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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Detroit Schools Severely Under-Identify Students Experiencing Homelessness and Housing Instability
In this policy brief in partnership with Poverty Solutions at UM and MSU's College of Education, we provide clear evidence that Detroit schools under-identify students experiencing homelessness and housing instability, and we identify ways that schools and districts can improve identification.
Detroit Parents’ Attitudes on COVID-19 Prevention Strategies in School
This report summarizes key findings from a representative survey of Detroit parents of K-12 students fielded in January 2022. By examining Detroit parents’ support for quarantine, masking, vaccine mandates, and remote learning policies in schools alongside specific pandemic-related hardships, we were able to identify the degree to which these barriers shaped a given household’s support for each policy. We hope this research informs the development of school health measures that will ensure equitable educational access as the pandemic continues into this school year.
Beyond the Bus: Reconceptualizing School Transportation for Mobility Justice
This essay combines an ecological perspective with a mobility justice theoretical framework to reconceptualize the relationship between school transportation and educational access. Authors Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Jeremy Singer, Kimberly Stokes, James Bear Mahowald, and Sahar Khawaja document the problem of “getting to school ”that is at the intersection of students’ family, community, and social contexts and how it goes beyond whether there is a reliable mode of physical transportation. Bringing together a historical analysis of the policy landscapeand interview data from parents and students in Detroit, they find that school transportation problems reflect the unequal political, social, and economic context in which families navigate enrollment and attendance. They discuss how policymakers can advance mobility justice in school policy by equitably distributing transportation resources, engaging students and parents as experts in developing and communicating transportation policy, and using institutional power to remedy structural barriers to educational access.
School Transit and Accessing Public School in Detroit
Students in the Detroit Public Community Schools District (DPSCD) have the highest rate of chronic absence (missing 10% or more of school days) among large districts in the United States. Additionally, students in DPSCD are among the poorest students in the country, often lacking access to reliable personal transportation or public transit to facilitate getting to school. Although DPSCD offers school-sponsored transit, only 30% of K-8 students were eligible for such transit in 2018-19. Through the use of multilevel modeling, we sought to identify the association between eligibility for school-sponsored transit and attendance. Our findings indicated that there was a negative association of small magnitude between eligibility for school sponsored transit and school attendance. This counterintuitive finding may highlight the fact that transit eligibility is not sufficient to mediate the negative relationship between student poverty and attendance, and transit eligibility does not guarantee regular use of school-sponsored transit.
Promoting Ecological Approaches to Educational Issues: Evidence from a Partnership around Chronic Absenteeism in Detroit
Many problems that we conceptualize as “educational” have multiple causes that cut across students’ ecosystems. Yet, most education reforms are targeted narrowly at schools, educators, and students. Supporting educators and community leaders in conceptualizing educational problems from an ecological perspective and designing policies in alignment with that conceptualization is critical to improving student outcomes. This study documented the macro-, meso-, and micro-level institutional conditions that shaped how educators and community leaders conceived of the problem of absenteeism in response to research framed ecologically. Our findings highlight the challenges researchers may have in influencing ecosystemic policy solutions, but they also provide insight into potential pathways for doing so through research partnerships.
Race, geography, and school choice policy: A critical analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices
The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.
Detroit Families’ Experiences with COVID-19 and School Attendance
How much school students attend is a powerful indicator of their wellbeing and a strong predictor of their future success in school. During the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21), most Detroit students attended school online and many experienced significant challenges at home and school. This research report summarizes the key findings from a representative survey of Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) families at the end of that school year. By linking survey responses to students’ attendance records, we were able to identify how experiences during the pandemic and socioeconomic circumstances in general shaped attendance during this critical school year.
School Climate and Student Mobility
School choice has been accompanied by an increase in student mobility. Although changing schools can benefit students, research has shown that it is often associated with negative student and school outcomes. This study sought to better understand the relationship between school climate and the likelihood of student mobility across K-8 schools in Detroit, a city marked by a high level of school choice options. We found conflicting evidence of a relationship between measures of school climate as measured by the 5Essentials survey and student mobility. We discuss these findings in the context of potential sector differences, which may overshadow parental preferences for organizational characteristics.
