Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing Annual Report 2002

[Chris Scheuer (cscheuer]

While it certainly would be interesting to look at how children from
cohousing are doing (in many ways not just academically) Anyone familiar
with the complications of researching something as complex as school
performance (what does that mean about how children are doing anyway?) can
attest to the fact that the simple collection of data on performance could
be easily misleading. The obvious question being is it the community or is
it the people in the community. The existing "data" on cohousing communities
already shows an exceedingly high level of education for members relative to
just about any other community, so it is likely that their children are
going to be strong academic "performers", but they would probably have been
wherever they were. If you really want to do such a study it would take a
fair amount of structure to tease out the differences that are a product of
the community setting itself.

Actually, I don't agree with you Raines, that it was a poor choice or
bad example.
I, for one, am very interested in learning if living in a cohousing
community helps
children do better in school. It would be very interesting to find out
how cohousing
children compare against a control group of non-cohousing children from
the same neighborhood/economic status. I have a hunch they would do
much better, but it's just a hunch.

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