Update on NFHA et al v. Carson: Following the District Court’s August 17 dismissal of this challenge to HUD’s suspension of the AFFH rule, plaintiffs filed a motion to amend the complaint and the judgment, pointing out that the court had misunderstood key elements of the AFFH and Consolidated Plan processes, which led to a finding that plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. These motions could lead to a reargument of the case, or to an appeal. See the collected court papers here. Plaintiffs National Fair Housing Alliance, Texas Housers, and Texas Appleseed are represented by a legal team including Relman Dane & Colfax, the Lawyers Committee, NAACP LDF, PRRAC, ACLU and Public Citizen.
Anti-busing amendments removed! After more than a year of sustained advocacy, the National Coalition on School Diversity is pleased to report the removal of 1970s-era federal budget riders prohibiting on the use of federal funds for transportation to achieve school integration. See our original campaign press release for more detail!
School poverty “thresholds”: In response to frequent questions about the impacts of poverty concentration in K-12 schools, Roslyn Mickelson from UNC-Charlotte prepared an analysis of extant research for the National Coalition on School Diversity, titled Is There Systematic Meaningful Evidence of School Poverty Thresholds? Mickelson’s conclusion:
“After a comprehensive review of the extant social, behavioral, and social science research, I found no reliable and valid body of evidence that points to specific thresholds of poverty concentration that can be used as the empirical basis for school assignment policies. We need more research on this question using longitudinal, nationally representative datasets, employing state of the art statistical techniques to test for possible thresholds in different subjects, for demographic groups, and at various grade levels. Given the current state of our knowledge on the relationship of school-level poverty to achievement, educational decision makers should focus on reducing concentrations of school-level poverty to as low a level as is feasible given the available demographic mix, and avoid policies based on the unsupported notion that there are poverty thresholds above and below which student achievement levels can be predicted.”
7th National Housing Mobility Conference, October 16-17: Register soon – space is running low! Cosponsored by PRRAC, Mobility Works, and the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA).
