There is a widely-held belief that the foremost mission of American public education is to provide a pathway to success for every student, including those who face considerable life obstacles. However, persistent achievement gaps along dimensions of race, income, family education level, and other factors challenge the truth—or at least the practicality—of this conviction. Research, including from Fordham, has shown that these gaps often form early and are persistent or even widen over time. A new CALDER working paper looks at both test-based and non-test-based high school outcomes for a population of third grade students in an effort to locate evidence that initially-low-performing students have the ability to rise.
The longitudinal student-level data for this study come from Washington State, comprising more than 581,000 unique students who entered third grade from 2006 to 2013. These students were followed through 12th grade—the latest cohort reached that milestone in 2022—with data focusing on outcomes such as math and English language arts test scores, college-level course-taking while in high school, absences, disciplinary incidents, GPA, and high school graduation. To keep their analysis consistent, the researchers make a number of adjustments to the wide swath of data to account for changes in testing regimes and for students who come into and out of the various cohorts over time.
“Academic mobility” is defined as how much a student’s rank in the distribution of academic (and non-academic) performance changes during their time in school. An education system with high academic mobility would be one where students’ early-grade ranks are less predictive of their later-grade ranks; one with low academic mobility would see students locked into their early-grade ranks for their entire school career.
The researchers find low evidence of mobility in their sample. Higher performance on third or eighth grade assessments strongly predicts better high school outcomes, including test scores, GPAs, college-level course-taking (in both math and ELA), and graduation rates. Higher performance on these exams also predicts lower rates of absenteeism and disciplinary incidents. And the corollary for low initial performance is true as well. Early achievement in math is even more predictive of high school outcomes than early achievement in ELA, and third grade achievement overall is more predictive than eighth grade achievement, indicating that potential for academic mobility—or lack thereof—sets in early without much capacity for change.
That’s not to say that some students don’t exhibit upward academic mobility after a slow start in third grade. On average, students who score at the 25th percentile of their third grade test score distribution move up to the 31st percentile by high school. But those same students also experience varying degrees of downward mobility in the non-test-based outcomes of college-level course-taking, absenteeism, and disciplinary incidents. Asian students are generally the most upwardly mobile racial/ethnic group, and Black males are generally the least mobile. Gender gaps also vary in size but almost always favor females, regardless of student group or outcome.
The authors point out that there is a missing counterfactual here (“we do not know what achievement would look like in the absence of any existing interventions”), but nonetheless conclude that “five years of elementary and middle school experiences and interventions”—whatever they are in this context—“do little to substantially shift the educational trajectories of students who begin school with low achievement” at third grade. This is bleak and challenges the belief that schools can provide a pathway to success for every student. But it is vital information to know. The road to a student’s ultimate academic outcome begins early, and lowtest scores by third grade should be a clarion call to do everything possible to give those students the best chance of moving up.
SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Stephanie Liddle, and Suvekshya Gautam, “Assessing the Academic Mobility on Test and Non-Test Outcomes for Students from Third Grade Through High School,” CALDER Working Paper (November 2025).
