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School desegregation and equitable access to educational opportunity takes alignment in the housing and education sectors. Racist housing policies and practices have systematically limited access to opportunity for generations of people of color, profoundly affecting their wealth, and perpetuating racial disparities in opportunity and well-being for children. Contemporary school enrollment patterns of students of different races reflect the legacy of state-sanctioned segregation and decades of exclusionary practices in housing and education. This report lays out a through line between housing policies and practices, inequitable school resources, and inequitable educational outcomes. It discusses racist policies that drive residential racial segregation and how limited residential opportunities have manifested for students through school segregation and education inequity. Next, it shares solutions from communities across the country to address segregation across both sectors, including housing mobility for students in segregated communities and schools, housing supports for students who want to stay in gentrifying neighborhoods, and inclusionary zoning policies that encourage affordable housing construction near higher-performing schools. Finally, it presents guidance and resources that practitioners can use to improve equity in their own communities. These include steps communities can take to assess current conditions, identify partners, establish shared outcomes, implement solutions, and influence policies in both sectors. [This report was written with Alexa Kort and James Carter.]

In 2021, Baby's Space became a Community Resource Hub. Funded by Minnesota's federally-funded Preschool Development Grant (PDG), the Community Resource Hubs help pregnant and parenting families with children under age 9 connect with needed resources. Baby's Space: A Place to Grow is a child development center that works to create a cycle of academic success and prosperity for families dealing with the systemic impacts of poverty, racism, and exclusion. Through the Strong Families, Strong Bonds project, they collaborate with Hennepin County, Minneapolis Public Schools, and other community partners to deepen and more effectively coordinate support for children and families who live in the Little Earth housing development. Through this work, they aim to better meet families' intersecting needs and help families achieve or maintain stability to create home environments in which they and their children can thrive. This report summarizes program successes and challenges; the hub's reach and family needs; and shares parent stories.

To succeed in creating a more equitable economy in New York City, policymakers will need to help boost economic outcomes for the nearly 300,000 working-age New Yorkers living in public housing. Although new investments in workforce training and education should be part of the solution, there is also an enormous untapped opportunity to make progress by increasing rates of entrepreneurship among New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents--and enabling the many public housing residents already engaged in side hustles and home-based ventures to grow their businesses. This report provides a comprehensive examination of the current state of entrepreneurship among New Yorkers living in NYCHA public housing--and what it will take to increase the number of successful NYCHA resident-run businesses. This report builds on the Center for an Urban Future's two decades of research about the role of entrepreneurship in building community wealth and creating a more inclusive and equitable economy in New York City. It documents current self-employment among NYCHA residents, explores the benefits of fostering a robust entrepreneurial economy within NYCHA, details the obstacles that prevent larger numbers of NYCHA businesses from taking shape, and examines current supports for entrepreneurship within NYCHA. In addition, the study features best practices from across the country, and advances 15 specific, achievable policy recommendations to support entrepreneurship among New Yorkers living in public housing. It was informed by extensive data analysis and draws on interviews with more than 50 small business and microfinance experts, community development leaders, workforce development practitioners, economic development officials, entrepreneurship educators, and NYCHA entrepreneurs themselves. [This report was written with Eli Dvorkin.]

Poverty & Race Research Action Council's (PRRAC's) March 2021 policy brief, "Mixed income neighborhoods and integrated schools: Linking HUD's Choice Neighborhoods Initiative with the Department of Education's Magnet Schools Assistance Program" (ED611507), highlighted an important opportunity for interagency collaboration, encouraging an explicit connection between HUD's Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) and the Department of Education's Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP). As the authors advocated with both agencies, if funding connecting MSAP and public housing redevelopment were incentivized by both HUD and the Department of Education, applicants could create plans for their communities that include a vision for safe, accessible housing, as well as neighborhoods and schools with diversity of race and income. The purpose of this update is to determine: (1) whether HUD and the Department of Education incorporated any of these recommendations to encourage the connection of MSAP and CNI or other public housing redevelopment projects; and (2) whether applicants responded to such encouragement.

