Making the Case? Unpacking Family Case Management Effects and School Effects in Neighborhood Redevelopment Initiatives

• In Event: Leveraging Housing Policy to Reduce Educational Inequality

Abstract

While public investments have often treated neighborhood, school, and family contexts separately, new place-based initiatives, like the CNI, seek to combine mixed-income neighborhood redevelopment with local school partnerships and intensive family case management to improve the outcomes of children and youth. However, despite over $1 billion in CNI grant funding being awarded, and the subsequent development of over 30,000 new mixed-income housing units across 40 cities, we have little evidence of the effects of these initiatives on the educational outcomes of children and youth. Although studies in previous initiatives, like HOPE VI, have explored the outcomes of children and youth, these studies often relied on surveys, which limit our ability to understand specific educational outcomes and how they change over time. Through a unique partnership with one of the largest implementation partners of the CNI, we merged family case management data with student-level administrative data from SCS and leveraged advanced difference-in-difference methods to understand the educational effects of the CNI in Memphis, TN.

In general, we find that attending CNI partnering school substantially decreased behavioral problems and that receiving case management services increased attendance. Leveraging the publicly available CNI documents (Shelby County Board of Education, 2015), we see that concrete financial investments were made in partnering schools and that increasing school programming that seeks to improve behavioral health was evident in the plans. These investments may explain the decrease in suspensions, while the role of literacy in USI’s case management services may explain the increase in attendance.

Furthermore, we observed substantial differences across gender and age. In particular, the effect of attending a CNI partnering school on behavioral problems was considerably larger for boys. As boys are often suspended more than girls, boys may have had more room to improve in this area. When considering age, older students were more responsive to school effects, particularly in math and reading performance. These trends may reflect a greater emphasis on academic performance in middle school, as well as higher rates of misbehavior in middle school that may be more responsive to school interventions. 

Moreover, we observed substantial differences across time. Concerning CNI attendance, we observed significant positive effects in both Math and ELA in the first year of the CNI programming that dissipated over time. This was not the case for behavior, where the effects of CNI attendance maintained and—in some cases—grew over time. 

Concerning policy, our findings suggest that the expansion of housing redevelopment initiatives to include broader neighborhood institutions, such as schools, can be effective. While future research is needed to understand how these mechanisms operate, the contribution of CNI financial resources to SCS, as well as the stated metrics of success, cannot be overlooked. Additionally, concerning practices, our findings demonstrate that case management services can be a powerful tool for improving the outcomes of families throughout mixed-income redevelopment initiatives and that these services can improve the educational outcomes of students. 

Author

• Jason Jabbari, Washington University in St. Louis
  Presenting Author