Panel:
Towards More Informed Policies for Student Homelessness: Examining the Influence of Context, Race, and Housing Interventions
(Education)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
At a time when federal education policy (i.e., Every Student Succeeds Act) emphasizes better identification and support for homeless students, school districts around the country continue to grapple with how to support a rising number of homeless K-12 students. Research on student homelessness has established negative associations between homelessness and academic and behavioral outcomes; yet less is known about the mechanisms that moderate these outcomes and the heterogeneity of the student homeless population. This panel draws together a methodologically diverse set of papers that fills these gaps by 1) examining how context (i.e., school, neighborhood, and residential) is associated with homelessness and academic outcomes, 2) considering the racialized experiences of student homelessness and beneficial supports, and 3) identifying behavioral outcomes for students participating in a housing intervention.
The first two papers in this panel examine the relationship between homelessness, context, and academic outcomes. The first paper uses administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and other publicly available data sets to provide a descriptive look at the school, neighborhood, and residential contexts of homeless students and how these contexts predict future homelessness. By attending to the nested contexts of homeless students, this paper will provide a more nuanced understanding of the multiple environments students inhabit and implications for how to deploy services. The second paper delves deeper into the residential context of students and how these contexts are associated with a range of student outcomes. Using data from the Houston Independent School District and coarsened exact-matching techniques, the authors find nuance in the relationship between residential context and academic outcomes and conclude with implications for policy and school leadership.
The third paper examines the experience of Black homeless youth in Los Angeles County—a population facing disproportionate rates of homelessness. Leveraging qualitative data and an anti-deficit framework, the author finds that Black educators and community actors supported homeless youth when district policies failed to do so. The author identifies how school-level factors limited the ability of homeless students to seek and receive support and concludes with implications for implementing the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.
The fourth paper shifts our attention to the impacts of a rapid rehousing policy in a large urban center. The author links student-level district administrative data with data on rapid rehousing (RRH) services and uses an event study differences-in-differences model to estimate the short- and medium-term effects of participating in the program on behavioral outcomes. Results find RRH improves student behavior but increases students’ absence rates and likelihood of being chronically absent, particularly among students who move outside the city limits. These results and future analyses may point to policy recommendations for RRH programs.
This panel is designed to produce a richer dialogue about the challenges faced by K-12 homeless students and potential solutions by putting research on context, racialized experiences, and policy interventions in conversation with each other. These papers have been selected to provide varied methodologies and theoretical perspectives to generate a deeper understanding of student homelessness.
