"McLaughlin points out that Central Falls High School has the most transient student population in the state, the highest percentage of students who don’t speak English and a high percentage of special-needs students. More than 90 percent of students live in poverty. Teachers have to adjust and readjust. And the high turnover in administrators over the last five years has left them wondering what each new day will bring. "
http://www.projo.com/news/bobkerr/kerr_column_21_02-21-10_1IHGEOS_v14.32a7a3b.html"The academic consequences of student transiency have been debated, but most research points to profoundly negative effects (Hartman, 2002; Wright, 1999). The U.S. GAO (1994) found that about 17% of third graders had attended three or more schools since kindergarten and therefore could be considered “highly mobile.” Forty-one percent of these highly mobile third graders scored below grade level in reading, and about 31% scored below grade level in math. In comparison, only 26% of stable students (those who attended only one school since kindergarten) tested below grade level in reading and about 16% tested below grade level in math. The study also found that highly mobile third graders were far more likely to repeat a grade than stable students. In their study of four groups of transient students, Ingersoll, Scamman, and Eckerling (1989) also found a strong, uniformly negative relationship between student mobility and academic attainment, particularly in the lower grades. Evidence suggests that transiency also affects school completion: Rumberger and Larson (1998) found that students who changed high schools even once were less than half as likely as more stable students to complete their high school education.1
Research also points to the impacts of student transiency on schools themselves. Student transiency can cause significant disruption to classrooms (Conniff, 1998), resulting in slowed curricula and loss of instructional time as a consequence of behavioral problems among new students (Sanderson, 2003). In a study of 21 classes in a single urban elementary school, Lash and Kirkpatrick (1990) found that teachers rarely received advance notice of new student arrivals. In addition to increased administrative and bookkeeping tasks, teachers often needed to re-teach material so that new students could catch up academically. This created classroom management problems as new students learned classroom rules and adapted to new peer groups, but it also affected social cohesion within the classroom. As a second grade teacher explained, “One of the things we want to establish is that we are a group, and if that group keeps crumbling, it’s a little harder (to establish) than in stable schools” (Lash & Kirkpatrick, p. 186).
This is consistent with the work of Bruno and Isken (1996), who, in their study of transiency within an inner city school, report that teachers repeatedly described how student movement created extra burdens by increasing the administrative workload and decreasing the regular instructional time. However, more significant was the disruption caused when enrollment change necessitated the reorganization of classrooms (i.e., either merging because of shrinking numbers or splitting because of growing numbers of students), an event that could be expected to occur anywhere from 1 and 5 times at any grade level during any given school year. In sum, student transiency poses serious challenges for schools and school districts and is associated with significant social and academic risk factors....
http://www.jrre.psu.edu/articles/20-15.htm
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