Homeless Students and Academic Achievement: Evidence from a Large Urban Area

There is no meaningful difference in achievement between homeless and housed low-socioeconomic status (SES) elementary school students.

Attendance is a mediator of lowered achievement and that commonly suspected school-level characteristics do not predict homeless student success.

Although some school-level factors are significant predictors of non-homeless students’ test scores, none of the school characteristics are significant when there is an interaction with housing status, indicating that there is no relationship between the percentage of homeless/highly mobile students in a school, the overall percentage of students in poverty, the enrollment of the school, or the overall achievement level of students at the school and homeless/highly mobile students’ math or languages arts test scores.

Housing status is not an important predictor of academic achievement in either language arts or math.