Affording living expenses presents a major barrier to degree completion for many community college students. Food, affordable housing, transportation, and childcare are central conditions for learning. Yet with stagnant incomes, rising tuition and living costs, and insufficient support from financial aid and the social safety net, approximately one in two community college students struggle to afford these basic needs. Additionally, as many as one in five experience homelessness. The College Housing Assistance Program (CHAP), operated by the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) and Tacoma Community College (TCC), is at the forefront of the nationwide fight to ameliorate homelessness among college students. CHAP is one of the country's first partnerships between a housing authority and a community college and offers a unique model. In contrast to other programs such as student-run shelters, rapid-rehousing, and college-owned affordable apartments, CHAP utilizes government-subsidized housing assistance to provide housing to homeless and near-homeless community college students. This report offers the initial lessons learned from the first external evaluation of CHAP. Successful program implementation is crucial to providing benefits for students, and can be especially challenging in housing programs. We therefore focus on how students experienced the program, where they faced barriers, and where they found support. It is too early in the evaluation process to draw conclusions about the program's efficacy; these are short-term insights.

The Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), launched in 2010, provides funds for public housing authorities and other local entities and aims to redevelop distressed housing projects and transform the neighborhoods surrounding them into "mixed-income, high opportunity communities." From its inception, the CNI has included a strong focus on school improvement and coordination, although the responses of most applicants have been less than robust. Despite the CNI's emphasis on transforming neighborhoods of poverty into mixed income neighborhoods, this economic integration goal has rarely been applied to the local public school--indeed, with a few notable exceptions the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and CNI applicants have generally assumed that the local school will remain a high poverty school. This policy brief reviews the goals of the CNI and the track record of CNI school improvement efforts, as reflected in successful applications for CNI funding. The authors suggest that HUD and the Department of Education have missed a major opportunity for cross-agency collaboration, which could be achieved by linking magnet school funding and school integration planning grants with Choice Neighborhoods implementation and planning grants.

At a time when voters are keenly focused on the cost of living, housing affordability has become a hot political issue in many parts of the country, including New York State. Policymakers, grappling with what they can do to make housing more affordable, are actively seeking to reform longstanding local exclusionary zoning laws, policies that severely limit the types of housing that can be built in communities. The first part of this report lays out the larger debate over zoning reform in New York State and situates how educational opportunity fits into the discussion. The second part dives into the zoning policies in Bayside/Little Neck and Jamaica/Hollis. The third part explains how restrictive zoning impedes access to high-performing schools in Queens. The fourth part addresses political obstacles to reform in Queens. The fifth part suggests a strategy for moving forward. [The appendices were prepared by Vicki Been and Colleagues at the NYU Furman Center.]

Among the many troubling legacies of centuries of slavery and discrimination in the United States are extraordinary race-based inequalities in life chances. Black children grow up in families with much lower income and wealth, on average, than White children. They are more likely than White children to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and to attend underfunded schools in which their classmates are also from low-income families. One consequence of these inequalities is that Black children are less likely than White children to acquire the skills, educational credentials, and networks that lead to well-paying jobs. Another is that the inequalities that hampered their lives are passed on to their children (Chetty et al., 2020). In this essay, Richard J. Murnane uses evidence from three studies to show that the nation has learned a lot about what it takes to reduce race-based inequalities. He also points out that the primary public policy strategies for reducing race-based inequalities and for measuring progress are inconsistent with the evidence from these recent studies.

