Sanbonmatsu, Lisa, Jeffrey R. Kling, Greg J. Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. 2006. “Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment.” Journal of Human Resources 41(4): 649–691.
Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among more than 5,000 children aged six to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments alone are small.
Lisa Sanbonmatsu is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Jeffrey R. Kling is a Senior Fellow in Economics at the Brookings Institution and a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER. Greg J. Duncan is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The authors thank the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute of Mental Health (R01-HD40404 and R01-HD40444), the National Science Foundation (SBE-9876337 and BCS-0091854), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the W. T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation for funding the interim MTO evaluation and our research. Additional support was provided by grants to Princeton University from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and from the NICHD (5P30-HD32030 for the Office of Population Research) and by the Princeton Industrial Relations Section, the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, the Princeton Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The authors are grateful to Todd Richardson and Mark Shroder of HUD, to Judie Feins, Barbara Goodson, Robin Jacob, Stephen Kennedy, and Larry Orr of Abt Associates, to our collaborators Alessandra Del Conte Dickovick, Jane Garrison, Lawrence Katz, Jeffrey Liebman, Tama Leventhal, Jens Ludwig, and to numerous colleagues for their suggestions. The data used in this article are available from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to researchers who meet HUD’s data confidentiality requirements described at http://www.huduser.org/publications/fairhsg/MTODemData.html. Direct questions about the availability to Lisa Sanbonmatsu, 617-613-1201 <lsanbonm@nber.org> or to HUD’s Todd Richardson, 202-708-3700 × 5706 <todd_m._richardson@hud.gov>.
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