Do Housing Choice Vouchers Lead to Improved School Participation?

Background and Purpose:  The Housing Choice Voucher program (also known as Section 8) is designed for low-income families, elderly, and disabled individuals to afford decent and safe housing in the private market.  A primary goal of Section 8 is to allow low-income families to choose to live in thriving and resource rich neighborhoods.  For families with school-aged children, this may mean choosing a neighborhood with access to high-performing schools.  A benefit of holding a Section 8 voucher is, theoretically, it allows families to choose a home school district.  Although families who have Section 8 vouchers theoretically have more choice in where they live, research shows they remain in high poverty neighborhoods with lower quality schools. Additionally, recent evidence shows families who move to low-poverty neighborhoods with a housing voucher  feel isolated and marginalized in their new community. Recent research from the Moving to Opportunities experiment show that boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods with a housing voucher experienced negative school outcomes. This study seeks to add clarity to the mixed research on Housing Choice Vouchers by testing the effect of Section 8 voucher use on parents reporting of children’s participation in school. 

Methods: Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative was used to test school participation for families using Section 8 vouchers compared to families using other government subsidized housing. Baseline data for Making Connections was collected on a stratified random sample of 7,495 households in low-income neighborhoods in ten cities in 2002.  The stratified random sample provides a unique opportunity to investigate a random sample of families using section 8 vouchers compared to a random sample of families using other government subsidized housing. Of the 7,495 sampled households, 479 are households with school-aged children who reported using a Section 8 voucher (N=211) or some other government subsidy (N=260) to pay rent.  Three indicators of school participation are regressed on Section 8 voucher use: satisfaction with school, number of absences, and participation in school activities.

Results:OLS regression was unable to detect a relationship between school satisfaction and Section 8 voucher use.  Poisson regression was able to reveal that Section 8 voucher use is related to a higher incidence of absences (IRR= 1.33, SE=.11, p<.001).  Logistic regression revealed that Section 8 voucher use is related to a lower likelihood of children participating in school activities (OR=.65, SE=.13, p <.05). Considering previous research on academic differences for boys and girls using Housing Choice Vouchers, effects of gender were tested for each of our outcomes but no differences were detected.

Conclusion and Implications: Although families who use Section 8 vouchers have theoretically more choice and social control around where their children live and go to school, results from this sample show Section 8 is related to a higher liklihood of school absences and a lower liklihood of participating in school activities.  These results have implications for housing policies focused on subsidies and for schools working to increase academic achievement for low-income students.