Nearly 115,000 students in New York City schools experienced homelessness during the 2017–18 school year, according to new data released by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) last month.

Most states use an education funding formula to allocate state and local dollars to school districts. Most funding formulas attempt to account for student poverty, among other factors, in distributing funds.

For decades, free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) status has been used as a proxy measure for student poverty. Families filled out paper lunch forms, and these were the basis for allocating resources to schools, defining accountability goals, and conducting research.

Current efforts to end homelessness are largely focused on the immediate housing needs of adults. Yet recent research further demonstrates the importance of addressing childhood, early care, and education in efforts to prevent and end homelessness. This blog post summarizes five new studies.

Homelessness among children is correlated with developmental delays, fair or poor health, and high healthcare utilization. Associations of homelessness specifically among infants younger than 12 months, however, are unknown.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in highpoverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes using administrative data from tax returns.

A Promising Approach to Improving Student Outcomes