The Potential for Improvement Science and Research Partnerships to Maximize the Policy Relevance of School Improvement Research
Increased demands by policymakers for evidence-based practices and rigorous impact evaluations in education offer researchers an unprecedented opportunity to influence policy. Yet, academic research has an infamous reputation for not addressing the real problems of policy and practice, being difficult to understand, and being slow to adapt to changing circumstances in implementation. The increasing complexity of the educational policy landscape threatens to exacerbate the disconnect between researchers and policymakers. Researchers interested in school improvement cannot be content to describe and critique these processes. This book chapter describes our approach to policy-engaged research partnerships and the role of improvement science in internal and external work processes.
Third Grade Reading and Attendance in Detroit
Potential student retention under the Read by Grade Three Law is a critically important issue to better understand and address in Detroit. Detroit students have historically been retained at much higher rates than their suburban peers. Nearly 15% of Detroit third graders would have been subject to retention under the Third Grade Reading law had it been in effect in previous years. There is a significant relationship between third grade reading scores and chronic absenteeism.
Why do Detroit Students Miss School? Implications for Returning to School
This report documents the reasons why Detroit students miss school, based on interviews with parents and high school students in 2020. Transportation was by far the most frequent and pervasive barrier to attendance that we heard from families. Yet, issues with getting to school were more complex than immediate access to transportation. They emerged from a combination of unreliable or inconsistent availability of transportation, weak social networks, parents’ work schedules, unsafe conditions, and more. Health issues, acute and chronic physical health issues in particular, but also mental health and parent health issues, created barriers to attendance. Parents expressed a strong understanding that missing school jeopardized students’ learning, and they went to great lengths to get their children to school. Parents also weighed serious trade-offs between attendance, safety, health, and family income, reflecting the unjust conditions they face.
Advancing an Ecological Approach to Chronic Absenteeism: Evidence from Detroit
Drawing on ecological systems theory to study chronic absenteeism, the authors identify the association between student, neighborhood, and school factors and chronic absenteeism in Detroit, as well as between macro-level structural and environmental conditions and city-wide chronic absenteeism rates in large U.S. cities. The authors’ findings suggest the need for coordinated, ecosystemic policy interventions that address structural and environmental barriers to attendance along with school-based efforts that more immediately support students and their families.
A Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach to Improving District Attendance Policy
Collaborative problem-solving research approacheshave the potential to support improvement in educational policy and practice beyond instruction, by facilitating the development of a shared understanding of complex problems and creating social structures where district, community, and research partners can work together to solve them. This study investigates how findings from a developmental evaluation of a district attendance initiative were incorporated into the initiation process of a networked improvement community to create a shared narrative about how members conceptualized the problem of absenteeism and how they should adapt their levers to better align to that problem. The developmental learning process created an infrastructure within which district leaders and community partners could develop a partnership culture that facilitated change in policy. This study suggests the need to revisit the assumptions that have driven non-instructional improvement efforts and highlights the potential of collaborative problem-solving to strengthen the implementation of district reforms.
Unregulated Open Enrollment and Inequitable Access to Schools of Choice
In severing the link between residential address and school assignment, school choice policies have the potential to decrease school segregation and increase educational equity. Yet, this promise is undermined when school choice creates greater opportunity for those who are already privileged while limiting access to students from historically marginalized groups. This study combines data from a new survey of local open enrollment policies in Metro Detroit, student-level administrative records, and geographic data to critically analyze the local discretion provided in Michigan’s interdistrict school choice policy in relation to the goals of access to schools of choice, desegregation, and educational equity. I find that local school districts implement provisions of state policy in ways that restrict access to Black and economically disadvantaged students while creating pathways of opportunity for others. Districts are incentivized to implement these restrictions because of the inequities built into the state school funding formula and the racialized geography of Metro Detroit that is mechanized in district and county boundaries to restrict access. This study has implications for the regulation of local school choice markets and the role they play in increasing equitable public school opportunities.
The Potential for Multi-Site Literacy Interventions to Reduce Summer Slide Among Low-Performing Students
Despite the evidence that summer learning loss or “slide” can have devastating cumulative effects on student performance in school, there are few examples of system-wide interventions that can prevent summer learning loss at scale in urban contexts with high rates of low-performing students. This study reports on the first year of a city-wide effort to reduce summer literacy loss in Detroit, Michigan, through a multi-site collaboration between the city Parks and Recreation Department, the local public school district, and several unique program providers. Results from this pilot study suggest that short-duration, high-intensity tutoring may help to prevent learning loss in literacy among a population with high rates of socio-economic disadvantage and low initial performance, regardless of specific program methodologies. This study has implications for other large cities seeking to prevent summer slide by building on existing municipal and district infrastructure.
