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Mobility's impact on achievement

by Jeffrey Rosen

Jeffrey Rosen is a research analyst, Department of Evaluation and Data Analysis, for Chicago Public Schools.

By design, many new federal and state policies — most notably No Child Left Behind (NCLB) — encourage students in low performing schools to seek new options within their districts. Curiously, however, student mobility — defined as students moving from one school to another for reasons other than grade promotion — is often left out of discussions regarding the impact of NCLB and other school reform initiatives.

How does movement from school to school affect student learning? How does a student's movement from school to school affect other students, teachers and the student's old and new schools? Does student mobility cause poor student performance or is it merely symptomatic of poor performance?

Data from Chicago Public Schools can illustrate how student mobility and school performance might be related. Analysis is based on a cohort of first-graders who were enrolled in a Chicago public elementary school in the fall of 1999. These students were tracked for five years and were defined as "mobile" if they were enrolled in different schools in October and May of the same academic year.

Although this method of identifying mobile students is consistent with definitions of student mobility in most research, it likely results in missing some mobility. For example, students who leave a school after October, but return prior to May, are not counted as mobile because they would be enrolled in the same school at both points of observation.

What we know

Not everyone in education or government today views mobility in the same way. It is very reasonable to view student mobility in much the same way that NCLB does — as a strategic activity by families that serves their own personal and schooling interests. Others view student mobility as a disruptive activity that harms students and schools. Just what are the broad impacts of mobility on student learning?

Mobility has been common all across the country even before NCLB and other initiatives that encourage student movement. In 1998, M.X. Mao, M.D. Whitsett and L.T. Mellor studied student mobility in 6,000 Texas schools and found, over a four-year period, two-thirds of students who were first-graders in 1994-95 moved at least once. Not surprisingly, these authors report mobility to be higher among poorer, less advantaged students.

Throughout the 1990s, Chicago Public Schools also struggled with mobility. David Kerbow, a research analyst with the University of Chicago, looked at student mobility in 1996 by examining its converse — school stability or the number of students who remained continuously enrolled in the same school over a specified period of time. He found low stability in Chicago schools during the early 1990s. (Figure 1, adapted from research conducted at the University of Chicago shows the Chicago Public Schools' stability patterns during the early 1990s.)

From 1993 to 1996, the typical Chicago public elementary school was quite unstable. By the end of first grade, 81.5 percent of students remained enrolled, while 19.5 percent left. By the end of year two, with most of those students in second grade, 65.5 percent of the same students were still enrolled and 34.5 percent had left. By the end of four years, with most students in the fourth grade, the typical Chicago elementary school retained less than half of its originally enrolled students.

By the same measures for 1999-2003, figures show stability today is still low and has not improved. (See Figure 2) Roughly 23 percent of students in this cohort that entered first grade in 1999 left their original school after one year. After four years, schools typically enrolled less than half of the students originally enrolled in 1999-2000.

Why the concern?

Prior research gives us reason to be concerned about student movement from school to school for reasons other than promotion to the next grade. The effects of movement in elementary school might have long-term impacts on students' academic performance.

A study by Christopher Swanson and Barbara Schneider in 1999 shows how mobility during elementary school increases the odds of dropping out of high school. Also serious problems seem to emerge when students make multiple moves during elementary school.

Kerbow's research shows the very clear and very negative impact of repeated mobility during elementary school on students' academic growth trajectories. A single move appears to exert relatively small effects on student learning, but cumulative moves have a dramatic impact on student academic growth. In other words, students seem to be able to recover academically from a single move during elementary school, but multiple moves puts them so far behind that catching up with their peers becomes extremely difficult.

It is important to note, however, that even a single school move initially can result in students falling behind their stable peers. So, perhaps the message is not being communicated well, not only to parents, but also to government officials who are encouraging programs that promote mobility.

Weighing the costs and benefits of mobility, specifically whether a new school is good enough to make the costs worth it, should clearly be something that parents and school officials consider. That mobility can create problems for students and schools should, at the very least, be part of the policy discussion as we move deeper into reform initiatives that will likely increase mobility.