Detroit has a long and complicated history with housing instability, and obtaining safe and stable housing is a significant challenge, particularly for low-income residents. For many renters, housing quality is poor, rents are high, and eviction is common. In 2017, 16% of households with children in Detroit reported being either evicted or forced to move within the last year, which meets the educational definition of homelessness. That same year, only 2% of children in Detroit were identified by their school as homeless. This under identification deprives Detroit's children of their legal rights to an equal education and leaves educators and schools without critical information about the barriers that a child and their family may be experiencing. For owners, property taxes and home repair costs threaten housing stability. There are too few housing vouchers in the system to serve all those in need, and properties developed through Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), the primary mechanism for developing low-income housing, are often not affordable to very low-income households. Aggravating all of these factors, for all the talk of Detroit's oversupply of housing, recent analyses show there are actually too few habitable structures in the city to house all Detroit residents. This level of housing instability is an educational issue impacting thousands of children and families in Detroit. This report is to provide stakeholders with the information needed to better understand the educational implications of widespread housing instability in Detroit as well as why identification and support for students who have experienced homelessness is critical. [Additional funding for this report by the McGregor Fund.]

The document are the appendixes for the full report, "Using Data from Schools and Child Welfare Agencies to Predict Near-Term Academic Risks." The study team collected and linked five academic years of student-level administrative data from Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), Propel Schools, and the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS). The sample included the full population of students enrolled in each local education agency in 2015/16 or 2016/17, and each entity provided any data available on those students for 2012/13-2016/17. The descriptive analyses used data from the two most recent years--considered the "outcome years" for which academic problems are predicted-- and the predictive analyses included data from the full five-year period. [For the full report, see ED606230; for the study snapshot, see ED6062323.]

This report provides information for administrators, researchers, and student support staff in local education agencies who are interested in identifying students who are likely to have near-term academic problems such as absenteeism, suspensions, poor grades, and low performance on state tests. The report describes an approach for developing a predictive model and assesses how well the model identifies at-risk students using data from two local education agencies in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania: a large local education agency and a smaller charter school network. It also examines which types of predictors--in-school variables (performance, behavior, and consequences) and out-of-school variables (human services involvement and public benefit receipt)--are individually related to each type of near-term academic problem to better understand why the model might flag students as at risk and how best to support these students. The study finds that predictive models using machine learning algorithms identify at-risk students with moderate to high accuracy. In-school variables drawing on school data are the strongest predictors across all outcomes, and predictive performance is not reduced much when out-of-school variables drawing on human services data are excluded and only school data are used. However, some out-of-school events and services--including child welfare involvement, emergency homeless services, and juvenile justice system involvement--are individually related to near-term academic problems. The models are more accurate for the large local education agency than for the smaller charter school network. The models are better at predicting low grade point average, course failure, and scores below the basic level on state tests in grades 3-8 than at predicting chronic absenteeism, suspensions, and scores below the basic level on high school end-of-course standardized tests. The findings suggest that many local education agencies could apply machine learning algorithms to existing school data to identify students who are at risk of near-term academic problems that are known to be precursors to school dropout. [For the appendixes, see ED606232; for the study snapshot, see ED606233.]

This report introduces the MyGoals for Employment Success demonstration. MyGoals is an employment coaching program that helps participants set and achieve goals. It seeks to do so by explicitly focusing attention on participants' executive skills. MyGoals also offers participants a set of financial incentives to encourage, facilitate, and reward their engagement in the program and progress in achieving employment goals. Although employment is the program's central focus, the coaches also help participants set and achieve goals in other relevant domains: education and training, financial management, and personal and family well-being. Coaches make referrals to other services in the community as appropriate given participants' goals. Two public housing agencies--one in Baltimore, Maryland, and one in Houston, Texas--are piloting the program and evaluating its effectiveness with a randomized controlled trial. This report describes the origins of the MyGoals model, its core features, the rationale behind those features, the contexts in which the program is being operated, and how the program is being evaluated.

Located in the heart of Charlestown [Boston, MA], Harvard-Kent Elementary School serves 365 students in grades Pre-K to 5. The school serves the highest percentage of children living in public housing of any Boston school. It is home to a specialized program for students learning English as well as a therapeutic program for children with emotional disabilities. Students represent a range of races, ethnicities, and home languages. Over the past five years, a focus on meeting the needs of the whole child and strengthening early literacy instruction has catapulted academic performance at the Harvard-Kent, one of the most racially diverse schools in Boston. The Harvard-Kent is now shrinking opportunity and achievement gaps for low-income students, students with disabilities, students of color, and English Language Learners. This case study explores how the Harvard-Kent made academic gains by engaging teachers to create a school culture where students feel valued and where learning is experiential and engaging. Information presented in this brief represents findings from a comprehensive data and document review; focus groups with students, teachers, and administrators; and a set of classroom observations meant to uncover key practices, both academic and non-academic, at the school.

