"Bad" parts of Penn Hills? (Pittsburgh, Plum: for sale, foreclosure)

[Hopes]

Originally Posted by simetime

As far as Penn Hills is concerned, there is not simple "fix" as the poor and unruly blacks/whites move in, the well educated blacks/whites are moving further out thus lowering the tax base and straining educational and enforcement resources.

I agree there is no simple fix. I was saying that the township's decline will not improve until the school district resolves its problems. And I readily admitted that I don't understand why the school district doesn't/can't resolve the problems. The fact remains the township's decline will not improve until the school district does. It has to start in the schools or the decline will continue.

Originally Posted by simetime

Personally I think that this is the plan all along. First you get the poor, unruly and uneducated out on the fringes of the county and cut off their bus services/resources and therefore keep crime in a specified area. Meanwhile, there seem to be a trend for those who can afford it to move back into the city, take note the increase in Downtown and Northside housing. I may be wrong but I have been watching this transformation for years, especially with the property values on the Hill rising.

That's interesting. It makes perfect sense and ties into Curtis putting out that it's impossible to live in Penn Hills without a car. It's similar to how housing projects were built in the suburbs, cutting the impoverished off from their support networks in the city.

[simetime]

Originally Posted by Hopes

I agree there is no simple fix. I was saying that the township's decline will not improve until the school district resolves its problems. And I readily admitted that I don't understand why the school district doesn't/can't resolve the problems. The fact remains the township's decline will not improve until the school district does. It has to start in the schools or the decline will continue.


That's interesting. It makes perfect sense and ties into Curtis putting out that it's impossible to live in Penn Hills without a car. It's similar to how housing projects were built in the suburbs, cutting the impoverished off from their support networks in the city.

I made that observation years ago (80's) when I asked my father why no one wanted to live on the Hill consider the proximity to everything. He said eventually people will move back and he started buying alot of cheap houses. A couple of years after he died, I noticed the subtle changes that started happening around my old neighborhood. The 15 or so bars whittled down to three, longtime crime and hangout spots were broken up, jitney stations were closed, houses were taken by the city, Crawford Square was built and projects were torn down, the poor were being relocated on a large scale. This happened when the Civic Arena was built as well which shifted Pittsburgh's surrounding demographic communities especially Homewood.

The other thing that made me wonder about that it was the South Park sky bus which was suppose to connect to the Airport, Monroeville and Kennywood but was scrapped in the 70's. If they would have cut off the bus/trolley service to those areas you were practically stuck without a car.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Hopes

That's not at all what I suggested. I said Penn Hills needs to fix the schools or the township will further decline. If the school situation is improved, more families will move into the township. As usual, Sparrowmint jumped to the conclusion that meant wealthy white families need to move to Penn Hills for the schools to improve. I meant families of all races and economic groups who care about their children's education. It's getting really old when people are putting words into our mouths. I shouldn't have to be specific. If I say families, I mean families. It speaks volumes that someone's mind automatically reads "wealthy white families" when someone posts "families." Back to the point, I never said white families need to move to Penn Hills for the schools to improve. Never. Reread the thread and all you will find is Sparrowmint's dramatic misinterpretation of my posts, as usual.

But my point is that in general, test scores are correlated with race and, to a lesser extent class. Nationwide Asians score better than whites, Latinos score lower than whites, and blacks even lower. We are in a region with nearly no Latinos, and comparably few Asians (most of which are higher-income and stick to very white areas), thus on race it's really a black/white thing here.

In terms of raw test scores, unless there is some genius local administration which figures out what everyone else nationwide has screwed up, the only way to effect substantive improvements is to get low-performing kids out of the schools, or attract higher-performing kids into the schools. Otherwise even if individual kids show improvement from year to year, the white/middle class flight will drown this out, and the school district will appear to continue to slide. It's illegal to kick low-performers out, and nothing short of gentrification does this indirectly, which isn't happening in Penn Hills any time soon. And as I said, attracting high-performers means attracting higher-income, disproportionately white parents, which would require setting up an alternate school system within the district which would be far whiter than the general population.

