Child Well Being: Education

What We Know from the Report Card

• Proficiency rates for homeless children in reading and math fall on average 16% lower than the scores for all students.
• Less than one in four homeless children graduates from high school.

Academic Proficiency Among Homeless Students vs. All Students

Homeless children have the educational deck stacked against them. The link between education and income is one of the most transparent relationships in economics,⁸⁰ and one of the clearest routes out of poverty. Children experiencing homelessness are faced with huge barriers to achieving a high school diploma. Education is key to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Strikingly, 82% of children whose parents have less than a high school diploma live in poverty.⁸¹

Poverty traps poor students who need a good education to better their living standards. But in a classic Catch 22, poor children are more likely to do worse than non-poor children on measures of school achievement. They are twice as likely as their non-poor counterparts to have repeated a grade, to have been expelled or suspended from school, or to have dropped out of high school.⁸²

Poverty is strongly correlated with poor educational outcomes.⁸⁵ Some of the factors interfering with education include:

• Low-income districts where schools are inadequately funded and academic resources are limited or non-existent often provide lower quality child care and poorer schooling. Some administrators and staff often have low expectations for their students.
• Low-income neighborhoods – characterized by poor housing conditions, high crime, and unemployment – are associated with higher rates of behavior problems among children. These problems impact school readiness and performance.
• The sparse presence of books in a poor home creates a literacy environment that may impede cognitive development.
• Children may be direct victims of their parents’ compromised mental health – particularly maternal depression and distress, which is more common in low-income families. These problems can lead to disruptions in the parent-child relationship that affects social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes.
• Malnutrition, exposure to lead poisoning and other toxins, low birth weight, abuse, and poor general health are all endemic conditions of poverty and can result in different educational outcomes between poor children and their non-poor peers.
• Risky health behaviors including smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, restricted opportunities for healthy eating or exercise and exposure to various environmental hazards – poor housing conditions, crime, proximity to pollutants – interfere with the capacity to learn.