The End of the Neighborhood School

Kids being uprooted from neighborhood schools are often the ones that can least handle the sudden change. "A lot of the children who are affected by this trend are already at risk because of poverty, drug abuse, violence, family upheaval, lack of healthcare," says Julianne Robertson King, a mother of four who lives in D.C.'s Ward 5, which is set to see four schools close this year. "These are people who have not been able to capitalize on the promise of America. When you remove one thing that they can count on... ."

According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.

Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)

"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/

5 Ways of Visualizing Crime in Philly

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/02/5-ways-visualizing-crime-philadelphia/4641/

Reimagining an Entire Neighborhood Through Murals

The Dutch art duo Haas and Hahn, comprised of Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, have embarked on a mural project that is strikingly similar to the high wire act of jazz improvisation.

The artists were commissioned by the City of Philadelphia and its Mural Arts Program to paint a section of Germantown Avenue as part of an ongoing revitalization effort targeted at stagnant commercial corridors. Located in the central part of North Philadelphia a few blocks east of Broad Street, the neighborhood is better known for its abandoned houses than its arts scene. The pair began the project a year ago, moving into a tiny white house directly behind the Village of Arts & Humanities.

Urhahn credits El Sawyer at the Village of Arts & Humanities, a community-based nonprofit organization dedicated to neighborhood revitalization through the arts, with orchestrating the duo's introduction to the neighborhood. “We didn’t just show up and start painting. We showed up and started making friends, talked to people, tried to get to know the neighborhood," says Urhahn. "Basically the first half-year we talked to everybody form the police officers to the guys on the corner and everyone in between. Especially the store owners."

"The point is not to change the neighborhood," Urhahn says. "We don’t bring answers, we have to define questions and to start the conversation."

-The Atlantic Cities