The enduring condition of racial and ethnic segregation in schools and housing in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut, is rooted in historical and contemporary racial discrimination and in practices and policies that exacted disparate harm on Black and Latinx people. School segregation both reflects and reinforces segregation in housing that was created, sustained, and exacerbated over decades. By all available measures, both the state of Connecticut and the Hartford metropolitan area have extremely high levels of racial and ethnic segregation in housing and public schools relative to other metropolitan areas in the United States. The purpose of this report is to increase awareness both of the role of government and other actors in creating and cementing segregation and of the consequences of the condition of racial and ethnic separation. The hope is that this knowledge will inspire redress in the form of holistic policy making in multiple sectors, including housing, education, health, and economic development. This report can also inform grant making that acknowledges and seeks to address root causes of racial inequality, an inequality long a hallmark of the state of Connecticut. The report offers recommendations to inform these conversations, from which more and better ideas will surely emerge. [The report was published with the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy at Brandeis University and the Open Communities Alliance (OCA).]

This document discusses a range of policy and practice options that states can undertake to increase college student access to public benefits. The Center for Law and Social Policy, Inc. (CLASP) has leveraged its hands-on policy and cross-issue technical assistance expertise to identify these options. Many states have already implemented one or more options, often through embracing state flexibility under federal law. This document is intended to stimulate state discussion, research, planning, partnership building, and action. It also may be used to develop key messages to begin shifting the narrative from a deficit-based description of public benefit recipients to a focus on the importance of public benefits for college enrollment, success, and attainment. Each of the document's eight sections are discussed in relation to college student access to public benefits: (1) Cross-Program Access and Alignment; (2) Improvements to Postsecondary Education Policy, Funding, and Practice; (3) The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); (4) SNAP Employment & Training (E&T); (5) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); (6) Child Care Assistance; (7) Free or Low-Cost Health Insurance; and (8) Housing Assistance. Combining policies and practices within each, and across, these sections may produce better outcomes.

In March 2014, the Center for an Urban Future documented an array of challenges and vulnerabilities resulting from the New York City's aging infrastructure in their "Caution Ahead" report (see ED555648). And it identified a minimum investment of $47.3 billion over the next five years to bring the city's core infrastructure to a state of good repair. The current study provides a five-year update to the Center's assessment of New York City's aging infrastructure vulnerabilities. It concludes that Mayor Bill de Blasio administration's record infrastructure investments have resulted in real progress in several areas, but also finds that capital needs across many city agencies have grown significantly--and not just in high-profile areas like the subways and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The Center's new analysis shows that some of the problems that were documented five years ago have only gotten worse, and that the new stressors like climate change have only added to the overall price tag to bring the city's core infrastructure to a state of good repair.

The purpose of this "Equity by Design" brief is to provide information to parents, community members, and school district leaders and teachers about the relationship between housing policy and school policy. Specifically, this brief provides a succinct history of U.S. housing policy, discusses some current educational policies that impact housing segregation, and demonstrates how demographic changes occurring in suburban and urban areas impact school diversity.

In 2008, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) commissioned UC Berkeley's Center for Cities and Schools (CC+S) to develop a strategy for integrating education into future housing redevelopment in the Bayview. Two years later, HOPE SF was launched in the Bayview at the existing public housing site at Hunters View. CC+S has worked in partnership with a number of stakeholders on the PLUS Leadership (Planning and Learning United for Systems Change) and YPLAN (Youth - Plan, Learn, Act, Now!) initiatives working in complement to HOPE SF to demonstrate how schools and young people are a positive force in this future redevelopment. The work of the past decade in the Bayview has not been comprehensively assessed nor viewed holistically, underlying the challenges of fragmentation in processes with so many stakeholders. The goal of this report is to lift up the work and partnership of the past decade to examine how this work to engage youth and schools in comprehensive housing development in the Bayview can inform future work. This analysis relies on existing evaluations, reports, and analyses of this work, a comprehensive education and HOPE SF literature review, and stakeholder interviews.

