Exploring the Impact of School Instability on the Outcomes of Youth with Foster Care Histories: A Structured Review of the Literature

Background: School instability may have a negative impact on a student's healthy development. Unfortunately, research suggests that students in foster care have high rates of school instability through changing schools often. Despite being a well-established concern, the empirical literature is inconsistent on what should be considered instability, and how to measure and understand instability for this youth population. This limits our understanding of the full nature of instability and its causes and consequences, precluding informed recommendations for research and practice. This review seeks to address this gap in the knowledge base by clarifying how school instability is examined, and highlighting overall trends in the literature.

Methods: We searched seventeen databases within EBSCO (e.g., CINAHL, Education Research Complete), four databases within Proquest (e.g., Applied Social Sciences Index), and Web of Science to identify articles published between January 1, 2000 and August 31, 2022. Studies were included if they met two overarching criteria: (1) included students in k-12 education who experienced foster care; (2) meaningfully measured student’s school instability. The search resulted in 2,107 citations. After screening for inclusion and exclusion, this review yielded 18 studies.

Results: The 18 included studies were published between 2000 and 2022. Results showed inconsistency in how instability was conceptualized and operationalized. However, the average number of schools attended ranged from 0.28 to 9. Nearly 80 % (n = 14) of the studies examined two overarching outcomes related to school instability: 1) academic outcomes (n =12), and 2) mental and behavioral health (n = 5). Only 33 % (n = 4) of the articles examining academic outcomes found instability to negatively impact student’s academics, linking instability to declines in reading and writing and lower high school completion rates. 80 % (n = 4) of articles exploring mental and behavioral health linked school instability to adverse outcomes. Additional results highlight a lack of theoretical applications examining the mechanisms underlying the association between school instability and subsequent outcomes.

Conclusions: This review summarizes research examining school instability for youth with foster care histories. Results do not provide clear evidence of instability’s impact on academic outcomes but suggest instability may have a deleterious effect on mental and behavioral health, highlighting the need to identify protective factors that promote positive mental and behavioral health. Future research may investigate the extent to which mental and behavioral health mediates the relationship between instability and academic outcomes. Students in foster care are an educationally vulnerable population; mental and behavioral health may be a pathway by which instability impacts academic outcomes. The various measurements of instability emphasize a need to develop consistency in how this construct is captured. The lack of theory application provides opportunities for theory refinement to facilitate conceptual clarity. When utilized, theories tended to highlight individual-level variables and student deficits to account for instability without contextualizing students within larger structures or accounting for the destabilizing nature of foster care placements. This calls attention to a critical need for theory development to ensure adequate detection and attention to systemic factors contributing to school instability.