School shapes young people’s lives.
But so does the rest of our world.

The Beyond Schools Lab is a small research group focused on understanding the how seemingly non-educational structures of social inequality—issues such as affordable housing, transit access, gender inequality, immigration policies, and policing—shape the everyday lives of young people and their experiences with school.

We believe that schools are vital institutions shaping the day-to-day experiences of children, youth, and families. Indeed, schools and educators face the many consequences of the ways that our society has betrayed young people and failed to provide basic resources such as access to health care and safe places to live. Often, educators, families, and young people themselves are left picking up the pieces of a broken world, where an affluent society has decided to ignore the needs of its children. And when those children struggle to read or don’t graduate high school, our society points the finger at schools—without offering additional resources to address the root problems or make sure students’ basic needs are met before we worry about GPAs and test scores.

At the Beyond Schools Lab, we believe that the problems we label “educational issues” tend to be a reflection of the society beyond classroom walls. In other words, what happens inside a school holds up a mirror to what happens outside. American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner views the impact of external factors through the lens of an “ecological systems theory” that views students’ educational experiences as ecological, or as “a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment from immediate settings of family and school to broad cultural values, laws and customs.”

We ask: how can K-12 public school systems serve to interrupt or perpetuate social problems? How do large-scale social inequalities impact the lived realities of young people? What role can educators, policymakers, families, community members, and young people themselves play in understanding, acknowledging, and disrupting them?