Is Student Homelessness in the United States Inevitable (Part 1)?
By Andrew
Student homeless in the United States is at an all-time high.
In school year 2016-2017, the most recent school year for which we have data, 1.3 million children, or one in every 50, was homeless. Comparatively, one in 59 children has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and/or a peanut allergy. As staggering as these numbers are, they underestimate student homelessness as they fail to capture populations not enrolled in school; who dropout; or who are enrolled in preschool programs administered by local education authorities. The number may actually be closer to 2.5 million. The population of homeless students in the United States is growing exponentially. There was a seven percent increase between 2014-2017 and a 70% increase over the last decade.
Even more concerning, this surge in student homelessness occurred during a comprehensive federal government effort to end homelessness. The mandate was broad, including how to identify vulnerable children and acquire accurate information about their situation. This was critical as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of Education, the two federal bureaucracies with the most oversight for provision of service to students, differ on how to define homelessness. The U.S. Department of Education’s definition is more inclusive than HUD’s criteria. Unfortunately, these inconsistencies still exist and have created momentum in Congress to redefine homelessness. For now, though, these discrepancies continue to limit understanding of the scope of the problem and misdirect provision of service.
Interestingly, student homelessness is pervasive across geographies. Rural student homeless has increased by 11% since 2014 and in New York City, for the fourth school year in a row, the homeless student population exceeded 100,000. Major metropolitan areas across the country are facing similar growth trends in student homelessness as the map from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness demonstrates.
According to data from the National Coalition for Homeless Education, only seven states reported a reduction in student homelessness of 10% or more since school year 2014-2015, and only four of those states reported a decrease in the number of homeless students identified by public schools as homeless for two consecutive years.
We know that homeless students are more likely to be chronically absent, are 87% more likely to drop out of school than their stably-housed peers, and only graduate from high school on-time 64% of the time.
Beyond our moral obligation, the social and economic consequences of these poor education outcomes should compel us to act,
Economic - one study asserts that child poverty costs the U.S. over $1 trillion annually.
Health - a multi-city, long-term Canadian study showed how housing instability effects short and long term health. Worth noting is that health status, particularly mental health, often leads to homelessness. It is both a cause and consequence.
According to research from America’s Promise, young people impacted by homelessness overwhelmingly report the negative toll it has taken on their lives.
This should be an issue of the day. At least by one imperfect measure, it hasn’t been. Back to the comparison of peanut allergies and ASD. Since 2004, as the Google Trends data below indicates, the average interest in “student homelessness” in the United States was less than “child peanut allergies” and “child autism” despite its higher prevalence.
Still, while the interest trend line is positive, the numbers are underwhelming compared to the human toll.
How did we end up here?
Obfuscation? Generalized apathy? Tyranny of short-termism? Structural ossification? Incentive misalignment? Failed policies? Awful program implementation? Not-my-kid-not-my-problem situation? Spill ink on a page and it likely looks like all of these (and more).
School districts—and sometimes individual schools—across the country have been forced to address these formidable challenges over which they have very limited control. The problem is that many of the solutions that are being offered, to no fault of the districts and schools, are too narrow, focused only on the symptoms,
In Santa Rosa, Florida, a small group of families with school-age children are receiving housing rental assistance;
In New York City, the Department of Education added 69 social workers to support homeless students;
One school in San Francisco, is experimenting with turning its gym into an overnight shelter for families; and
Los Angeles is considering expanding a program that will allow families to park their cars overnight on school owned property.
These communities and others are doing herculean work and should be applauded for their initiative. We should learn from their successes. But these are not comprehensive or sustainable solutions. Similarly, the Obama Administration's Open Door platform amplifies learnings from local work to address veteran homelessness that can be applied to other homeless populations.
But there are too many red numbers in the table above to be content with the progress being made.
Homelessness is old. The gospels suggest Jesus lacked stable housing,
Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).
“Each day Jesus was teaching at the temple, and each evening He went out to spend the night on the hill called the Mount of Olives, and all the people came early in the morning to hear Him at the temple” (Luke 21:37-38).
In the United States, the first documented cases of homelessness appear in colonial records from the 1640s. The federal government has been working on homelessness since at least 1892 when Congress allocated $20,000 to the Department of Labor to investigate urban slums in cities with at least 200,000 residents. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt formed a formal housing commission to continue these investigations, but these efforts were halted with the stock market crash of 1929. And most are familiar with the Johnson administration's War on Poverty first outlined in the 1964 State of the Union.
Despite its seeming intractability over the millennia, and the data that details nothing short of an epidemic, homelessness, particularly student homelessness, is not inevitable in America.
Homelessness is an interconnected set of problems of our own making. It can be solved but we have to want to solve it. We need the conviction to act, the will to sustain the work and the creativity to build governance structures that insulate and bolster the interventions that we know are effective.
America is too wealthy to let our children go without stable housing.
But the same things we've been doing for two centuries won’t fix this problem. Below are a few observations and thoughts that could inform a path forward,
Homelessness may be unmanageable.
Innovative solutions to fix student homelessness are not driven by federal policy but by local pragmatism.
Homelessness fixes must be insulated from politics.
The federal government should not lead this work.
Non-governmental governance structures are better positioned to fix humanity’s trickiest problems (see: energy and AI).
Incentives to bring private sector solutions to bear to fix data issues should be explored.
Homelessness is a multidimensional problem and thus solutions must be formulated and implemented holistically.
We need national leaders who can guide us through the painful but necessary conversations about the state of our values; not people who reinforce and magnify our worst impulses (self-obsession, greed, dishonesty, closed-mindedness).
We need forcing functions at scale to create a more engaged public on this issue (one model, and another).
Fixing this problem will fix other problems (substance abuse, school truancy, unemployment). And maybe, it will fix us. Putting us back on the path to the just, generous people we are destined to be.