School and neighborhood segregation are recognized as pernicious and persistent problems across the United States, originally developed through intentional government policies, and perpetuated today by both public policy and private markets that have adapted to segregated systems of housing, education, and transportation. Housing and school segregation function as mutually-sustaining phenomena that limit perceived housing and school choices, constrain social networks, and curb employment and educational potential. Despite the link between housing and school segregation, however, many initiatives combating segregation tend to focus on one or the other instead of recognizing their inherent connectedness. This research brief highlights innovative programs across the United States that consider school and housing segregation in tandem, representing an array of approaches ranging from grassroots community processes that connect housing and schools, to structural approaches seeking to build integration into community structures, to solutions focusing on access to transportation, and removal of transportation barriers to increased mobility.

The Housing Act of 1949 espoused the goal of "a decent home and a suitable living environment" for all Americans. Nearly 70 years later, significant strides have been made in improving the quality of American homes, but there continue to be large disparities across income and race, especially with respect to neighborhood environments. These disparities matter: growing research shows that neighborhoods shape children's long-run life chances. This report focuses on neighborhood schools, highlighting disparities between families living in subsidized housing and those who do not. The authors describe the characteristics of the local public elementary schools to which children living in subsidized housing have access, including their student demographics, teacher characteristics and relative proficiency rates. They include all households with children that receive housing assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as those living in Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) developments, for all 50 states and the 100 largest metropolitan areas, updating an earlier Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) report that relied on 2008 data. This report compares the profile of the schools accessible to HUD-assisted and LIHTC households in 2016 to the profile of those accessible to other similar households within the same state or metropolitan area. In brief, the authors found that families receiving all four major types of federal housing assistance lived near lower performing and higher poverty schools than other poor families with children as well as other renters with children. Large differences by race within the voucher program were also found, with black and Hispanic voucher holders living near significantly lower performing and higher poverty schools than white voucher holders. Lastly, the authors found large variation across metropolitan areas in outcomes for assisted families.

This paper examines the U.S. social insurance system, which we define broadly to include both programs supported by dedicated taxes and other federal programs that provide income support, assistance in meeting basic needs, or services to improve economic opportunity. The paper considers the social insurance system as a whole as well as its component parts, providing an overview of major federal programs in the areas of education and workforce development, health, income support, nutrition, and housing. The paper covers how the social insurance system is organized, how eligibility is determined and who benefits, how the benefits and services are delivered, and how the system affects poverty and inequality. We focus primarily on the system as it operated prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also look at how various programs respond to economic downturns. Coming at a time when policymakers will start shifting their focus from using the social insurance system to provide relief from the pandemic and recession to considering what changes should be made in the system on an ongoing basis, the paper also reprises an array of proposals to strengthen the system in various ways that The Hamilton Project has commissioned in recent years.

This brief is the third in a series documenting the implementation of an economic mobility initiative supported by New York City's Change Capital Fund (CCF). CCF is a consortium of New York City donors formed to invest in local nonprofits that undertake data-driven antipoverty strategies integrating housing, education, and employment services. CCF donors believe that an integrated approach to service delivery is an important way to "saturate" areas of persistent poverty with intensive, comprehensive services, cultivating multiple pathways toward neighborhood-level change. The first brief described CCF in detail; introduced the initiative's first grantees, located in Brooklyn and the Bronx; and shared the organizations' ambitious work plans and start-up efforts. The second brief describes two pervasive challenges to service coordination and the ways grantees have responded to them. [For the first brief in this series, "The Promise of a Community-Based Approach to Economic Opportunity: New York City's Change Capital Fund. No. 1," see ED570529. For the second brief in this series, "Addressing Challenges in Community-Based Service Coordination: Breaking Down Silos to Promote Economic Opportunity. New York City's Change Capital Fund. No. 2," see ED570521.]