Timing is everything

One of the more important elements of student mobility is the timing of the student's move. Research and common sense show that students who change schools during the school year appear to be at a much greater risk for academic problems than those students who move during the summer months or those who are stable. This was a fairly straightforward and intuitive distinction made by Chester Hartman in 2002, and data from Chicago shows how dramatic the differential impacts of summer and school-year movement can be. (Figures 3 and 4 show a school's percentage of mobile students graphed against the school's percent at or above national norms on the reading section of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills [ITBS]. Figure 3 shows the percent of students mobile during the school year; Figure 4 shows the percent mobile during the summer.)

Schools with higher school-year mobility in Chicago have fewer students at or above national norms. This pattern is quite consistent and clear over time. The summer mobility pattern is much more difficult to determine and appears far less consistent over this particular time period.

But this information helps confirm what we suspect: school-year movement is more detrimental for students and schools than summer movement.

Associated mobility risks

Another important element of student mobility is the considerable risk associated with multiple student moves during elementary school. Many argue that the highly mobile student is clearly the most at-risk, but the issue is very complicated. It is unclear which occurs first: poor student performance or multiple student moves.

A 1996 study conducted in Baltimore Public Schools by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Susan Dauber showed that once student background characteristics, including past academic performance, are controlled for, the effects of mobility become insignificant in relation to student performance. So, mobility may not be the factor that causes poor performance; it may only be a symptom, a byproduct of other more important individual factors that are directly responsible for depressed student performance. However, the data suggests some important relationships associated with highly mobile students.

In Chicago, a sizable group of students move repeatedly during their elementary years. (See Table 1) More than half of all the elementary school moves made for reasons other than promotion (57 percent) were made by the 18 percent of children who moved two or more times. Twenty-eight percent of moves were made by 6.7 percent of kids who moved more than three times. Again, in this cohort of students, most made at least one school move.

When we speak about the highly mobile student, we are referring to a sizable group of kids. In fact, fully one-fifth of all CPS students were highly mobile between 1999 and 2003, again meaning they moved more than twice, thus placing them at high risk for academic problems.

Furthermore, the Chicago data suggest that highly mobile students tend to congregate in particular schools. And schools with large concentrations of highly mobile students tend to perform more poorly on the reading portion of ITBS. (See Figure 5.)

The clarity of the relationship between the percent of highly mobile students and school level performance is striking. But, interpret this with caution.

It would be incorrect to infer causation here. We really cannot say, from these data, which comes first, school changes or poor performance. However, it is clear that where there was a high concentration of highly mobile students, school level test score performance in 2003 was low.

What does this mean?

Clearly, it seems to matter how many moves a student makes, when those moves occur, the student's personal and family situation and, of course, the reason for the move. It must be noted that not all mobility may be negative for students.

If a student moves from a low-performing school to a high-performing school, can that really be argued as a case of bad mobility? Probably not, but research has yet to address this issue. And this is critical, given the nature of NCLB, which clearly encourages strategic movement via transfers from low- to high-performing schools.

We still do not know what difference moving for quality of school makes on a student's performance relative to moving for other reasons. But because student mobility probably matters quite a bit, and given the current political environment, it should be at the forefront in the minds of policy makers and school district officials as they consider transfer options under NCLB.

References

Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Susan Dauber, "Children in Motion: School Transfers and Elementary School Performance," Journal of Educational Research, 1996

Chester Hartman, "High Classroom Turnover: How Children Get Left Behind," in Dianne Piche, W.L Taylor and R.A. Reed (eds.)

Rights at Risk: Equality in an Age of Terrorism, 2002

David Kerbow, "Patterns of Urban Student Mobility and Local School Reform," Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 1996

M.X. Mao, M.D. Whitsett and L.T. Mellor, "Student Mobility, Academic Performance, and School Accountability," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Assocation, Chicago, Illinois, 1998

Christopher Swanson and Barbara Schneider, "Students on the Move: Residential and Educational Mobility in America's Schools," Sociology of Education, 1999