Young, Black, successful, and homeless: examining the unique academic challenges of Black students who experienced homelessness

ABSTRACT

Youth homelessness is a growing crisis impacting urban high schools across the United States. Black youth, in particular, are disproportionately affected. While the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is designed to provide educational access to students experiencing homelessness, the extent to which the policy supports Black students is unclear. This qualitative study uses structural racism as an analytic framework to examine the narratives of eight Black youth who successfully graduated high school while experiencing homelessness. Findings show that being Black and experiencing homelessness creates unique challenges for accessing resources under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Participants identified hostile racial climates at school as a common deterrent from disclosing their homeless status to adults at school, thereby restricting their access to federal support. The findings suggest the need for race-conscious language and interventions to be included in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Additionally, the author urges more researchers studying youth homelessness to use a critical racial lens to address the racial knowledge gap that exists in the current literature on student homelessness.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeless students
• McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act
• race and homelessness
• education and homelessness
• poverty and education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Earl J. Edwards is currently a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and a researcher at the UCLA Black Male Institute. His research interests include the impact of structural racism and implicit bias on American public institutions serving youth impacted by homelessness. Edwards is also a certified English Language Arts high school special education teacher.

Notes

1 In the context of this study, the term “youth” is used to refer to high school aged students, specifically adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18.