Word: childrene
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Homeownership has long been heralded as better for children. Kids raised in owned - as opposed to rented - homes show higher math and reading scores and less tendency to drop out of high school. In recent years, organizations from the National Association of Realtors to the President's Council of Economic Advisers to Habitat for Humanity have made sure to mention those sorts of findings in efforts to push more people to own houses...
...educational advantage to living in an owned home. Numbers from the U.S. Department of Education, for instance, show that elementary school students who live in owned homes consistently do better on reading and math tests than students who live in rentals. In a survey involving more than 20,000 children, first-graders in owned homes scored an average 77.3 points on a test of reading, while children in rented homes scored an average 68.5 points. That gap persisted for math scores (62.6 vs. 54.8), as well as for reading and math scores among third-graders...
Using another set of data, from the U.S. Census, the researchers tested the claim that children in owned homes are more likely to graduate from high school. By looking at homes with 17-year-olds and whether or not those kids were still in school, Baker and Miller saw a clear advantage to ownership. Children in owned homes were a few percentage points more likely to stay in school. Yet again the researchers saw that advantage dissipate once other variables were taken into account. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
...houses are important in and of themselves, but both are good at signaling a lack of financial strain. "If parents have income coming in, then they are more likely to be able to afford a house or a car, and that's a more regular, less stressful environment for children," says Barker...
...conclusion, then, is that policymakers probably can't bolster how well kids do in school simply by crafting programs to encourage homeownership. The $100 billion-plus in annual tax breaks and subsidies sent the way of homeowners might do many things, but helping the nation's children doesn't necessarily appear to be one of them. "You can't conclude that by making more people into homeowners you can cause all these other good things to happen," says Barker, "because maybe these people are different in the first place...