Research
Check out our academic publications, policy reports, and working papers. Browse all of our work, or search by topic or type.
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School Diversity and Social Capital: Conditions That Foster Bridging Ties in Schools
Social networks can drive upward mobility for marginalized youth, yet cross-class ties remain difficult to form due to structural constraints, organizational barriers, and homophily. Using merged administrative and social network survey data from 948 11th-grade students, and interviews with 32 students, across five diverse high schools in metropolitan Detroit, we examine the mechanisms through which bridging ties form across social classes. Using exponential random graph models, we found that shared extracurricular activities and courses are the strongest predictors of cross-class friendship formation, while residential proximity plays a minimal role in most schools. Interviews further illuminated mechanisms through which school activities created “third spaces” for cross-class interaction. Findings suggest schools can foster cross-class ties through intentional programming and course scheduling, countering the effects of residential segregation, with important implications for educational equity and social mobility.
Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve it Alone
In Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer reframe chronic absenteeism as a symptom of a complex set of factors affecting the student, family, and community rather than simply an accountability metric for educators, schools, or districts. Lenhoff and Singer identify chronic absenteeism—often defined as missing 10 percent or more of instructional days—as an issue of social and economic inequality as much as an educational one, and they explore the role of K–12 schools and other organizations in solving this growing problem. The book is based on research conducted over eight years as part of a research-practice partnership with urban school systems in Detroit. Their results show the challenges of relying on school-based approaches to improve attendance, particularly in high absenteeism contexts where the causes of absenteeism are due to inequalities that are outside the scope of schools or districts to address. Purchase from our publisher and use code HCPR25 for a 20% discount: https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781682539613/rethinking-chronic-absenteeism/
What are Michigan Schools Doing to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism?
What are schools doing to reduce chronic absenteeism? In this brief, we summarize the results from our recent study of school attendance practices in Michigan. We sent surveys to every school leader in Michigan, asking a range of questions about their school attendance strategies and systems. (A full discussion of the results, as well as details about our survey methodology, can be found in the technical report.) The findings from this statewide survey offer a greater understanding of how Michigan schools are responding to the challenge of chronic absenteeism.
How are Michigan’s Schools Addressing Chronic Absenteeism?
This report provides comprehensive evidence about school attendance strategies in Michigan. Our findings come from a representative survey of Michigan school leaders during the 2024-25 school year. We address the following questions: What practices are Michigan schools using to improve attendance? What organizational systems are they developing and what staff members do they have in place to support their efforts? How do these vary across different contexts in the state, and to what extent have they changed over time? The responses will also allow us to measure the effectiveness of specific attendance practices in future research.
Corktown Residents’ Perceptions of their Neighborhood
The Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research is part of a research collaborative with scholars from the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan studying the implementation of the Corktown CNI and its impact on residents’ educational opportunities and experiences, as part of our increasing focus on children’s neighborhoods alongside their educational experiences. This report presents a closer look at Corktown residents’ perceptions of their neighborhood using data from a representative survey of Detroit residents during the summer of 2023.
Neighborhood Satisfaction and Implications for Detroit Schoolchildren
The Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research is increasing its focus on children’s neighborhoods alongside their educational experiences. As a first step, we partnered with the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study and our colleagues at the University of Southern California, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to conduct a representative survey of Detroit residents during the summer of 2023. This research brief uses the survey results to provide a baseline assessment of the neighborhood conditions affecting Detroit children and their families, from perceptions of improvement to social cohesion to satisfaction.
Chronic absenteeism in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood: addressing systemic & structural inequities through participatory action research
This study highlights the efforts of a Detroit-based community research group to understand chronic absenteeism in a way that acknowledges its underlying complexities. Employing Participatory Action Research, an intergenerational team of community members and university researchers examined the disconnect between educators’ strategies for addressing chronic absenteeism and students’ lived experiences with barriers to regular attendance. The findings reveal a school environment characterized by a punitive attendance framework that constrained teachers’ ability to address absences effectively and allowed school leaders to shift responsibility elsewhere. In contrast, students who experienced chronic absenteeism articulated a vision for improving attendance through specific structural pathways, school improvement, and social-emotional support. The discussion emphasizes the need for strategies that uphold students’ dignity and support educators’ capacity to move beyond punitive attendance policies.
Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Racial Composition in Detroit
Over the past few years, teacher recruitment and retention have become more difficult in Michigan, especially in the state’s highest-need districts. At the same time, the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) has substantially reduced large annual teacher vacancies. The district’s strategies to hire and retain teachers have included increased teacher compensation, improved working conditions, and a “Grow Your Own” program. How does teacher recruitment and retention in DPSCD compare to Detroit charter schools and other districts in metro Detroit? And over time, to what extent has the racial composition of the teachers changed in Detroit and the metro area? We answer these questions through an analysis of longitudinal state administrative records on teachers and teaching positions in metro Detroit, for the 2016-17 through 2022-23 school years.
How Has Attendance in Michigan Changed Since the COVID-19 Pandemic?
This brief provides a closer look at how chronic absenteeism and average attendance rates have changed in Michigan since the pandemic.
The Role of School- Based Transportation in School Choice: Evidence from Detroit
In school choice systems, many families face geographic constraints. Yet, there is limited evidence on the association between school-based transportation and students’ school choice, especially in fragmented transportation contexts. Using unique data on Detroit kindergarten students’ eligibility and access to school-based transportation, we find that students with access to a bus at a school—either a traditional or shuttle-style bus—were 4-5 percentage points more likely to enroll in that school. The association was greater for traditional buses in higher-crime neighborhoods and for shuttle-style buses for farther-away choices. We did not find that this association differed by block-group-level household car ownership. Our findings suggest that school-based transportation can increase school choice access, depending on policy design and contextual factors. This report was co-published with the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH).
Detroit’s Educational Outcomes and Opportunities Across Race and Gender
Contemporary education policy is dominated by narrow representations of student data, resulting in a limited understanding of school inequalities. This study aims to show how educational outcomes and opportunities are differentially experienced when race and gender are simultaneously accounted for in Detroit. Analyzing educational outcomes and opportunities for students who live in Detroit, we examine differences by race and gender in areas such as math and reading achievement, high school graduation, chronic absenteeism, access to advanced coursework in high school, and special education.
Chronic Absenteeism in the School-Prison Nexus
This qualitative case study examines how attendance management practices are designed and implemented in a large urban school district and explores the empirical and conceptual relationship between student behavior and attendance management within the “school-prison nexus.” We use interviews with parents, high school students, and staff charged with reducing chronic absenteeism to demonstrate how managing students’ attendance through intervention plans, student monitoring, and threats of legal action have implicit and explicit parallels to the management of student behavior in schools and could be considered a potential mechanism through which the school-prison nexus functions. We conclude with implications for schools and districts as they seek ways to reduce chronic absenteeism without contributing to the over-surveillance and punishment of high school youth.
A Stable Place to Live and Learn: Why Detroit Housing Policy Is Critical to the Success of City Schools
This report was made in collaboration with Poverty Solutions at UM. It was created in order to better understand opportunities to address housing instability among Detroit’s families in a manner that meets the educational needs of children. This brief analyzes interviews with 20 parents identified as homeless or housing unstable and the responses of more than 1,400 Detroit parents who responded to a January 2022 survey conducted by Wayne State University’s Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research (Detroit PEER). Themes are discussed and policy recommendations based on innovations in other cities are presented.
Gaps in Identification and Support for Students Experiencing Homelessness and Housing Instability in Detroit
Homelessness and housing instability can have significant negative effects on students’ academic and behavioral outcomes. Schools that endeavor to support students who are experiencing housing instability can only do so if they accurately identify students facing these challenges. This mixed-methods study provides deep, contextualized data on the experiences of housing unstable youth and families in Detroit traditional public and charter schools, whether and how they are identified as housing unstable by their districts, and what schools are doing to support them. We find that 16% of Detroit students were housing unstable in 2021-22, but Detroit schools only identified 4% of students as homeless under the McKinney-Vento Act. Our qualitative data suggest that this undercount is predominantly related to parents’ feelings of stigma and shame associated with discussing their situation with their schools and in some cases a lack of follow-through when parents do divulge their housing issue. Housing unstable students who were not identified by their districts as such were more likely to have been suspended; identification was not associated with attendance or student mobility, compared to other housing unstable students.
School Transportation Mode and Student Attendance Across Schools of Choice
The availability and reliability of school transportation is essential for regular student attendance at school. Yet, school transportation resources are stretched for both families and school districts in cities with widespread school choice, where students’ residences do not determine where they enroll in school. This study provides some of the first evidence on how Detroit students get to school. Going beyond eligibility for the school bus, we use linked survey and administrative data to determine how students get to school, the student and school characteristics associated with riding the school bus, and how mode of transit is associated with attendance.
