Study: Being the New Kid in School Can Harm Student Development

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Being the new kid in school is always tough, from finding friends to adapting to new teachers and homes.

More than 6.5 million students nationwide are frequently the “new kid,” and studies have shown that Latino, black, and lower-income students have the highest rates of student mobility, which refers to students changing schools during the middle of any given school year for any other reason besides matriculation.

Frequently, student mobility is detrimental to children’s social and academic development, according to data collected by the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Understanding this data can also help put them 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 at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In K-12 grades, student mobility, also called “churn” or “transience,” 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.

But more often than not, student mobility depends on 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 makes all the reforms—smaller classes, better-trained teachers, better facilities—irrelevant.” said Chester Hartman of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington in a 2010 report.

Understanding the impact of student mobility on learning should account for children’s life circumstances, as well as education and social policies that support students when moves are necessary, various reports have suggested.

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