A 20-year retrospective study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the July 2015 issue of the "American Journal of Public Health," suggests that kindergarten students who are more inclined to exhibit "social competence" traits--such as sharing, cooperating, or helping other kids--may be more likely to attain higher education and well-paying jobs. In contrast, students who exhibit weaker social competency skills may be more likely to drop out of high school, abuse drugs and alcohol, and need government assistance. This brief provides an overview and major findings from this study and implications for further action.

The housing and education sectors are being asked to do more with fewer resources. School districts often struggle to meet the needs of low-income students who deal with challenges outside of school and to connect them to resources that can strengthen their academic competencies. Public housing authorities and other assisted-housing providers similarly recognize the need for an array of support services to help their clients achieve financial and family stability. Housing providers have been exploring the role they can play, particularly in improving child outcomes overall and educational outcomes specifically. The premise is that housing providers have a unique opportunity and entry point to improve children's outcomes by connecting them to services and by bringing opportunities right into their homes or developments. Housing authorities in particular are in a favored position to reach low-income families and connect educators, low-income students, and their caregivers outside the school day. By partnering, school districts and housing authorities can begin to identify and tackle barriers to learning that poor students may face, such as housing instability, truancy, and health problems. By combining their resources and leveraging their individual strengths--programmatic, financial, and social--educators and housing authorities are learning how they can have a greater impact on low-income students' lives. Those partnerships represent uncharted territory for many school districts and housing authorities. The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) is a membership association that represents 70 of the largest public housing authorities in the country. To support and expand its members' ambition and capacity to support educational outcomes, CLPHA kicked off an education initiative in 2013. As part of that initiative, CLPHA is providing technical assistance and field-building support to practitioners, conducting policy advocacy on Capitol Hill, and entering partnerships with other national organizations to advance meaningful and sustainable partnerships between the housing and education sectors. In 2014, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CLPHA enlisted the Urban Institute to examine promising practices emerging from partnerships in three cities: Akron, Ohio; New Haven, Connecticut; and Vancouver, Washington. This brief focuses on one of the three partnership sites: Akron, Ohio. The overview of findings from case studies in three sites, "Developing Housing and Education Partnerships: Lessons from the Field" (ED559308) documents some creative approaches and promising practices to inform local efforts to launch partnerships, as well as national-level policy and advocacy efforts.

The housing and education sectors are being asked to do more with fewer resources. School districts often struggle to meet the needs of low-income students who deal with challenges outside of school and to connect them to resources that can strengthen their academic competencies. Public housing authorities and other assisted-housing providers similarly recognize the need for an array of support services to help their clients achieve financial and family stability. Housing providers have been exploring the role they can play, particularly in improving child outcomes overall and educational outcomes specifically. The premise is that housing providers have a unique opportunity and entry point to improve children's outcomes by connecting them to services and by bringing opportunities right into their homes or developments. Housing authorities in particular are in a favored position to reach low-income families and connect educators, low-income students, and their caregivers outside the school day. By partnering, school districts and housing authorities can begin to identify and tackle barriers to learning that poor students may face, such as housing instability, truancy, and health problems. By combining their resources and leveraging their individual strengths--programmatic, financial, and social--educators and housing authorities are learning how they can have a greater impact on low-income students' lives. Those partnerships represent uncharted territory for many school districts and housing authorities. The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) is a membership association that represents 70 of the largest public housing authorities in the country. To support and expand its members' ambition and capacity to support educational outcomes, CLPHA kicked off an education initiative in 2013. As part of that initiative, CLPHA is providing technical assistance and field-building support to practitioners, conducting policy advocacy on Capitol Hill, and entering partnerships with other national organizations to advance meaningful and sustainable partnerships between the housing and education sectors. In 2014, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CLPHA enlisted the Urban Institute to examine promising practices emerging from partnerships in three cities: Akron, Ohio; New Haven, Connecticut; and Vancouver, Washington. This brief focuses on one of the three partnership sites: New Haven, Connecticut. The overview of findings from case studies in three sites, "Developing Housing and Education Partnerships: Lessons from the Field" (ED559308) documents some creative approaches and promising practices to inform local efforts to launch partnerships, as well as national-level policy and advocacy efforts.

