school buildings, etc. – came close.

“The educational resources provided by a child’s fellow students,” Coleman summarized, “are more important for his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board.” So important are fellow students, the report found, that “the social composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any school factor.”

In the four decades since, nothing has changed. There has been no more consistent finding of educational researchers – and no research finding more consistently ignored by most politicians and many educators. They will not challenge the underlying racial and class structure of American society.

I have conducted a dozen such studies myself, charting the dominant impact of socioeconomic status on school results. The most recent is my study of all elementary schools in Madison-Dane County, Wisconsin. The study finds that

• Pupil socioeconomic status accounts for 64 percent to 77 percent of the school-by-school variation in standardized test results and that
  
• Poor children’s test results improve dramatically when surrounded by middle-class classmates. Move a poor child from a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are also poor to a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are middle class would raise the chance of that child’s scoring at a proficient or advanced levels by 30 to 48 percentage points – an enormous improvement.

In other words, where a child lives largely shapes the child’s educational opportunities – not in terms of how much money is being spent per pupil but who the child’s classmates are. Housing policy is school policy.

This is not really earth shattering news but among all the discussions about the St. Louis Public Schools — the performance of the long list of recent Superintendents, divisions on the school board, low test scores, and calls by Mayor Fracis Slay and others for state takeover of the system the idea of the home-life envinronment for the bulk of the school kids has been lost. This is not to say the kids have a bad or abusive home life but one in which perhaps their parents are poorly educated themselves and are working many hours to provide for their family.

The basic argument is this — the St. Louis Public Schools will continue to under-perform regardless of who is in charge as long as the social issues of concentrated poverty, lack of nearby jobs and poor housing remain unchanged. Ballpark Village is not going to change this situation in the neighborhoods. In the past I’ve said something to the effect of we don’t need school age kids — they are a financial drain anyway. Well, I was wrong. We do need kids — lots of middle-class kids.

But how is that possible? Parents are not going to move to the city until the schools improve and the schools are not going to improve until we get more kids. A costly busing system is one avenue but I don’t think that is a good long-term solution. The answer? Consolidation! No, not a city-county merger of municipalities but of school districts.

Between the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County we have 25 school districts. In many less fractured regions of the country, that same area would have 1-3 districts. Of course, large districts can have their issues as well but that is more about leadership. So what to do? Well, I’d probably combine all the small districts that are fully within the I-270 loop (see map of districts) — this includes St. Louis, Riverview Gardens, Jennings, Normandy, Ritenour, University City, Clayton, Ladue, Brentwood, Maplewood-Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, Affton, Bayless, and Hancock Place. A number of districts are mostly within the I-270 loop and could be included as well — Ferguson-Florissant, Pattonville, Kirkwood, Lindbergh and perhaps Mehlville.
Could this happen voluntarily? Probably not, state action would be needed. But, I would argue this is necessary to help the region — the St. Louis Public Schools are acting as a drain on the regions growth but the solution, more middle-class students, is outside the grasp of the St. Louis School Board and the administration. And yes, as long as poor folks are concentrated in the city and older inner-ring suburbs like Wellston we will need some busing to move people around. But as a single district this would be easier to accomplish — less of the “us” vs. “them.”

Another factor is if we had a single school district for the city and most of the county we could eliminate the “I won’t live in the city because of the schools” claims. Of course, some might argue this would drive folks to Illinois, St. Charles County or Jefferson County even faster but I’m not so sure. After the initial shock of it all I think it might go pretty well and then parents would not see the city limits sign as a big barrier. A strong city is good for the region and especially good for St. Louis County, which continues to lose population to surrounding areas. Such a school system consolidation could help both the city and county. Discuss.

St. Louis Magazine’s “50 Power Players” Online

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about St. Louis Magazine’s ’50 Most Powerful in 2006′ list in their December 2006 issue, with me rounding out the list at #50. If you’ve still not picked up a copy you can conveniently read the entire list online, just click here. However, if you want to see the nice pic of me on my scooter on a closed Washington Ave (thank you McGowan’s & St. Louis Cardinals) you will need to purchase the print edition.  From the intro to the piece:

“You think it’s easy to rank this city’s heavy hitters? Try it. Everyone knew who carried the biggest stick back during the reign of Civic Progress, but in these days of fragmented power, it’s a bit harder to separate influence peddlers from petty insiders”

Some of us were also asked to name five people we thought were powerful and influential in St. Louis. See who Jeff Smith, Joe Edwards, The Gills, Peter Raven, myself and others listed as powerful in St. Louis, here.

