Moving Across the Urban/Suburban Divide: Student Strategies for Navigating Higher Performing Schools

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Where families live is still a major determinant of the quality of children’s schools, with significant implications for social inequality and economic mobility. While research strongly points to the detrimental effects of concentrated poverty on academic outcomes for children, scholarship remains limited on whether the same low-income children would fare better if they could grow up in more advantaged neighborhood settings and attend higher quality schools. Recent research suggests that mobility programs positively affect the long-term outcomes, including college attendance and earnings, of youth who move prior to adolescence, but not youth who move at older ages.

This study examines a recent mobility program called the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BHMP), a housing voucher program that has created dramatic and durable change in families’ neighborhoods and schools. Families who move with the BHMP experience large reductions in neighborhood poverty and racial segregation. These significant residential changes are mirrored in children’s school changes.

By examining the experiences of these families, this study explores both the process of making a significant change in school context and its effects. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study quantitatively evaluates the effects of the program on students’ academic outcomes using administrative data from the BHMP and student level academic data from the state of Maryland. Additionally, this study qualitatively evaluates the process of adjusting to new schools through in-depth interviews with 110 parents and 89 interviews with youth participating in the program. Through these interviews this study examines the strategies students and parents use to navigate these schools and the mechanisms through which this type of school change affects youth.

This poster illustrates preliminary qualitative findings from analysis of the youth interviews, which indicate that the age at which students make this residential move plays a large role in their adjustment to new school contexts. Youth developmental stages (middle childhood compared to adolescence) intersect with their new social contexts, such that younger students more easily establish new friendships and are pulled into social networks by their new school peers, while adolescents face a more complicated and differentiated social landscape. Adolescents more often adopt a strategy of self-isolation after moving and more frequently face social exclusion by peers than their younger counterparts. These findings help explain why we might observe age differences in the long-term effects of mobility programs; rather than being driven solely by differences in the length of exposure to lower-poverty neighborhood and school contexts, differences in the long-term effects of these programs are likely also driven by age variation in the formation of new social networks and social integration in these settings.

Author

• Anna Rhodes, Johns Hopkins University