Better neighborhoods don't boost test scores-study

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Students from poor families did no better on math or reading tests after they moved into middle-income neighborhoods, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research counters other research suggesting that living in a better neighborhood would boost school performance.

Government policies to improve academic achievements of poor children must solve issues beyond changing their addresses, said the four economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research who conducted the study.

"It appears that interventions focused exclusively on neighborhoods rather than factors directly related to the child, family, and school are unable to solve the myriad problems of children growing up in poverty," they wrote in their study.

The four economists studied the school performance of more than 5,000 children whose families moved out of public housing into areas with lower poverty rates.

The families were living in public housing in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. Some were randomly selected to participate in the Moving to Opportunity, or MTO, for Fair Housing demonstration program by the U.S. Department and Urban Development.

The 10-year program was started by Congress in the early 1990s to gauge the effect on families that moved out of neighborhoods where 40 percent of the population lived below the poverty line.

But there were other benefits from programs aimed to help poor families relocate to better neighborhoods such as improved health among women and dramatically reduced exposure to drugs and violence, they said.

Still, the lack of academic improvement especially among young children who moved to better areas was surprising because developmental theory suggests that a better environment would have more positive impact on them than on older children, the researchers said in the study.

Among some of the factors for the lack of improvement reckoned by the study's economists included:

-- Although MTO families moved into much better neighborhoods, the new schools that their children attended were only modestly better.

-- Some of the MTO families undid some of the economic advantages by returning to poorer neighborhoods several years from their original placement into middle-class areas.

-- MTO families did not live in "truly affluent" neighborhoods, where prior research suggests impact on school successes would be most profound.