Exam 2 | Urban Schools and Communities

• Chronic homelessness

  • Often an unaccompanied homeless individual
  • Often has disabling condition (substance abuse, serious mental illness, chronic physical illness, etc.)
  • Continuously homeless for a long period (e.g., year or more), or has had multiple episodes
  • Represents a small fraction (less than 1 in 5) of the overall homeless population
  • Uses a sizable proportion of the resources allocated to the homeless
• Only ~1 in 4 families that qualify for housing assistance receive it due to limited funding, long waitlists, or housing shortages
• Eviction: To force out (a person, tenant) from a property, building, or land, especially with the support of the law. Also known as "involuntary displacement"
• In 1991, 46% of renters in the U.S. were house poor. By 2013, that number had risen to 57%
• Desmond argues that eviction is not just a result of poverty, but also a cause of poverty
• Percentage of renters spending at least half of their income on rent rose to 30%
• Incidence of eviction: Desmond's Milwaukee study revealed 16 evictions a day and 1 out of every 8 renters had experienced at least one eviction in the last two years
• Characteristics that increase the likelihood of eviction include being female, black, and having children
• Affordable housing


  Housing that costs no more than 30% of household income
• Transitional/short-term homelessness


  • Can be single adults, families, youth
  • Shorter duration – may experience a single episode of homelessness after a significant event (e.g., illness, job loss, divorce)
  • Typically seen as a temporary condition
  • The majority of people experiencing homelessness in any given year = transitional
• Challenges to learning presented by homelessness include frequent moves leading to educational setbacks, transportation challenges, parental stress affecting support for children's schooling, lack of suitable study space, inadequate sleep, inadequate food, safety concerns, bullying, and child stress/mental health
• Some scholars argue that affordable housing is a misleading term as affordability is a relationship between housing and people
• Evictions used to be quite rare, but now are a fact of life for many poor families
• Housing precarity = instability in housing, including risk of eviction, risk of utility disconnection, etc.
• Renters are more likely to be house poor
• Some people now use the term “unhoused”
• According to the McKinney-Vento Act, a child is considered homeless who “lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence”
• Fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence


  A place where a person can regularly and appropriately sleep every night
• Children who are homeless


  • Doubled up
  • Living in motels, hotels, etc
  • Living in emergency or transitional shelters
  • Living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, etc.
  • Migratory children who live in one of the above
• Homelessness


  • Lower school achievement (e.g., lower grades, lower pass rates on standardized tests, especially in reading)
  • Chronic absenteeism (15 missed days per year on average vs. 11 for FRPL vs. 8 for full-priced lunch)
  • Lower levels of classroom engagement
  • Increased risk of dropping out
  • Lower high school graduation rates
  • Higher rates of disciplinary action
• McKinney-Vento Act requirements


  1. Homeless students who move have the right to remain in their schools of origin if in the student's best interest

  2. If students change schools, must be immediately enrolled in new school even if they do not have the records normally required

  3. Transportation must be provided to/from school of origin if requested

  4. Homeless students must have access to all programs/services for which they are eligible (special ed, preschool, nutrition, language assistance, gifted & talented, before/after school care, etc.)
• Sharkey


  Effects of acute environmental stress (quantitative study)
• Harding


  Effects of socialization (qualitative study)
• Many studies have documented a relationship between living in a violent neighborhood and lower academic performance
• Randomness" of the timing of violence allowed Sharkey to test short-term effects of violence, the day-to-day "microprocesses" that might affect a student's performance in school
• Results of Sharkey Study

  • Significant decline in ELA test scores (English Language Arts), but not math scores, when exposed to violence before the test. Not a huge effect, but still noteworthy.
  • Effects strongest for Blacks (esp. boys) vs. Hispanics and Whites
  • Effects strongest for elementary school students vs. middle school students
• Harding's question


  How might the neighborhood serve as a source of socialization for teenagers and affect teenagers' attachment to school?
• Socialization


  The process by which individuals learn how to behave as members of a given society
• Agents of socialization


  • Family
  • School
  • Peers
  • Media
  • Workplace
  • Neighborhoods
• Code of the Street (Anderson 1999)

  • Old heads: Traditional role model in the inner city, older man with stable work and family life, felt responsibility was to teach young men responsibilities regarding work ethic, family life, law, decency
  • New heads: New, younger role model in the inner city, fast money, fast life, acquires status not through blue-collar job, but through other means: drug dealing, underground economy, ruling the streets, derides family values, doesn't feel responsibility to establish traditional community norms
• Harding (2009) studied young teens in 3 Boston neighborhoods (two with high rates of poverty and violence, one with lower rates of poverty and violence) and found that teens in the two high poverty/high violence neighborhoods were more likely to associate with older peers (from ~ 2 years older to about their mid-20s) than teens in the low poverty/low violence neighborhoods
• Cross-cohort socialization


  Relationships that cut across cohort lines – i.e., relationships that young teens have with older peers (especially young adults) that serve as a means of transmitting norms about school, work, relationships etc.
• In more disadvantaged neighborhoods, older peers are more available to young teens
• Why do the boys in Franklin & RC (the two more disadvantaged / poor neighborhoods in Harding's study) associate more with older peers?

  • Neighborhood violence increases the salience of neighborhood identity
  • Persistent threat of violence causes young teens to look to older peers for protection from violence, to learn strategies to reduce threat of victimization
• Potential consequences of these cross-cohort friendships for young teens' socialization, particularly regarding school

  • May offer protection, but may also expose young teens to behaviors that may inhibit upward mobility (disengagement from school, early family formation, substance use, engagement with criminal activity)
  • Messaging from schools, teachers about importance of education may seem less relevant to day-to-day existence and safety for young teens
• Purpose of education


  Education is the process through which society provides its members with knowledge, values, and skills; It is the means by which we develop general and specific academic, social, and cultural tools
• Manifest functions of education


  • Clearly apparent: Subject matter, specific skills (reading, math, accounting, carpentry, etc.)
  • Human capital: knowledge and skills that make you more "bankable"; investment in future earnings
• Latent functions of education


  • Potential or hidden: Norms, values, and goals that we accrue by being in school (e.g. obedience, competition, conformity)
  • Hidden curriculum: non-academic socialization and training that takes place in school
• Schooling as cultural reproduction (Pierre Bourdieu)

  • Schools reproduce inequality by rewarding certain cultural norms over others
  • Cultural capital: Cultural & social class resources (speech and dress, interaction styles, experiences, ways of acting and being) that people inherit from parents/families and use to their advantage in different contexts
  • Schools value and reward the cultural capital of middle- and upper-class students & families, which places poor and working-class students & families at a disadvantage
• Cultural capital


  • Subtle set of class-based resources (knowledge, skills, competencies, mannerisms) valued and rewarded in social institutions (e.g., schools)
  • Originally used to describe knowledge of / preference for "high-brow" culture (e.g., opera, museums, art, fashion, etc) and how that knowledge results in academic benefits
  • More recently, cultural capital is used to refer various markers of middle-/upper-class status (e.g., dress, manners, language, etc), as well as the ability to navigate social institutions, such as schools – "know how"