Originally Posted by simetime

You should be aware of school test statistics because many of them are short term studies verses longitudinal. A short term study does not include if the all of the children went to the same feeder schools together or if they have equal home life (were the black kids bused there or not).

I am aware of this. As I said in my response to Hopes above, given the national disparities in test scores, a district can show improvement in the results of most students (black and white) on a year-to-year basis, and still come out as a "failing school" if the white population is falling or the black population increasing at a significant rate. It's one reason why the focus on standardized test scores is totally awful for public education.

Originally Posted by simetime

Believe it or not a black child put into a predominately white community/school out of the blue has to adapt considerly to their new surroundings. This would apply the same way if you took a suburban white kid in a inner city black school.

I believe it. From everything I've seen/read, there doesn't appear to be any significant advantage academically for black children in busing-type situations. Black children who are in a district with only a handful of other black kids tend to perform much better than national averages for all black children, although in part this may be explained by class, as black kids in 90%+ white areas are much more likely to be middle class. Any time a significant number of black kids from an actual disadvantaged background are put into an otherwise high-scoring school, however, there isn't much difference between how they score there and in their old neighborhood school.

You can see this in PPS, as despite the black population at the magnet schools doing much better than the average district-wide, at Allderdice (which remains high-scoring for white students), the average black test-taker does almost as badly as those at Westinghouse. The habits of white students don't rub off there, because by and large the black student body comes from enclaves within Homewood, East Hills, and Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar which aren't any different from the portions which go to Westinghouse.

Originally Posted by simetime

This being said, what community has had a consistently 50/50 racial population for over 50 years?

Admittedly few. Places where the racial turnover from black to white has happened very slowly however (like Willingboro, NJ for example) seem to have kept stability in ways that Pittsburgh has not. White people eventually stop moving there, but the decline of the white population is slow enough the neighborhoods can develop into middle-class black areas. On the other hand, there are areas like Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland which have managed to keep an integrated, large black minority for going on 50 years now.

Originally Posted by simetime

If you are looking at all of the PSSA scores in the state you would have noticed that Delaware County which is 80% white scores were lower than they should be.

I don't know Delaware County well (have some relatives who live out there though), but looking at the PSSA scores, there are essentially two black districts (Chester Upland, Southeast Delco) and one mixed depending upon schools (Upper Darby), with the remainder overwhelmingly white. Still, from 2000 to 2010, the black population in the county increased by 37%, and the total white population of the county actually shrunk by 9% in absolute numbers. Particularly for some of the close-in districts affected by the emptying out of West Philadelphia, like Interboro and William Penn, I think that changes to school demographics may explain part of it. The county does have a pretty big lower-performing working-class white population in pockets of course though.

Originally Posted by simetime

As far as Penn Hills is concerned, there is not simple "fix" as the poor and unruly blacks/whites move in, the well educated blacks/whites are moving further out thus lowering the tax base and straining educational and enforcement resources. Personally I think that this is the plan all along. First you get the poor, unruly and uneducated out on the fringes of the county and cut off their bus services/resources and therefore keep crime in a specified area.

I'm not sure if this was a conscious plan, but first-ring suburbs nationwide aren't in high demand anymore. They generally lack both the features those who enjoy cities enjoy, and don't do the suburb thing as well as modern subdivisions. Except in areas where housing prices are high enough people can get away with buying the plots, demoing the houses, and putting something larger and more modern there, they are often doomed.

Originally Posted by Hopes

That's interesting. It makes perfect sense and ties into Curtis putting out that it's impossible to live in Penn Hills without a car. It's similar to how housing projects were built in the suburbs, cutting the impoverished off from their support networks in the city.

Most projects were built like this in Pittsburgh though. Think about the locations of Northview Heights, Terrace Village, Saint Clair, Arlington Heights, Glen Hazel, etc. They were all built away from existing development. Buses went there, but really, you can't walk to anywhere easily from any of them. This was in part due to the era they were developed, where a lot of bad ideas regarding cities were entertained, but it's not like any the Pittsburgh projects were put in actually convenient places.

