The Project Has Failed

Children Who Live in Public Housing Suffer In School, Study Says
By Manny Fernandez
New York City children who live in public housing perform worse in school than students who live in other types of housing, according to a study by New York University researchers.

The study, which is being released on Monday, found that students living in public housing are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to graduate in four years than those who do not live in public housing.

It also showed that fifth graders living in public housing did worse on standardized math and reading tests than fifth graders who lived elsewhere. Researchers found this disparity in fifth-grade test scores even when comparing students at the same school who shared similar demographics, like race, gender and poverty status.

The report is the first large-scale study of the academic performance of children growing up in the city’s 343 public housing complexes, researchers said. They suggest that those children face social and economic hurdles at home that affect their success in the classroom and illustrate the often-overlooked role that housing can play in education. The report was done by the university’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and its Institute for Education and Social Policy.
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On any given night, right around 11:00pm to Midnight or later in what I euphamistically refer to as the 'hood, you can find somebody standing on their porch or on their stoop staring into the darkness, they may be talking on the phone or to someone nearby or not, just standing; and the other is a child or group of children anywhere from 18 months to 18 years old outside playing or in the halls. Now, this scene is as ubiquitous to the 'hood as hot fries and cold beer. It doesn't matter if you're in Detroit or Greenville, SC. If you're in public housing this is the norm (and I invite anyone to disagree with me on this one).

The reason that I bring that up is to illustrate my point that the public housing project, the program that is supposed to give struggling families a hand until they can get on their feet and sustain themselves has failed and failed miserably. What may have been a low-income respite from over-inflated housing rates in over populated areas has deteriorated into unsafe (see the Dunbar Village case where a woman was gang-raped by 10 teenagers in her public housing complex in full earshot of her neighbors who did not even call the police, either out of indifference or fear of reprisal) , sometimes unsanitary pockets of concentrated poverty and despair.

How can a child focus on learning the parts of a book, or finishing a reading assignment when she's busy trying to tune out the lady next door getting beaten by her boyfriend or (barring any violence or misconduct) resist the urge to ditch the effort altogether in favor of playing double dutch until 11 o'clock until her Mom gets home from work?

The study doesn't offer too much insight into why children in the public housing fare so much worse than their counterparts who rent or own, but assumptions can and are being made. The hood is not a nice place to grow up and the mental stress and peer pressure that comes with that environment cannot be overestimated.

Public housing is filled with working families trying to make a living, but it is also has a good portion of folks who are living solely on assistance, unemployment or living off those who do receive assistance. It's like quarantining the healthy with the sick and dying. At some point the well will be adversely affected. Now, I don't mean to monolithically characterize those on assistance as emotionally and spiritually bereft, but make no mistake that there are those who are suffering from a generational mental handicap that manifests itself in a number of self-destructive ways.

Someone outside this environment can look at a woman with 8 children, a small drug habit, a revolving door of boyfriends and no high-school diploma as someone who may be suffering from massive low self-esteem and is badly in need of an awakening. But to a kid in the hood that's just Sheila from the 5th floor. You might play with Sheila's kids and she seems completely normal to you. This is the failure of the projects it pools the can't do alright folks along with the won't do alright folks.

My hope is that the system will be reviewed and dismantled. The problem with that is changing the minds of the middle and upper class who frown at any placement of lower class folks within their midst. If there were a way to require HUD recipients to joint local homeowners associations I think that more suburban homeowners would be apt to accept lower income residents and building, because its not the housing that is deficient (even though sometimes it is pretty bad) it is the aberrant behaviors, such as letting your kids stay up till the wee hours of the morning, that are.