So, check out the full list and use the comments section below to add people that you think are missing but should be included, perhaps to name those that you don’t think belong on the list or even suggest a different order.

Stop Signs Best Symbol of Machine Politics

A big part of machine politics is “constituent service” — giving the people the little things while ignoring the major societal problems. One example is what it takes to get a stop sign installed, or removed, in the City of St. Louis. A petition by residents to the Streets Department? Nope. How about a professional traffic study? Wrong again. Convincing your aldermen to pass a bill through the entire Board of Aldermen? Bingo! Latest example, Ald. Gregali introduced Board Bill #306 on Friday to remove a school stop sign on Bancroft.

Yes, the simple task of determining suitable locations for stop signs is not something we can leave to our presumably professional city staff. No sir, this takes our fully elected legislature and the mayor’s signature — for a single f-ing stop sign! Do we really think that in 1950, at St. Louis’ population peak, the aldermen had time to deal with such trivial matters? But, over the decades as you lose nearly sixty percent of your population you have to invent ways to remain relevant.

Perhaps the number of aldermanic seats needs to be tied to population? A 60% reduction in the number of Aldermen would put us at 11 (11.2), not 28. At each census, if the population grows enough, another seat would be added. In increase to 364,000+/- would bump the number to 12.  When we get to roughly 394,000 another seat would be added, and so on.

If you wonder why your alderman is too busy to return your email or communicate via a blog-like website it is because they are serving their constituents — one stop sign at a time.

St. Louis Board of Elections, the Good and the Not-So Good

In the two recent elections the St. Louis Board of Elections has done an outstanding job of holding relatively smooth elections with speedy results.  Since this has not always been the case, they deserve some kudos.

But as one of many people curious about who has and has not filed for upcoming seats it is highly frustrating that the only way to know what is happening is to keep checking sites like the Post’s Political Fix, PubDef or ACC.   The sad part is, the old site for the election board did show who had filed!

“What is the big deal?”, you ask.  Well, to those that are perhaps considering running between now and the last day of filing (January 5th) this might be helpful.  After all, you’d think the election board would be in the business of making sure elections are open, not just the insiders.

And what about those two school board positions coming up in April?  Not a mention on their website.  Filing opens in a week on the 12th but their December calendar is completely blank.  The filing for the two school board seats close on the 16th of January, 2007.  Of course, if the state of Missouri takes over the schools this may be a moot point.  Do they know something we don’t?

The St. Louis Board of Election(s) can be found at stlelections.com.

Rusk: Feds Institutionalized Discrimination

Over the years I’ve read various books that talk about the federal government’s role in the suburbanization of America, most are overly technical explanations or just exceptionally lengthy. But, David Rusk in this third edition of , does an excellent job summarizing the issue:

“For Whites Only” was the sign that the federal government hung out as America’s suburbs exploded with millions of new families in the postwar decades. The federal government did not create discrimination in America’s housing markets, but it institutionalized it on an unprecedented scale.(1)

In 1933, as millions of owners were losing their homes during the Great Depression, the New Deal created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). To help struggling families meet mortgage payments, HOLC offer low-interest, long-term mortgage loans. HOLC developed a ratings system to evaluate the risks associated the loans made to specific urban neighborhoods. HOLC designated four categories of neighborhood risk; on its “residential security maps” the highest risk areas were colored red. Black neighborhoods were always coded red and were “red-lined”; even those with small black percentages were usually rated as “hazardous” and residents were denied loans.