Originally Posted by simetime

I made that observation years ago (80's) when I asked my father why no one wanted to live on the Hill consider the proximity to everything. He said eventually people will move back and he started buying alot of cheap houses. A couple of years after he died, I noticed the subtle changes that started happening around my old neighborhood. The 15 or so bars whittled down to three, longtime crime and hangout spots were broken up, jitney stations were closed, houses were taken by the city, Crawford Square was built and projects were torn down, the poor were being relocated on a large scale. This happened when the Civic Arena was built as well which shifted Pittsburgh's surrounding demographic communities especially Homewood.

Terrace Village in particular is pretty different than it has been in the past. In large part this is because one of Pitt's new dorms is hectically in the neighborhood, but Oak Hill's demographics aren't the same as Alliquippa Terrace - it's about 25% white now, with a scattering of Asians as well.

Rumor has it that Bedford Dwellings (save the newer private portions around Memory Lane) is going to be shuttered sometime soon. I do wonder what further demographic changes it's going to cause in the city. All those people are going to have to go somewhere.

[Uptown kid]

Rumor has it that Bedford Dwellings (save the newer private portions around Memory Lane) is going to be shuttered sometime soon. I do wonder what further demographic changes it's going to cause in the city. All those people are going to have to go somewhere.

That makes sense as Bedford Hills is all over Bedford-Webster-Whylie. And if they make a Bedford Hills site on Chauncey and the site of the former Francis Street Projects it'd be large like the Fairfield Apts in East Liberty.
Well either Crawford Square or Oak Hill (besides the low income section of Burrows Street because that's already sketchy) might fall if Chauncey Drive was closed down.
When Francis closed they about 1/3 of the population moved to Chauncey and about 1/3 of Emore Square also moved to Chauncey, so if they close Chauncey (until the new Elmore Square, Reed Roberts, Dwindle St Townhomes get built) there will be no place for residents to turn with in the Hill District. That means Penn Plaza, Prospect Park/SykTop Manor,West Mifflin, Turtle Creek, Swissvale, Penn Hills and East Pittsburgh will further decline. Or they will be relocated to Northview Heights, and there would be trouble... IMO the wasted land that was once housing projects in Arlington Heights, Saint Clair and Fairywood should be used as mixed income townhouses, and the Chauncey Drive people could move there.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by eschaton

Terrace Village in particular is pretty different than it has been in the past. In large part this is because one of Pitt's new dorms is hectically in the neighborhood, but Oak Hill's demographics aren't the same as Alliquippa Terrace - it's about 25% white now, with a scattering of Asians as well.

practically. Damn that was weird of spellcheck.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Uptown kid

IMO the wasted land that was once housing projects in Arlington Heights, Saint Clair and Fairywood should be used as mixed income townhouses, and the Chauncey Drive people could move there.

I think it's a bad idea. Those are out-of-the-way areas where if there wasn't bus service, as I said, no one would be able to get to anything without a car. Those projects were built far away from any historic black populations (Beltzhoover turned organically like Homewood, IIRC, around the same time), and they became isolated islands both due to geography and demographics. The last thing you need to do is disperse more of the inhabitants outside of the Hill District, and concentrate them in the two widest swathes of Pittsburgh seeing continued decline. If you're going to build replacement housing, just do it in the Hill. There's tons of blocks which are still 80%-90% vacant.

[sparrowmint]

Originally Posted by Hopes

You have no children. You work from home. As far as I can see, you have no recent first hand knowledge of what it's like inside schools.

"As far as you can see" is a pretty key phrase there, dear, since I'm a trained educator, volunteer in schools most days of the week (in a poor district), and tutor on top of that. As I have for the last 8 years, in more than one state and country. Nice try though. As for working at home, yep, the rest of the time is spent working for a company that helps police fight internet child abuse and child pornography, that's responsible for putting hundreds of pedophiles in prison and for changing a lot of laws in this country. How much experience do you have working with poor minority children? How much experience do you have studying social justice issues? These are rhetorical questions, btw.

I'm getting tired of self-proclaimed experts talking about problems without offering solutions.

Oh I have "solutions." That they are not politically feasible in the United States is a little outside of my control. There's no stomach for my socialism here. War on poverty, war on institutionalized racism (including ending the war on drugs and how it racially targets the black community), income redistribution, socialized medicine, district consolidation (the Penn Hills School District shouldn't even exist), equality in school funding for all schools, control of schools from a state (as opposed to local) level, among other things. I don't sit around and locally obsess about school districts. I don't live in a Pittsburgh bubble. These are national issues.

