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Policy Corner

Penn GSE experts on the educational headlines of the moment
by Rebecca Raber

The Headline

Student Homelessness on the Rise

The Story

Across the country, the number of K–12 students experiencing homelessness is climbing. The National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE) found that in academic year 2021–2022 (the latest year for which national data is available), public schools identified more than 1.2 million students experiencing homelessness—2.4 percent of the entire student population. That’s a 10 percent increase over the previous year and a 79 percent increase since the 2004–2005 school year. And unfortunately, states that have more recent numbers don’t show that trend deescalating. According to data released late last year by Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), roughly one in nine students in New York City were without permanent housing during the 2022–2023 school year. And Houston Independent School District, one of the ten biggest in the nation, reported more than 7,200 unhoused students—more than during the year when Hurricane Harvey devastated the city in 2017–2018.

Student housing insecurity has acute consequences for school attendance, which itself has ramifications in academic and socioemotional outcomes. The latest NCHE numbers show that roughly 52 percent of students experiencing homelessness were chronically absent (defined as missing one out of every ten days of school), which has been shown to correlate with lower test scores, course grades, eagerness to learn, and social engagement, as well as higher drop-out rates.

The expert

Penn GSE Professor Michael Gottfried, GRW’10, an applied economist whose research explores the links between absenteeism and achievement, wants parents and caregivers to know that every day of instruction matters. “The research shows,” he said, “that even missing one day is linked to lower test scores.”
Michael Gottfried portrait
Photo credit: Lora Reehling Photography

HIS TAKE

As an expert in absenteeism, Gottfried is worried about how already vulnerable populations, including those experiencing homelessness, are being further left behind. “Students who are missing school are missing both academic content and valuable time to interact with classmates, interact with adults. . . . They’re missing chances to grow and develop socially and emotionally,” he said. “If I don’t go to school, I miss out on all of these opportunities.” And it becomes a vicious cycle. Once a student returns to school, said Gottfried, they are behind in their classwork and feel alienated and disengaged from their peers, all of which conspires to make them want to go to school less in the future.

That is true for all students, but for those who are already starting from a place of precarity, it widens inequality. “If school is this lever to propel you academically, in life, in the economy, in the job market, and if you’re already behind, missing school is going to make it even harder to break out of cycles of poverty, to have housing stability, to raise families,” said Gottfried. “Absenteeism is doubling down on the disparities that we’ve seen previously.”

He is quick to add, however, that the vulnerable students don’t bear the blame for their missed days—which could have an emotional cause, like stress and anxiety, or a practical one, like lack of transportation or clean clothes—and that we should, instead, look to fix the system that is not doing enough to support those students coming to school. One easily scalable and replicable solution, he said, could be moving the free breakfast program from the cafeteria to the classroom, something that was the subject of one of his recent studies.

“It’s not just a location change, but it’s giving the food to everyone once it goes to the classroom,” he said. “Why that works, specifically for homeless youth, is that part of the problem with the cafeteria is you have to have your voucher, you have to be there on time or early. You’re singled out for needing to eat the free food. But if everyone around me is eating breakfast at 8:30 together in the classroom? These are the kinds of little things that make it okay for me to be at school. I feel [a similar lunch program] would double down on that.”

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