No Place Like Home: Thinking Beyond the Classroom to Improve Education
Alexis Etow
A mong the myriad factors that set a child up for success, having a safe and affordable home is paramount.[1] For many children, success is also tied to educational quality and opportunity, since one’s neighborhood often determines where they go to school.[2] Knowing that quality education leads to better opportunities, better long-term health, and improved economic stability, it’s critical that quality housing be included as part of the foundation of early childhood.
A robust body of research examining the connections between neighborhood conditions and school quality has consistently demonstrated that growing up in low-income neighborhoods and attending under-resourced schools hinders children’s academic achievement as well as their cognitive development.[3] Professor Patrick Sharkey explains in his report, Neighborhoods, Cities, and Economic Mobility: The cumulative consequences of long-term exposure to high-poverty neighborhoods, and the policies that drive this, create a harmful cycle in which poverty, resulting in limited educational attainment, poor health outcomes, and economic insecurity, contribute to a widening wealth gap.[4]
Recognizing the powerful — and reciprocal — roles housing and education play in a child’s life, some public housing authorities across the United States are exploring innovative ways to break this destructive feedback loop. Before identifying some of these promising efforts in the second half of this post, we will examine the root causes these strategies seek to dismantle.
Housing Instability: Compounding Challenges
More than one million students enrolled in public school in the U.S. are without the most basic of necessities: a home.[5] For these children, and the millions more who do not have a safe or consistent place to sleep — housing instability and homelessness impose serious challenges. When families cannot afford a place to live, they may end up in unstable or unsafe conditions, or be faced with choosing between housing and other basic necessities like food and medicine.[6] It is not surprising then that the baggage some children bring with them into the classroom leads to behavioral problems and decreased academic performance, as well as chronic absenteeism.
Housing instability can also lead to high rates of student mobility, or transience, which often occurs when a student changes schools partway through the year. Transience can have harmful repercussions on a child directly if their uprooting is stressful or they have difficulty maintaining friendships with classmates and indirectly if their parents are unable to be attentive or supportive through the move.[7] Making matters worse, the damaging consequences of student mobility are not limited to the children who leave. Transience can disrupt the learning of all children within the classroom, even the ones who stay.
Unlike students from wealthier families, who might move for voluntary reasons (e.g., to attend a better school or move to a safer neighborhood) and typically wait to do so during the summertime (to minimize interrupting their schooling), highly mobile students are disproportionately students of color or from low-income families, who are forced to move during the school year because of high housing costs, their parents’ financial instability or job insecurity, homelessness, or a combination of factors.[8]
How Did We Get Here?
Improving the social and economic disadvantages that impede children’s educational achievement requires confronting the historical inequities that are so deeply entrenched in our policies, institutions, and neighborhoods. American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones powerfully captures the destructive consequences perpetuated by such policies in her article Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law, explaining that “[m]ore than 20 years of research has implicated residential segregation in virtually every aspect of racial inequality, from higher unemployment rates for African Americans, to poorer health care, to elevated infant mortality rates, and most of all, to inferior schools.”[9]
As years of school reform efforts can confirm, improving children’s educational outcomes cannot be resolved through any school-wide policy or federal education mandate alone. While the US Supreme Court unanimously declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, when it decided Brown v. Board of Education, many schools were slow to racially integrate. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that all schools were ordered to integrate, and discrimination — including racial segregation in schools — was outlawed.[10] During the 1970s and 80s — the peak of integration efforts — the achievement gap was cut in half. Despite significant improvements in educational outcomes, an increasing number of public school districts are now moving away from desegregation. Federal judges across the nation are releasing school districts from court-ordered desegregation, resulting in what scholars are now calling “apartheid schools — meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less.”[11] The regression towards segregated schools further underscores the urgency for policy change that provides low-income students and students of color with access to the same facilities, quality teachers, and education as their more affluent white peers.[12]
Beyond the Classroom: The Promising Role of Public Housing Authorities
To actually move the needle, we must tackle the root of these disparities head on. Working upstream to confront broader determinants of health — like poverty, housing, and education — is by no means a singlehanded undertaking and requires meaningful collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders. Cross-sector partnerships are critical. And indeed, some innovative partnerships are already showing early signs of success.
