Description

The impact of school mobility on the academic
achievement of students has been studied as early as
1935. While prior researchers have included
demographic variables in school mobility studies,
they have not examined the impact of
school moves in conjunction with changing
school-level socioeconomic status (SES) on the
educational
outcomes of children. Using nationally
representative data from the Early Childhood
Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten cohort), the author
evaluates the influence of school transitions on the
reading skills of several million children who
attended kindergarten through fifth-grade in the
U.S. A two-group latent growth curve model is used
to estimate
the impact of school moves on the growth of reading
skills across time. The
study includes time-invariant and time-varying
variables
at the level of the individual and the environment.
The results should shed some light on the varied
impact of changing schools on the reading skills of
poor and non-poor children within and across race,
controlling for age, gender, school level SES,
mother s level of education,
and family structure of the children.