Dan Goldhaber, Stephanie Liddle, Suvekshya Gautam
While achievement gaps have been widely studied, less attention has been given to how these gaps relate to students’ patterns of academic mobility—that is, how students’ relative academic standing changes from early to later grades. Using rich administrative data from Washington state, we apply an academic mobility framework to examine both test-based and non-test outcomes for student subgroups defined by race/ethnicity and gender, tracking their progress from 3rd grade through high school. Our findings align with prior research: after controlling for other student characteristics, higher performance on 3rd or 8th grade assessments strongly predicts better high school outcomes, including test scores, GPAs, college-level course-taking in math and ELA, graduation rates, and lower rates of absenteeism and disciplinary incidents. We also find that early math achievement is a stronger predictor of later outcomes than early ELA performance. Although some initially low-performing students demonstrate upward mobility, 3rd grade test scores remain powerful predictors of long-term academic trajectories. Students who begin behind tend to stay behind. Though magnitudes of academic mobility vary significantly across outcomes and subgroups, Asian students, especially Asian females, were the most upwardly mobile subgroup while Black males were often, though not always, the least mobile. Gender gaps also vary in size nearly always favoring females. Our results underscore the need for earlier and more intensive interventions to change the educational trajectories of students who struggle academically.