Displacement, Punishment, and Schooling

While community members and policymakers continue to call for improvement in urban schools, they do not sufficiently attend to the ways that displacement (through eviction) and punishment (through the youth justice system or school disciplinary practices and policies) impact the opportunities and outcomes of students. This is a large omission in our understanding of the personal trajectories of students and their families and is especially noteworthy given the broader efforts to understand how displacement and justice system engagement impact outcomes of adults including health, employment, housing, etc.

Kara Finnigan's mixed method, exploratory study brings together administrative data sets from a variety of sources to begin to examine these areas. The study uses descriptive analysis and mapping techniques to examine where displacement is happening in the Rochester community and whether this is impacting some schools or students more than others in terms of the resulting mobility of students in the school system. The study also explores whether housing instability increases the likelihood of involvement in the juvenile justice system or disciplinary infractions. The study involves interviews of school and community leaders to better understand current programmatic, structural, and policy limitations and possibilities to better serve youth. The study uses data visualization strategies to illustrate results at different units of analysis including the broader system/community and individual student level.