HOLC’s loan program was small, but the impact of its discriminatory practices was enormous. During the 1930s and 1940s, HOLC residential security maps were widely used by private banks for their own loan practices. When the Federal Housing Administration (1937) and the Veterans Administration (1944) were founded, they embraced HOLC’s underwriting practices. The 1939 FHA Underwriting Manual, for example, stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that the properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”

FHA and VA largely financed the rapid suburbanization of the United States after World War II. The federal government’s regulations favored construction of single-family homes but discouraged the building of multifamily apartments. As a result, the vast majority of FHA and VA mortgages went to new, white, middle-class suburban neighborhoods, and very few were awarded to black neighborhoods in central cities. Historian Kenneth Jackson found that from 1934 to 1960 suburban St. Louis County received six times as much FHA mortgage money per capita as did the city of St. Louis. Per capita FHA lending in suburban Long Island was eleven times greater than in Brooklyn and sixty times greater than in the Bronx.

Such government practices died hard. As late as 1950, FHA was still encouraging the use of restrictive racial covenants two years after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled them unconstitutional. FHA’s red-lining continued overtly until the mid-1960s, when Robert Weaver became the first African American HUD secretary. The weak Civil Rights Act of 1968 finally outlawed housing discrimination. However, the full extent of discrimination in mortgage lending was only revealed after passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975), and significant mortgage funds began to flow back into inner-city neighborhoods only with vigorous enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act (1977).

Extreme segregation of America’s housing markets was not the result of some natural process of self-regulation. For decades it was force-fed by discriminatory rules of the game from federal, state, and local governments.

Rusk has one misstatement above that should be noted. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a St. Louis case, Shelley vs. Kraemer, that it was unconstitutional for the government to enforce racially restrictive covenants. The covenants themselves as private agreements, however, were not ruled unconstitutional. The 1968 Civil Rights Act, as Rusk indicated, outlawed housing discrimination based on race.

In cities such as St. Louis, by the start of the Great Depression some of the oldest areas were already showing signs of excessive wear. Combined with the depression and the inability to obtain a mortgage many people simply had no choice but to move to the suburbs. Generous terms on these new mortgages often made it cheaper to live in a new house in the suburbs than to rent an old apartment in the central city. Government policy, not natural market forces, accelerated the shift to the suburbs.

The only money central cities saw for many decades came from federal “Urban Renewal” programs, a misnomer if ever there was one. The renewal was not needed investment in basic maintenance neglected during the depression or updating structures with wiring and plumbing, but wholesale clearance and replacement. Today one of those areas targeted for replacement of its “functionally obsolete” housing stock is one of the highest demand areas, Soulard. Soulard’s structures, once thought to be of no value, have been reborn as new living spaces. offices, restaurants and retail stores. The term functionally obsolete continues to be used today to justify destructive policies of demolition, land clearance, and auto-centric development. Whenever you hear (or read) the phrase functionally obsolete from developers, engineers, politicians or others, do so only with many grains of salt.

Historically cities, going back centuries, were a mix of economic classes. St. Louis’ 19th Century neighborhoods exemplified this with streets of more affluent housing around the corner from the housing of the common workers. Long before the car became so dominant in our society, the feds determined neighborhood stability depended not upon centuries of history but on a new idea of separating people based on “social and racial classes.” This false notion of neighborhood stability has undermined inner-city neighborhoods for decades since and has helped create wealthier suburbs and concentrations of poverty in cities. Again, this is not born out of natural market forces — this was the result of poor public policy.

This is not to say that we would not have seen suburbanization or class/racial divisions without these federal lending policies — we must certainly would have. But we have to wonder to what extent our cities, namely St. Louis, would have been different had black areas not been red-lined so that they could receive loan guarantees. And what if the FHA guidelines would have been open to all types of housing, not just single-family detached, would suburbanization have taken on a different form that included multifamily buildings and corner stores? We most certainly would have taken to the car post WWII regardless of these lending policies but with so many far-flung new houses being built as a result of these policies one has to wonder if the adoption of the car would have been slowed if lending policies were at least neutral or favoring a more dense development pattern?

Today’s decisions seldom consider the long-term consequences. If decision makers had been told in 1937 their neighborhood security map would lead to devestating & costly consequences for America’s cities over the next 5-6 decades they may have revised their thinking. In reality, concerns about the consequences would have likely been ignored as politicians then, as today, look mostly to short-term solutions. This is why we must carefully consider those people we elect to public office.