| Recent school policies encourage students to transfer schools. Yet educational researchers find that students who make school transfers tend to have lower academic achievement as compared to non-movers. I use data from the national Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) 1998, to investigate the ways in which the academic progress of elementary students is influenced by when and whether they move. The ECLS-K data allow the use of growth curve modeling, a technique that makes it possible to show how the timing and frequency of moves in elementary school influence children's immediate and longer-term academic achievements.;Children who change elementary schools do not immediately begin to perform more poorly in school, but their progress in reading and math achievement slows over time, no matter their home or school context. The negative outcomes of moving are multiplied for children who move more than once.;Students who will transfer schools during elementary school begin school with characteristics associated with lower reading and math achievement. These differences between school changers and stable students, however, do not explain the achievement differences found between students who move and stable students. Mobile students do not attend elementary schools that are very different from students who do not move, though students with higher-achieving classmates and those in classrooms with more math and reading resources are predicted to have higher math and reading scores than other students.;Also, a student who moves from a low-resourced school to a high-resourced school is predicted to improve on later math and reading tests, while an accompanying change in the home situation (increase in income and parent education, and/or an increase in student and parent ties with others in the school community), can improve these academic results even more. These changes do not appear to be common however, as students tend to move to new schools that are strikingly similar to their previous school. |