Across the US, public housing authorities are working to improve educational outcomes for the families they serve. In many states, no other agency (aside from the school district and social services) serves more low-income children and their families than public housing authorities. In the state of Washington, for example, the Tacoma Housing Authority provides housing for approximately 14% of all Tacoma public school students and almost 20% of all low-income students.
Housing authorities are uniquely situated to dismantle the harmful cycle that prevents the most vulnerable children from achieving higher educational outcomes, long-term health, and economic stability. Some housing authorities, like the King County Housing Authority (KCHA) in Washington State have partnered with its local school districts to create a more seamless through-line between the eight hours children spend at school and the other 16 hours spent in their communities and at home. For example, by entering into data sharing agreements with the school districts, KCHA is using the information gathered to help inform and evaluate the effectiveness of its housing policies and programs.
The number of housing authorities working at the intersection of housing and education is growing. The Pacific Northwest is leading this movement, with Seattle, Vancouver, King County, Tacoma, and Portland all pursuing innovative projects to support families’ educational and economic opportunities.
One of the federal programs that made these innovative partnerships possible is the US Department of Housing and Development’s (HUD) Moving to Work Demonstration (MTW). Housing authorities that apply for and receive MTW designation are allotted more flexibility in how they spend their federal housing dollars. MTW Demonstration has been instrumental for many housing authorities — particularly those paving the way in the Pacific Northwest — to advance collaboration between housing authorities and education advocates.
Another promising policy is the Affordable Housing for Educational Achievement Demonstration (AHEAD) Act, which is sponsored by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and currently being drafted by the Senate Legislative Council. Under the AHEAD Act, school districts, housing authorities, and community-based organizations could apply for federal funding to improve housing stability and help low-income families and children succeed academically and economically.
In a follow-up post on how housing and education partnerships offer a promising path forward, I will focus on some of the on-the-ground work and lessons learned from housing authorities who are doing innovative work to improve the educational and lifelong outcomes of the families they serve. By knitting together and expanding existing educational and community development resources, we have the ability to ensure young people who have typically shouldered the burden of inadequate schools and poverty have ample opportunities to receive the education and homes they deserve.
[1] Olinger J and Rogers C. The Future of Housing: Seeking Clarity in Times of Uncertainty. The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
[2] Charette A. Creating Equitable Student Outcomes: How Housing and Education Policy are Intertwined. Enterprise Community Partners. August 2017.
[3] Sharkey, P. Neighborhoods, Cities, and Economic Mobility. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 2016;2(2):159–177. doi:10.7758/rsf.2016.2.2.07.
[4] Sharkey, P. Neighborhoods, Cities, and Economic Mobility. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 2016;2(2):159–177. doi:10.7758/rsf.2016.2.2.07.
[5] National Center for Homeless Education, UNC Greensboro. Federal Data Summary School Years 2012–13 to 2014–15: Education for Homeless Children and Youth. December 2015.
[6] deVuono-powell S, Allbee A, and Stewart J. Public Health for All: Rethinking the Legacy of Public Health & Housing. The BLOCK Project. July 2017.
[7] Cohen R and Wardrip K. Should I Stay or Should I Go? Exploring the Effects of Housing Instability and Mobility on Children. Center for Housing Policy. February 2011.
[8] K-12 Education: Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change Schools Frequently. U.S. Government Accountability Office. November 2010.
[9] As Enterprise Community Partners explains in its recently released report, Creating Equitable Student Outcomes, “segregation has been and continues to be a factor in the United States,” creating a formidable barrier to academic achievement.
[10] Charette A. Creating Equitable Student Outcomes: How Housing and Education Policy are Intertwined. Enterprise Community Partners. August 2017.
[11] In a research paper entitled The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters, Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) emphasize the need for radical change: “From the continuing impact of redlining on American homeownership to the retreat from desegregation in public education, public policy has shaped these disparities, leaving them impossible to overcome without racially-aware policy change.”
[12] Sharkey, P. Neighborhoods, Cities, and Economic Mobility. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 2016;2(2):159–177. doi:10.7758/rsf.2016.2.2.07.
Alexis Etow, JD, is a staff attorney at ChangeLab Solutions, where she works at the intersection of education and health. Her focus is on developing policy strategies and facilitating multi-sector collaborations and partnerships between key community stakeholders to create healthier school environments that support children, young people, and their families.
