Category: Homeless

Addressing Homelessness in Urban Schools
1/1/06 - Lynn K. Wilder, Elizabeth J. Rotz , Amy W. Sonntag, Equity Alliance at ASU
This On Point is for all teachers who want to explore issues around homeless children. Students who experience homelessness are people first. Like their peers, they have unique hopes, dreams, cultural heritages, abilities, disabilities, and unique personality traits. As urban schools become more sophisticated in developing their support systems for students, it is important that systems stress personalization rather than generalization. The authors discussed that homelessness is a serious...
Early Childhood Residential Instability and School Readiness: Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
1/1/09 - Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, Claire McKenna
"This paper assesses the consequences of residential instability during the first five years of a child’s life for a host of school readiness outcomes. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examine the relationship between multiple moves and children’s cognitive and behavioral readiness at age five. We further test this relationship for differences among poor, near poor, and not poor children. We find that moving three or more times in a child’s first five...
Educating homeless children in Chicago
1/1/08 - Amy Dworsky
This report highlights the results of a study that examined the educational needs of a group of homeless children in the Chicago Public Schools. The research involved both qualitative interviews with key informants familiar with the problems facing homeless families with children in Chicago and quantitative analyses of administrative data from Inner Voice, an agency that provides services to chronically homeless families, and the Chicago Public Schools. Generally speaking, the educational...
Homeless Children and Youth: Causes and Consequences
1/1/09 - Yumiko Aratani
Housing plays a pivotal role in the well-being of children and families. Stable housing is a critical factor for positive child and youth development. Unfortunately, the number of homeless families with children has increased in recent years due to the lack of affordable housing. On top of that, the current economic recession and the housing crisis further increase the likelihood of homelessness among children and youth.
Parental Incarceration, Child Homelessness, and the Invisible Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
1/1/09 - Christopher Wildeman
"Although the share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since at least the early 1980s, the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in at least the second of these shifts by considering the effects of parental incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These are the only data that simultaneously represent a contemporary cohort of the urban...
Underperforming schools and the education of vulnerable children and youth
1/1/09 - Lisa Walker, Cheryl Smithgall
"The lives of vulnerable children and youth and the performance of their schools are intertwined. Chapin Hall studies suggest that the numbers of vulnerable children and youth in underperforming schools can be high. This is significant because the life experiences of these children can distract their attention from learning, and in more serious cases, lead to cognitive or physical impairment. In the classroom, these students may struggle with basic literacy skills, disengage from...