YOU are guilty of not expecting enough from these children when you say "it's not possible" to improve their schools!

Yeah, again, you don't know what the problems are in these schools, but if you want to blame the children for bringing their school districts down, certainly be my guest. Let me know as soon as if you've worked with children whose only meal they get in a day is at school, whose parents never talk to them (let alone read to them or work on their homework), and who live in a dangerous environment. Then multiply that by large numbers.

I think you really need to take a long look in the mirror and quit so readily tossing down the racist card.

Funny, considering I never called you a racist and don't consider you one. That was sort of the point, one that you missed, but the fact that you're so afraid of it is what is keeping you from actually being able to learn about these issues. These are not local issues, they don't have local solutions, or at least none that are actually positive for the lower income black community. I don't think of gentrification as a good thing. The situations that poor black people and white people live in are not the same. You're trying to treat them the same in an innocent but misguided way. There is a wealth of studies and education out there on this subject. To improve the Penn Hills School District (or any poor black district) is not a local issue. The only local solutions are, in fact, infeasible and harmful in themselves. Eschaton has spoken about them. None of them actually improve the lives of the kids who already live here though, they just push them elsewhere or work around them. That's what always happens though, the poor black kids just get pushed around, few fight for them for their own sake.

I don't care what you think of me. I am confident in who I am and who I hope to continue to grow into being.

As soon as you realize that your personal attacks aren't getting anywhere, maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.

Until then, I'll focus my discussions on this issue with other members whose opinions I value and respect.

You've never been personally attacked, but yes, I recognize your need to have an out on a conversation that you realize you don't know much about. In the mean time, please read any of Eschaton's posts about race and education. That'd be fantastic.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by sparrowmint

You've never been personally attacked, but yes, I recognize your need to have an out on a conversation that you realize you don't know much about. In the mean time, please read any of Eschaton's posts about race and education. That'd be fantastic.

A lot of people in the U.S. seem to have this false idea that teaching is in some ways analogous to manufacturing widgets, or any other job where the actual work productivity can be easily quantified. Witness the experiments every generation with incentive pay for teachers. They always fail, because the people who need incentives to do well are actually the students. There are plenty of motivated teachers - at least at the start of their careers. From my experience, after 5-10 years on the job, most teachers (particularly in rougher districts) start seeing their job as more about how to stop the problem kids from being so disruptive that they stop the kids who actually want to learn from doing so. They've given up any hope of turning around the problem kids themselves.

It irks me to say this, coming out of a background in the labor movement, but teaching (on the K-12, and especially K-5 level) is in many ways now more analogous to being a manager/supervisor than anything. The students are your employees. Your job is to make their productivity higher, except you have no choice in who you hire, and you cannot fire them unless they commit a felony or something. You also can't give them cash bonuses, or promotions, or anything beyond verbal praise. Under these sort of circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that schools are unproductive when viewed in a traditional, business lens.

[sparrowmint]

Originally Posted by eschaton

A lot of people in the U.S. seem to have this false idea that teaching is in some ways analogous to manufacturing widgets, or any other job where the actual work productivity can be easily quantified. Witness the experiments every generation with incentive pay for teachers. They always fail, because the people who need incentives to do well are actually the students. There are plenty of motivated teachers - at least at the start of their careers. From my experience, after 5-10 years on the job, most teachers (particularly in rougher districts) start seeing their job as more about how to stop the problem kids from being so disruptive that they stop the kids who actually want to learn from doing so. They've given up any hope of turning around the problem kids themselves.

It irks me to say this, coming out of a background in the labor movement, but teaching (on the K-12, and especially K-5 level) is in many ways now more analogous to being a manager/supervisor than anything. The students are your employees. Your job is to make their productivity higher, except you have no choice in who you fire, and you cannot fire them unless they commit a felony or something. You also can't give them cash bonuses, or promotions, or anything beyond verbal praise. Under these sort of circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that schools are unproductive when viewed in a traditional, business lens.

