This article presents findings from a qualitative exploration of homeless individuals’ experiences and their perspectives on ideal designs of schools. The article is part of a larger research project titled “Unheard Voices,” which explores marginalized individuals’ (homeless, prisoners, working poor, and migrant workers) visions of ideal schools in order to more effectively include them in the school reform dialogue. The results of the interviews from the prison study are briefly outlined alongside the current voices of the homeless in order to show areas of agreement and disagreement between the studies in the larger project. The findings of this study confirm many of the findings from the prison study and therefore constitute a good synthesis, to this point, of the unheard voices in school reform. The results are surprising in that they are not in alignment with most policy experts or educational researchers’ suggestions for school reform. Further research among remaining marginalized populations must be our next step, along with better discussions of and explanations for why these populations’ ideas differ so dramatically from the traditional reform dialogue.
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