For the first day of her sophomore year, Layla Cornish strode into Rooted School clad in a denim jacket and bright pink Crocs with a matching Croc purse.
This year, she’s looking forward to dance-team tryouts, reconnections with friends, and the dual-enrollment science classes she’s taking to earn early college credits as she works her way toward becoming a nurse.
But, to her disappointment, the new school year marks the end of the $50 payments she’d received for the past 10 months as part of Rooted School’s “guaranteed-income” pilot study.
Teachers have long known that students with economically stable lives are better able to learn, without the distraction of scrambling to find money for school uniforms, sports gear, food, clothing, books, transportation, and WiFi services. Poverty’s effects on academics become even more clear in high school. The number of low-income students who drop out of high school is nearly four times higher than higher-income households.
Those students might do better if they felt more economically stable, Rooted School administrators concluded a few years ago. In response, they launched a guaranteed-income program, which they called The $50 Study, since that’s how much each participant received each week.
The timing seemed perfect.
“We are still navigating a lot of the remnants of the pandemic: chronic absenteeism, performance slippage,” said Rooted CEO Jonathan Johnson, who believes that school administrators must innovate, in ways that help children. “We still very much believe that there are interventions out there that are often underexplored that could be leveraged to move the needle for young people in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
Research shows that, when compared with previous generations, today’s young adults feel instability that goes far beyond the pandemic, which is why an increasing number of guaranteed-income programs are focused on youth.
From a practical sense, guaranteed-income programs like the one at Rooted School put spending money in students’ pockets, allowing them to occasionally buy Uber Eats, pay for their little brother’s field trip, and even help parents pay the light bill. Philosophically, the programs are designed to provide economic security to young people as they transition to adulthood, with hopes of building a more solid foundation for their futures.
Results published earlier this month show that Rooted’s $50 Study seems to have moved the needle for participating students, who demonstrated improved attendance and higher reading-level growth than their peers, among other strides forward. The study tracked academic outcomes like attendance and grades, financial literacy and each student’s sense of self and future outlook.
Back at Rooted, the work of Johnson and his team is already well underway, to understand how universal income could help students.
They are encouraged by the results they’ve seen so far.
Students who received the $50 each week missed two fewer days of school in a semester compared to those in the control group. This is important for students’ learning — and particularly significant in Louisiana, because state law stipulates that students who miss more than 10 days of school can automatically fail a grade level, putting them at risk of not graduating.
Students who received the $50 stipends also showed a half year of reading growth — twice as much as students who did not receive the money.
No need to ask Mom for money
Last year, Layla and some classmates at Rooted and a few other local high schools received $50 stipends each week for 10 months.
The cash that they received was “unconditional” – the students could use their debit card to spend it on anything they wanted to.
Layla will receive her last cash transfers this month. She was part of the pilot’s second 10-month year.
Over the past two years, the school’s study enrolled and tracked nearly 200 students, split randomly into two groups, with half of the students – called the “treatment” group, receiving the $50 weekly stipend through direct deposit into a bank account.
The remaining students, who were placed in the “control group,” did not receive the payments.
For Layla, the income fostered independence, she said, showing off the new cross-body bag that she saved up for, then purchased, on her own. She was also able to buy food and other essentials, treat her friends to small gifts – all without hitting up her mother for money.
She feels a sense of pride about that. “I didn’t have to ask my mom for anything,” she said, cracking a smile.
Her mom, Lena Cornish, who teaches science at Rooted, saw growth in her daughter that was “life-changing,” she said, noting that Layla had, over time, learned to save money instead of spending it immediately like many children do. “Kids, they get money and they automatically think they need to spend,” she said.
Layla’s experience, and growth, was shared by other students. As staff watched, students used their stipends to help their families and save for important things, which provided a feeling of security, said Talia Livneh, senior director of programs at Rooted.
Daughters can be expensive, Cornish said. But over the past year, Layla became more aware of those expenses and learned how to manage her own money, with her own source of income. “It prepared her for the future.”
Layla was quietly confident in her spending plans. She would merely tuck her cash card away at home when she wanted to save for items like her new cross-body bag, her mother said.
“We did not talk about saving for the purse, because I didn’t know,” her mom said. “She saved on her own.”
Guaranteed Income programs mirror pandemic support findings
Some of the results of the Rooted School study echo larger, household findings from The Center for Law and Social Policy, which found families reported more stability after the introduction of two pandemic-era programs, the Child Tax Credit and economic impact payments, through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Still, two-thirds of Americans say they couldn’t cover living expenses for one month if they lost their primary income source. One suggested policy solution is to supply families with guaranteed monthly income to keep them stable.
