A few of the things that were either asserted or implied was that:
1.) Low-income housing does not hurt the neighboring schools. It actually HELPS the API.
2.) Everybody loves low-income housing.
Let's first look at Poway Elementary schools from the report.
The measure of a schools goodness is the API, which is "The cornerstone of California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999; measures the academic performance and growth of schools on a variety of academic measures"
It's a standard to measure how the schools are doing. Anything under 800 is a no-no under the "No child left behind" act of 2001.
Here's the raw data for the Poway City Elementary schools from 2000 to 2009*:
And here's the data in graphical form:
Looks great huh? Everyone is FINALLY above 800. Note that Valley Elementary took until 2007 to break that barrier. Also note the general trend, every school is heading upwards. Soon they'll be breaking the max 1000 API limit. (API's go from 200 to 1000). Wonder what happens then?
What's the point? Well remember that quote about there being "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? The Poway Housing commission study on low-income housing and its effects on the schools, crime, and the housing market, states that (surprise, surprise) ".... the standardized Academic Performance Index scores from the two schools (Valley & Midland) improved at a higher rate than district-wide trends." The Valley Elementary API (the school with almost half the students being from low-income households) went up over 5% from 2005-2008. What was implied is that low-income students, being concentrated at Valley Elementary, managed to bring up the scores the most among the Poway schools. Hooray for that!!! Statistically that's true.
Of course they failed to mention a number of things. First, the 2009 score at Valley is down from 2008. For a number of years Valley was in danger of getting slapped from the "No child left behind" act. Check the numbers, if you average the scores w/o Valley, then Valley's API are a whopping 80 points BELOW the average and 52 points BEHIND the next school (Garden Road). Even as far back as 2000, Valley is consistently at the bottom. So we're supposed to be glad that Valley has improved 5%? That's better than going down, but there's a long long long ways to go to be even near average.
For years the city of Poway has clustered the low-income housing around two schools, Valley and Midland, and after the Brighton complex is completed there will be even more at Midland. The teachers at these schools are doing a bang-up great job with the resources they have to work with. The teachers volunteer to teach English to the parents on Saturday mornings, they provide extra tutoring to the students after school, they go BEYOND the extra mile to see that the students are given a good education. However, there are far too many disadvantaged students at Valley Elementary. If there were fewer, the extra effort would lift up the students more. What's a solution? Since the housing is already near the schools, busing to other schools in the city would help. If low-income students are helping raise test scores as the housing reports implies, then Painted Rock and Tierra Bonita, whose averages went DOWN during the same period that Valley's went up, would benefit from the influx of new students from Valley.
In the future, don't concentrate new low-income housing near these two schools, spread it out.
Next, the residents love to live there.
The report states that the residents of the low-income housing love it there. I'd love it too if I could pay $583/month for a 1440 sq. ft. condo as is being offered for Brighton**. Maybe I'll quit my job, go to work at walmart, and my disabled wife and I can live there on our low income?
Note that the report didn't ask the neighbors of low-income housing how they feel about it. I live next to two complexes, they were built years after I moved there. From talking to the housing residents, if the kids misbehave, if the residents violate the rules, park on the street instead of the garages, etc, they will be evicted from the housing complex. Sounds good. Except that a half dozen of these cars now park in our neighborhood every night. (too many cars per household?) The kids, bless their hearts, play in our streets because there's not enough playground room in the complexes for them. Where are they supposed to play when the City doesn't provide adequate green space in the complexes and doesn't build any new parks for the increased population? Another former resident, who just moved to RB, used to have a condo that backed up to the housing. The kids would throw garbage over the fences into the condo parking lots, would climb the fences to "play" in the greens there, etc.
Last, how much do these complexes cost? According to Mayor Higginson (April 20th council meeting), the average cost for EACH unit is $399,000!!! Holy cow!!! The city could have bought up houses in foreclosure for under $300K each during the last couple of years but instead are spending almost $400K for a low-income unit!!! The report also stated that there's an average of 2.1 people/unit. That's not a lot of people in a $400K unit. Once again, I wouldn't mind paying under $500/month (for the small 1000 sq. ft. units) to live in a $400K condo with maintenance taken care of.
While nothing stated in the housing report is a lie, it's far from "the whole truth".
*http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/API/APISearchName.asp?TheYear=&cTopic=API&cLevel=County&cName=&cCounty=37,SAN,DIEGO&cTimeFrame=S
** http://www.poway.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1175
