Commission 6% As early as 1961, Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities discussed the issues of concentration and diversity. She summarized that cities were deteriorating not because of the mere concentration of poverty but because the concentration of urban areas lacked diversity. Diversity, she argued, not only included ethnicity and race but also dealt extensively with families of various incomes (later termed mixed-income) and the preservation of buildings of various conditions (rehabilitation). In addition, she further defends the need for places to have a diversity of uses to serve various functions (later termed mixed-use)
“ Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity,” 1993, http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/esed/prospect.html.
Education reformers -classroom instruction & administrative accountability for instruction = Neglecting the school-community relationship! Focus: community context for school performance, with concentrated poverty posing an especially strong challenge. School-Community Relationship/ Neighborhood Based Collaboration
Yet the traditional definition of concentrated poverty – 40 percent of the tract population living below the federal poverty threshold – remains problematic in light of burgeoning working poor populations, the emergence of inner-suburban poverty, and long-standing problems with the federal poverty threshold itself. (Wolch, 2005)
causation seems to require not just a correlation, but a counterfactual dependence. This is referred to as the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference – it is impossible to directly observe causal effects Well-designed experimental studies replace equality of individuals as in the previous example by equality of groups. This is achieved by randomization of the subjects to two or more groups. Although not a perfect system, the likeliness of being equal in all aspects rises with the number of subjects placed randomly in the treatment/ placebo groups. From the significance of the difference of the effect of the treatment vs. the placebo, one can conclude the likeliness of the treatment having a causal effect on the disease. This likeliness can be quantified in statistical terms by the P-value .