But lawmakers have also targeted young people for additional support. The Young Adult Tax Credit Act would provide a universal $500 monthly payment to all 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States. “Our social safety net rightfully has programs for childhood and seniors, but it fails to address the prevalence of young adult poverty,” said Rep. Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, a co-sponsor of the Young Adult Tax Credit, who noted that he sees nearly 25% poverty among young adults in his state. (It stands even higher, at 26%, among young adults in Louisiana.)
Since the early 1970s, poverty has increased for young adults, who are now among the most likely age group to live below the federal poverty line. They are juggling education, work and household responsibilities in a world with heightened instability, lower social mobility, and greater economic inequality.
Basically, young adults today fit into a vulnerable category – one that defies common perceptions, since historically, young adulthood is often viewed as a carefree age with few responsibilities.
Spending the money: from groceries to Ubers to school
The Rooted study aimed to see how guaranteed income – and the hopeful relief of some stressors – would affect students’ academics and financial literacy along with their sense of themselves and their outlook on the future, said Johnson, the Rooted School CEO.
In research parlance, the Rooted study is described as a two-year, multi-phase, randomized control study. They implemented the first phase during the 2022-23 school year, with the second phase kicking in the following school year. Over the next five years, they will expand the study to include 1,600 students.
As the study rolled out, Johnson saw students play new roles in their families’ dynamic, as students helped younger siblings with school uniform costs, field trip fees, or snacks.
Banking data showed that most students spent their money on basic needs – nearly half on groceries, Livneh said. The second most frequent purchases were retail services, then transportation, which made up for about 12% of money spent. That may be because school bus routes can feel lengthy, especially for teens who might have opted to sleep a little later, then use their money to take an Uber to school, “to get there faster,” Livneh said.
Students also saved, in a way that administrators hadn’t anticipated. “What blew me away is 46% of the money that we transferred to students was still sitting in bank accounts at the end of the study,” Livneh said.
To explain how it was going, students shared their experiences through the Rooted Cash Podcast.
Participant Peyton Weeks, then a senior at Rooted, said during a podcast last year that she was grateful for the $50 Study’s income so she could help her siblings and be more self-sufficient, which was especially important to her at the time, because she was living with her aunt. She didn’t feel like she was “a burden on someone else’s household,” she said.
Yet, of course, some student spending was frivolous.
Students were able to spend the money as they wanted — for household needs, entertainment, school expense or anything else they wanted or needed. “Some were saving for video games, to go hang out with friends, go to the movies,” Lena Cornish said. Kids also frequently sprung for food, in a flair of teenage independence. “Sometimes you don’t want to eat what your mom cooks.”
Weeks, who is now attending college in New York City, was enrolled in a dual-enrollment program her senior year in New Orleans and had to use her lunch period to cross the city from the Rooted campus on Press Drive to the Bard Early College program housed within Frederick Douglass High School in the 9th Ward. The $50 Study money allowed her to stop on the way to buy healthier lunches, like acai grain bowls and other favorites.
Since 2020, more than 400 students in New Orleans and Indianapolis have participated in the study. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the control group of students who did not receive the $50 weekly cash infusions.
The control group was a necessity within the study, to be able to truly show the effects that the $50 Study had on recipients, when compared to the control group. But the randomized assignment was a painful part of the process, knowing that some students wouldn’t receive the money, Livneh said.
“We’re very upfront about the language around ‘randomized.’ Some of you will get chosen, some of you will not,” she said, explaining that an algorithm had assigned students to the control or test group. “It is the hardest part, I think, of this project when I see the list of students who land in the control group.”
The oldest of five, learning to drive
Last school year, first and foremost on Aronica Hudson’s mind was passing driver’s education, so that she could get her license. With her $50 weekly stipend, she saved up and paid for the $200 course, which she found “nothing like the driving games I played on my iPad.”
Aronica, then a senior at George Washington Carver High School in the 9th Ward, said she passed her test in a family car, “a little red Nissan.”
Beyond helping her understand how to manage and save money, the cash also helped her pay for registration fees and transportation to the four-month culinary program at Café Reconcile, the first step toward her goal, to work as a chef – maybe even at a restaurant she admires, Ruby Slipper, she said.
Aronica’s experience exemplifies the goals of the $50 Study. She was better able to plan for her future, while also addressing the present-day necessities of life – on a typical week, much of her payment went toward household supplies, she said. “I used the money for things I needed, like hygiene products, food, and for my siblings,” she said.
As the oldest of five children, she said, money has always been tight for her. “Before the $50 study, it was really a struggle.”