Schools and youth-serving organizations often struggle to better meet the needs of low-income students and to connect them to resources that can stabilize their lives and strengthen their academic competencies. Assisted-housing providers, including housing authorities, are in a unique position to support educators, low-income students, and their caregivers outside the school day. By partnering with schools and school districts, housing providers can help address challenges outside school that can become barriers to learning--such as housing instability, truancy, and health problems. Their roles as developers and landlords create opportunities to connect housing and education. As developers, housing authorities can build or repurpose facilities and bring education supports closer to assisted-housing developments. As landlords, housing authorities can expand on-site resources and change the quid pro quo for housing assistance; if a housing authority wants to use its leases to require school attendance or education planning for young residents, it can. Housing authorities can also facilitate connections with schools and school districts through data sharing. The housing field is exploring creative approaches and promising practices to further link housing and education services. The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) is a membership association that represents 70 of the nation's largest public housing authorities. To help meet its members' desire to support educational outcomes for low-income students, CLPHA kicked off an education initiative in 2013. The initiative started with CLPHA's "Bringing Education Home" report (Council of Large Public Housing Authorities 2012), which scanned promising practices of members that were leveraging their role as housing providers to help boost academic achievement for children in assisted housing. Today, CLPHA is providing technical assistance and field-building support to practitioners, conducting policy advocacy on Capitol Hill, and entering partnerships with other national organizations to advance meaningful and sustainable partnerships between the housing and education sectors. As part of that effort, and with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CLPHA enlisted the Urban Institute to develop a set of case studies to document and describe housing and education partnerships in three diverse settings: Akron, Ohio; New Haven, Connecticut; and Vancouver, Washington. Each case study highlights key elements that shape and strengthen the partnership. This report summarizes the innovative approaches and promising practices that emerged from the three sites.

The housing and education sectors are being asked to do more with fewer resources. School districts often struggle to meet the needs of low-income students who deal with challenges outside of school and to connect them to resources that can strengthen their academic competencies. Public housing authorities and other assisted-housing providers similarly recognize the need for an array of support services to help their clients achieve financial and family stability. Housing providers have been exploring the role they can play, particularly in improving child outcomes overall and educational outcomes specifically. The premise is that housing providers have a unique opportunity and entry point to improve children's outcomes by connecting them to services and by bringing opportunities right into their homes or developments. Housing authorities in particular are in a favored position to reach low-income families and connect educators, low-income students, and their caregivers outside the school day. By partnering, school districts and housing authorities can begin to identify and tackle barriers to learning that poor students may face, such as housing instability, truancy, and health problems. By combining their resources and leveraging their individual strengths--programmatic, financial, and social--educators and housing authorities are learning how they can have a greater impact on low-income students' lives. Those partnerships represent uncharted territory for many school districts and housing authorities. The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) is a membership association that represents 70 of the largest public housing authorities in the country. To support and expand its members' ambition and capacity to support educational outcomes, CLPHA kicked off an education initiative in 2013. As part of that initiative, CLPHA is providing technical assistance and field-building support to practitioners, conducting policy advocacy on Capitol Hill, and entering partnerships with other national organizations to advance meaningful and sustainable partnerships between the housing and education sectors. In 2014, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CLPHA enlisted the Urban Institute to examine promising practices emerging from partnerships in three diverse cities: Akron, Ohio; New Haven, Connecticut; and Vancouver, Washington. This brief focuses on one of three partnership sites: Vancouver, Washington. The overview of findings from cases studies of all three sites, "Developing Housing and Education Partnerships: Lessons from the Field" (ED559308) documents some creative approaches and promising practices to inform local efforts to launch partnerships, as well as national-level policy and advocacy efforts.