Detailed New National Maps Show How Neighborhoods Shape Children for Life
NYTimes, The Upshot
By Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui
October 01, 2018

Originally Posted by article
access to the same middle school
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Children from low-opportunity neighborhoods, they suggest, could merit priority for selective high schools.
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Researchers still don’t understand exactly what leads some neighborhoods to nurture children, although they point to characteristics like more employed adults and two-parent families that are common among such places.
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Is opportunity a block away?
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The answers shown here are based on the adult earnings of 20.5 million children, captured in anonymous, individual-level census and tax data that links each child with his or her parents. That data covers nearly all children in America born between 1978 and 1983, although the map here illustrates the subset of those children raised in poorer families. The research offers a time-lapse view of what happened to them: who became a teenage mother, who went to prison, who wound up in the middle class, and who remained trapped in poverty for another generation.
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some neighborhoods will look quite different now.
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drawing their opportunity maps
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voucher holders had long been clustered in neighborhoods offering the least upward mobility
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“It really struck us as, well, we are contributing to this problem, not solving the problem,”
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the federal government has spent billions in struggling neighborhoods over the years, funneling as much as $500 million into some individual census tracts since 1990
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we have fine-grained data on millions of children

As the article mentions that a child's future success as an adult in his/her 30s correlates with parents being employed and maintaining a 2-parent home while raising the child... then possibly it is not the location, per se, which is to be credited with the child's success, but rather the parental choices and behaviors? The influence of role modeling?

Possibly, in some cases, opportunity is not a block away, but right next door, where the parents engage in different choices and behaviors?

Possibly moving a family into a government-subsidized residence in a particular location (as described in the article) would not be as beneficial to the children as teaching a variety of employment skills, budgeting skills, relationship skills, parenting skills, etc, to those accepting taxpayer-funded support... so that the parents may provide their family with a sense of stability (remaining employed, maintaining a 2-parent household) and belonging (nurturing their children, volunteering in the community, etc).

Possibly using low-income to prioritize students for selective high schools changes the selectivity criteria away from ability and readiness for advanced academics, leaving out "gifted" kids?

Some may say there is a disparity between individual level data being anonymous... and being matchable to tax data that links each child with his or her parents (as described in the article).

The article refers to a collaboration between Harvard, Brown University and the US Census Bureau, and references:
- the US Census dataproduct called the Opportunity Atlas (which includes an interactive map)
- the US Census 6-page PDF, Opportunity Atlas Summary (subtitled "Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility.")