New research findings from NYU’s Furman Center and Institute for Education and Social Policy document the impact of the foreclosure crisis on student mobility
New York, NY – April 20, 2011 – (RealEstateRama) — Much attention has been given to the recent foreclosure crisis, in particular to its causes and impacts on communities. Considerably less attention, however, has been given to the collateral costs on children, in particular on their educational experiences. As children around the country leave their homes due to foreclosures, we look at whether they leave their schools as well.
Building on their 2010 publication, Kids and Foreclosure: New York City, researchers at New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy (IESP) and Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy have released a new study entitled, Foreclosure and Kids: Does Losing Your Home Mean Losing Your School? This report finds that public school students living in buildings in foreclosure were more likely to change schools in the year following a foreclosure notice than other students, and that they were less likely to enroll in schools outside New York City or to switch to private or parochial schools.
“While we expected that children whose homes received a foreclosure notice would be more likely than other children to change schools, we were surprised that they are less likely to leave the New York City public school system.” said Leanna Stiefel, associate director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy. “It’s possible the foreclosure prevented families from moving or enrolling their children in parochial or private schools.”
The research also finds that students who moved to new schools after a foreclosure tended to move to lower-performing schools. On average, children living in buildings entering foreclosure end up in schools with a math proficiency rate 12 percentage points lower and a reading proficiency rate five percentage points lower than the school they left. The change in school quality suffered by students who moved schools after foreclosure was no more dramatic, however, than changes experienced by other students who moved schools.
“Students affected by foreclosure tend to wind up in poorer performing schools than those they left, which may affect their school performance in the future,” said Vicki Been, faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “The next step in our research will look specifically at how these foreclosure-related moves may affect student performance.”
The report focuses on elementary and middle school students who attended New York City public schools in the 2003-04 and 2006-07 school years. Between those two time periods, the number of properties receiving a foreclosure notice increased by 41 percent, and the number of students living in properties entering foreclosure rose by 69 percent to 20,453 students.
The Open Society Foundations funded three research organizations from the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) to explore how foreclosures have affected children in their cities. NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy and Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy were chosen to study New York City’s public school students, while other researchers are examining children’s experiences in Baltimore, MD, and Washington, DC.
Contact:
Lila Nazar de Jaucourt (IESP)
(212) 992-7679 / lila.nazar (at) nyu (dot) edu
Caitlyn Brazill (Furman Center)
(212) 998-6697 / caitlyn.brazill (at) nyu (dot) edu
