Moving to Opportunity Programs

Liana Heitin:

The younger children are when they move out of impoverished neighborhoods, the better their long-term outcomes are, including college-attendance rates and later salary levels, according to two studies released this month.

Those results may derive in part from the likelihood that children in low-poverty neighborhoods are more liable to be given second chances in any number of situations, said a researcher who worked on one of the studies.

“There are less permanent consequences for youthful indiscretion in better neighborhoods and modestly better schools,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University and co-author of a new analysis of the Moving to Opportunity program, a federal anti-poverty initiative from the mid-1990s in which families were randomly selected for vouchers to move to higher-income neighborhoods.

The relative leniency of schools and authorities in lower-poverty areas may have a positive effect on educational outcomes even if the academic programs don’t differ significantly, researchers suggested. Previous analyses of the Moving to Opportunity program were unencouraging. Moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood, they found, had no positive effects on parents’ earnings or on students’ academic achievement.

But the new analysis by Harvard University researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Mr. Katz indicates that the community where children live has a significant impact over time—and the longer they live in low-poverty neighborhoods, the more opportunities they’ll have as adults.