Coming and Going: The Neighborhood and Educational Contexts of Mobile Students

Stefanie DeLuca

Despite the frequency of residential and school mobility in the US, little research has examined the destinations of mobile families, and even less research has examined the school destinations of mobile students. Given the demonstrated importance of both neighborhood and school context, it is critical to determine where families and children “end up” when they make a move. On the one hand, many researchers suggest that the disruptions often accompanying neighborhood moves negatively impact behavioral outcomes and school performance. By contrast, residential mobility experiments, where poor families are placed into better neighborhoods via legislative mandate, demonstrate that moving from disadvantaged neighborhoods to more affluent, safer areas can significantly improve children’s educational outcomes and family life. If the quality of new schools and neighborhoods can make up for the disruption caused by moving, then some moves may be worth it. Further, many current policies, such as HOPE VI and No Child Left Behind, might increase the chances that a family will move neighborhoods and that a child will change schools. Therefore, we need to get a comprehensive sense of the consequences of these policies for youth educational development via their impact on mobility.

About Stefanie DeLuca

Stefanie DeLuca is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University. She earned her PhD in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. During this time she was a graduate fellow at both the Institute for Policy Research and the Joint Center for Poverty Research. She is currently engaged is several areas of research involving sociological considerations of education and housing policy issues. First, she is analyzing educational attainment, the timing of educational transitions and student effort using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). Stefanie’s second project uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess whether participation in career and technical education (CTE) enhances school outcomes, especially for students at risk. Two additional programs of research consider the impacts of neighborhood and social context on the educational and economic outcomes of families and young people. One study examines the long-term effects of the Gautreaux neighborhood mobility program on welfare use, employment, special education, and mobility patterns. Another project involves a mixed methods analysis of survey data and interviews with mothers and teenagers from the Baltimore site of the Moving to Opportunity Program. Stefanie’s work has been published in academic journals such as Sociology of Education, Social Forces, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, Sociological Focus and the Brookings Institution series on Urban Policy.