EdWeek: Mobility of Native American Students Can Pose Challenges to Achievement

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/10/10/07native.h27.html

But she continues to be frustrated by an obstacle to achievement that seems particularly pronounced among the Native American students who make up 61 percent of the school’s enrollment: high mobility.

The turnover rate for North Middle students last year was 50 percent overall—meaning that half the school’s 468 students came or went after the start of the school year. Many of them were Native Americans.

And instability carries a cost. Ms. Burckhard cites the steady coming and going of students as one reason the school has always failed to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, goals under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Statistics are limited on the mobility of Native American and Alaska Native students, who make up just 1.2 percent of public school students nationally. But an analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics, by an NCES researcher for Education Week, found that 15.7 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native sophomores in 2002 changed schools in their last two years of high school, compared with 7 percent of white sophomores and 8.5 percent of Asian sophomores.