Student Mobility Affects Academic Performance

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Being the new kid in school is always tough, especially when it happens in the middle of the school year. Finding new friends, adapting to new teachers and rules, adjusting to a new home, all are part of a difficult transition that many kids face.

According to figures collected by the University of California, Santa Barbara, more than 6.5 million students nationwide are frequently the “new kid,” and it is frequently detrimental to their social and academic development.

More and more studies are being done on student mobility and it suggests that this is a key indicator in identifying vulnerable students. Understanding this data can also ensure that they stay on a path toward academic achievement.

“To be sure, multiple moves are a dangerous signal, but even one move increases the [student’s] risk of not graduating or getting delayed in graduating,” said Russell Rumberger, a research professor who studies dropout risks and student mobility at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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In K-12 grades, student mobility, also called “churn” or “transience,” generally refers to students changing schools during the middle of any given school year for any other reason besides matriculation. This occurs when students volunteer to change schools to be part of a new program or when they are involuntarily expelled or seek to change their social environment to “escape” from bullying.

More often than not, student mobility is dependent upon the family situation. Moves are forced due to changing jobs or financial hardships. School mobility refers to the frequency of these moves by students in a particular classroom, school, or district. Schools that have high churn numbers hurt not only the students that leave, but also those students who remain enrolled.

The National Academy of Sciences reported that “high-poverty urban schools” often have more than half of their students churn within a single school year. A similar study by the University of Chicago found that students who changed more schools four times or more before the sixth grade were nearly a year behind their classmates in terms of learning skills. Schools with high churn were behind “more stable schools” by the fifth grade.

“It’s chaos,” Chester Hartman, the research director for the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington said in the 2010 report. “It makes all the reforms—smaller classes, better-trained teachers, better facilities—irrelevant.”

Several studies have found that student mobility, especially multiple moves, are associated with engaging less in class, having poorer grades in reading and math, and are at higher risk of dropping out in high school. Research has determined that transferring students are nearly three months behind in reading and math learning.

Mobility can be especially hard on children in early grades when they learn “foundational skills.” A study by New York University in 2015 focused on Chicago found that, out of 381 low-income, ethnic minority students, 327 changed schools at least once between kindergarten and fourth grade; 40 of these students transferred three or more times. The more often the students moved, the lower they scored on state standardized math tests.