Housing Choice Vouchers and School Mobility: Evidence from Houston

• In Event: Housing, Neighborhoods, and the Schools Children Attend: Policy Evidence

Abstract

Housing vouchers relax budget constraints and may facilitate moves to higher-opportunity neighborhoods and better-resourced schools. Whether they ultimately improve children's outcomes, however, depends on residential mobility, school switching, and the quality of destination schools. A large literature has linked housing vouchers to children's academic outcomes with mixed results, yet very few have directly observed the schools that students attend. As a result, we know relatively little about whether and how vouchers translate into access to higher-quality schools, the school-level channel that ultimately shapes children's learning environments. In this study, we use administrative enrollment records to directly trace school mobility trajectories and the quality of schools students attend. We study Houston, where most public school students are assigned to zoned schools, so residential moves often entail changes in school enrollment. We examine how voucher receipt influences the likelihood of school mobility, whether moves are non-structural/voluntary or structural/driven by grade transitions, and whether students who move gain access to higher or lower quality schools. We link administrative data from the Houston Housing Authority (HHA) and the Texas Education Agency (TEA), combining voucher timing with six-week enrollment records, campus-level value-added estimates for grades 4–8, and measures of school demographic composition, including shares of economically disadvantaged and at-risk peers. Identification leverages variation in the timing of voucher receipt, using not-yet-treated recipients as a comparison group for earlier recipients, allowing us to compare students who receive vouchers earlier with otherwise similar students who receive them later. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design (Callaway and Sant'Anna, 2021) that accommodates heterogeneous and time-varying treatment effects, we find that housing vouchers lead to a sharp increase in non-structural school moves in the year of voucher receipt, followed by a persistent decline in subsequent years. Structural moves remain unaffected, serving as a placebo check. In terms of school quality, we find that housing vouchers increase school value added for non-structural movers, with no significant changes for structural movers. Taken together, these results indicate that housing vouchers cause an immediate rise in non-structural school moves and a gradual improvement in the academic quality of the schools students attend. These findings suggest that housing vouchers improve children's educational environments by enabling families to relocate into higher value-added schools, identifying a school-mobility and school-quality channel that prior studies relying on neighborhood proxies have been unable to observe.

Authors

• Jiaxin Li, Rice University
  Presenting Author

• Rui Zeng, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Anna Rhodes, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jeremy E Fiel, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Hojung Lee, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author