Great post. As an addition, I've often wished there'd be a long, real-world study done based on the performance-based pay and/or performance-based job security ideas that are being implemented in many places, on the basis of standardized tests. If this is the wave of the future, why not scientifically test it? Take a lot of high-performing teachers (based on test results) from good districts and plop them in low-performing districts, see how the scores are after a couple years. If it's about the teachers, surely there'd be some noticeable improvement.

I don't think that teachers have zero role to play, they can make a huge difference for some individuals if they happen to be inspiring enough or actually have that room to be creative in the classroom*, but being able to make a difference large enough that it can be reflected in statistics? That's rare. It's just too deep of a problem, and it's beyond depressing. A good friend of mine moved from Ohio to teach in Atlanta. He lasted two years and came out of it with psychological problems. Before that, he was a really cheerful, idealistic man who loved kids, loved the idea of teaching, was convinced he could "make a difference" like he'd seen too many movies. It wasn't so much abuse in the classroom that broke him, it was his complete inability to change the broken lives he dealt with every day, it was just completely outside of his control, and he had no support from their parents, from administrators, anyone. The only reason those kids were in the schools were because they legally had to be. They were lost.

Edited to include: I should say that one of my other unfeasible socialist ideas is that there should be pre-school for everyone, subsidized, however one wants to work it. There is still the problem of some of these gains disappearing in later years, but I think it would make a difference for some. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/1...for-poor-kids/

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by sparrowmint

Great post. As an addition, I've often wished there'd be a long, real-world study done based on the performance-based pay and/or performance-based job security ideas that are being implemented in many places, on the basis of standardized tests. If this is the wave of the future, why not scientifically test it? Take a lot of high-performing teachers (based on test results) from good districts and plop them in low-performing districts, see how the scores are after a couple years. If it's about the teachers, surely there'd be some noticeable improvement.

There's a lot of work showing performance-based pay for teachers is rubbish.

Originally Posted by sparrowmint

I don't think that teachers have zero role to play, they can make a huge difference for some individuals if they happen to be inspiring enough or actually have that room to be creative in the classroom*, but being able to make a difference large enough that it can be reflected in statistics? That's rare. It's just too deep of a problem, and it's beyond depressing. A good friend of mine moved from Ohio to teach in Atlanta. He lasted two years and came out of it with psychological problems. Before that, he was a really cheerful, idealistic man who loved kids, loved the idea of teaching, was convinced he could "make a difference" like he'd seen too many movies. It wasn't so much abuse in the classroom that broke him, it was his complete inability to change the broken lives he dealt with every day, it was just completely outside of his control, and he had no support from their parents, from administrators, anyone. The only reason those kids were in the schools were because they legally had to be. They were lost.

I've seen some studies which suggest that in one sense poor and minority heavy schools are often ill served. Basically because the job is so much more soul-crushing, there is very high turnover, and teachers are not particularly effective within the first few years on the job (skills plateau after about ten years of teaching though). Thus difficult districts can end up with a higher proportion of inexperienced teachers, which is why urban schools often have higher pay than surrounding suburbs which have much better educational reputations - it's an attempt to sweeten the pot more than the competition.

Of course, there are a few conclusions from this. One, if you penalize those with difficult classrooms (by cutting wages, benefits, or reducing job protections), you raise the chances of teachers quitting, and effectively lower quality of future applicants. Second, one would presume that schools with worse wages and benefits, and higher job insecurity, would thus have even higher turnover. And that's what you see in charter schools, which generally perform the same or worse than public schools.

Originally Posted by sparrowmint

Edited to include: I should say that one of my other unfeasible socialist ideas is that there should be pre-school for everyone, subsidized, however one wants to work it. There is still the problem of some of these gains disappearing in later years, but I think it would make a difference for some. Report Demonstrates Continuing Value of Preschool for New Jersey's Poorest Kids - NJ Spotlight

Eh, they have it in Quebec, I don't think it's that pie in the sky.

I've thought for awhile that we ought to have a Social-Security like benefit for having kids. Consider it a wage provided for parenting. For the very poor, it would replace TANF. For the middle classes, it would be a tax credit allowing for inexpensive day care, or perhaps a subsidy which would make one parent staying at home actually financially possible.