A critical analysis of the research on student homelessness

Miller, Peter M. (2011). A critical analysis of the research on student homelessness. Review of Educational Research 81(3), 308-337.

This is a straightforward review of the research on student homelessness since 1990. Statistics on the growth of the homeless population in recent years begin the article, and those figures in themselves are important for educators to know. According to Miller, “at least 1 out of 38 children living at or below the poverty level in the United States experienced sheltered or street homelessness in 2009” (p. 309). Homelessness has been linked with low achievement in school as well as with low attendance rates, behavior problems, and other undesirable outcomes, and it seems that these negative effects go even beyond those that we might expect for children from low-income families who are not homeless. It seems realistic to expect that many teachers will encounter children who are homeless in their classrooms. When I taught in the K-12 sector more than 20 years ago, homeless students were not completely unheard of, but they were rare. Now, almost every urban teacher I know personally has told me about children they have in their classrooms who live in cars, children who live in shelters, and children whose families have moved in with close relatives because they either lost their homes entirely or they could not afford good housing. With the problems with absentee landlords in the urban core of my metropolitan area being especially acute, some families I’ve heard of had to move when housing became uninhabitable and could not afford to move to better housing immediately. The problem of homelessness is growing, and articles like Miller’s can help educators stay informed on the issue.

I appreciated Miller’s helpful review of the provisions of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which has changed the way we identify and provide support to homeless students and their families in recent years. This Act first was implemented in 1987, and was reauthorized as part of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. With the McKinley-Vento Act, for the first time families who moved into relatives’ households (Miller uses the term “doubling up” to describe this circumstance) were considered homeless and thus qualified for various kinds of assistance. Prior to that time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had not technically considered those families homeless. If you lived in a space which was primarily designed as a residential space, even if it was not your own, under HUD policy you had a home. The McKinley-Vento Act changed that.

One of Miller’s findings, based on a review of 151 articles, with 33 articles he considered especially strong methodologically being “foregrounded” (p. 314), was that families that lived in shelters often had more access to support services and other resources than did families that “doubled up” with relatives. One might think the shelter would be a worse environment, but the doubled up families often experienced serious problems due to “overcrowded living quarters, intrahousehold disagreement, and domestic violence” (p. 320).

One of my mother’s favorite sayings was “Put yourself in his/her place.” For those of us who have never experienced homelessness, it is easy to look down upon the choices that people in that predicament make. However, if I put myself in the place of a head of a homeless household (often a single female), I have to admit that my first resort would indeed be to call on relatives who might make room for me, and that I would do my best to contribute to that household, with the idea that if someday the situations were reversed, I would return the favor. That is what families do. Of course, if it is not your own residence, you cannot always control the environment or the people who enter it, and that can and does have tragic results sometimes, as in cases where in my own city, children have died in fires when left with only slightly older children, or when significant others of resident family members have killed children who were too noisy or too much trouble in some other way. Still, even if “doubling up” meant taking my children into a chaotic environment, going to a shelter would be a last resort for me, I know, just one step above living in the street. I’d sooner take my chances with relatives I know than with strangers in an “institutional” setting, no matter what.

No solutions to the problem of homelessness are offered here, but Miller’s overview helped me stay informed on the many forms homelessness can take, the laws concerning homeless students, and the various kinds of services that the law makes available to them. Miller suggests that any solutions we might find will involve collaboration across the network of entities that work with homeless families, which may not always be as coordinated as they could be. He writes of “a siloed field of practice where efforts to support overlapping populations of families and/or students unfold across boundaries without shared language or operational understandings” (p. 327). Working together to build more effective networks will not solve the problem of homelessness, but Miller’s suggestion still makes sense. The presence of a “siloed” field suggests to me that this is ultimately an issue of who gets scarce resources. Only if a mentality of sharing resources to tackle a complex, shared problem like homelessness takes the place of a mentality of competing agendas and interests is there any chance of Miller’s ideal of collaboration becoming reality.