Despite frequent moves, low‐income black families are more likely than any other group to churn among disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the least likely to escape them. Traditional explanations for neighborhood inequality invoke racial preferences and barriers to living in high‐income neighborhoods, but recent work suggests that it is also involuntary mobility—such as eviction—which predicts the neighborhood destinations of poor African American families in urban areas. However, we know little about how individuals actually make residential decisions under such unplanned and constrained conditions. Using longitudinal interviews with low‐income African‐American families residing in Mobile, AL, and Baltimore, MD, we describe the array of factors that lead poor black families to move, and describe how families secure housing in the wake of unplanned mobility. We observe that moving among the poor is more reactive than it is voluntary: Approximately 70 percent of most recent moves are catalyzed by landlords, housing quality failures, and violence. We show how this reactive mobility both accelerates and hampers residential selection in ways that may reproduce neighborhood context and inequality. Where mobility is characterized by a greater degree of agency, we show that the strategies families use to make decisions often prohibit them from investigating a wider range of residential options.

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Secondly, a warm, consoling thanks goes to my mother, whose deer-in-theheadlights countenance when we first visited a college campus together so many years ago inspired this whole thing. I am nothing without her blind, misguided confidence. If this year proves anything, I will look forward to another five years of endless voice mail asking "Is your dissertation done yet? Holly? Is it?" A special thanks must go to all of the professors I've had the privilege of working with at Wesleyan. Particular recognition goes to Charles Lemert, Lynn Owens and Joel Pfister who have played a crucial role in guiding my growth from a terrified freshman into an equally terrified graduate student. I have no doubt that I will be thanking these gentlemen over and over again as I spend the next five (or six, seven) years writing that dissertation my mother thinks should be done by now. Less visible but no less important to my efforts have been my friends. I thank Mitchell Goldfarb for his unwavering love and sympathy during a time that has been exceedingly trying on the both of us. I thank my housemates, Annalisa Bolin, Abby Hinchcliff, Lynn Favin and the honorary Cedric Bien for tolerating my 4am bedtime and my strange affinity for making animal sounds under duress. All of the beautiful ladies of both the Sociology and Government offices deserve their place here as they, too, were privy to my madness over the course of the last several years.

This study investigates the literacy skills of 193 students across grades three, five, seven, and nine in one private English medium school in Kerala, India. Students were assessed on their ability to read phonologically regular and irregular words, fluency with grade-level text, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension skill. Results showed that students across all grade levels possessed the ability to apply phonological decoding skills that were equivalent to the 80th percentile for native English speakers while sightword recognition skills were commensurate with the 58th percentile. Oral reading fluency skills were assessed using grade-level narrative passages and average attainment ranged between the 50th and 70th percentiles. Vocabulary knowledge was found to decline consistently from 3rd through 9th grade, with percentiles dropping from the 25th to 8th percentile respectively. Text comprehension was similarly low with attainment averaging at the 16th percentile for all four grades. Implications for instruction are discussed.