Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education policy, in this study, we examined the spatial patterns of residential areas, school attendance zones, and school discipline rates of an urbanizing school district in Wisconsin to understand the construction of spatial "Other." We measured…

In this paper we explore the relationship between students' residential location and participation in Milwaukee's large, widely available private school voucher program. We are interested in one overarching question: do voucher schools disproportionately draw students from better public schools and city neighborhoods, or do they draw students most…

It is difficult to overstate the importance of segregation for race- and ethnicity-based school funding disparities in the United States. In many respects, unequal educational opportunity depends existentially on segregation. Racial and ethnic disparities in wealth accumulation are perpetuated over generations, ensuring persistent segregation even…

Almost everyone is familiar with the African saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." However, there are very few "villages" that actually engage in this practice. The educational assets of the village include the knowledge of neighborhood residents, the clubs, groups, and associations that are citizen-based learning…

The authors reflect on how they, as social work practitioners, support the school systems in supporting homeless youth and families. They emphasize the importance of relationships and trust in working with this vulnerable population. The reflexive vignettes highlight the challenges and success of developing community-based programming for homeless…

Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of…

Evidence points to associations between the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods and children's and adolescents' development. A minimal amount of research, however, examines how timing of exposure to neighborhood socioeconomic conditions matters. This study used longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development…

As the United States continues to become a more diverse nation, much work remains to be done to ensure that all children, regardless of their race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. A policy report recently published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that children of color face immense barriers to success in key categories of…

Community studies indicating that affluence has social-emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety-depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European-American descent, but…

Wisconsin is a state that values cooperation and historically has been willing to invest in providing opportunities for success. But there are troubling signs. Childhood poverty is increasing in Wisconsin faster than the national rate. It is easy to think that making substantive changes in poverty in the communities and the state is just too hard,…

This study uses geocoded address data and information about parents' economic behavior and children's development from four random-assignment welfare and anti-poverty experiments conducted during the 1990s. We find that the impacts of these welfare and anti-poverty programs on boys' and girls' developmental outcomes during the transition to early…

This brief reviews results of an Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored project that challenged local data intermediaries in eight cities (all partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, NNIP) to use their data to promote strengthening of their local school readiness systems. The project showed it was possible to develop rich…

Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged--the most year-over-year closures the program has seen. In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum's annual census of MPCP schools, the…

In 2006 Wisconsin policymakers identified the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) as the organization to help answer lingering questions about the effects of the MPCP [Milwaukee Parental Choice Program]. The SCDP is a national research organization, based in the University of Arkansas' Department of Education Reform, dedicated to the…

Americans change residences frequently. Residential mobility can reflect positive changes in a family's circumstances or be a symptom of instability and insecurity. Mobility may also change neighborhoods as a whole. To shed light on these challenges, this report uses a unique survey conducted for the "Making Connections" initiative. The…