We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in “academic mobility,” a term we use to describe the extent to which students’ ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. We find that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education—that is, academic mobility is limited in U.S. schools on the whole. Still, there is non-negligible variation in the degree of upward mobility across some student subgroups as well as individual school districts. On average, districts that exhibit the greatest upward academic mobility serve more socioeconomically advantaged populations and have higher value-added to student achievement.

我们使用来自七个州、涵盖近 300 万学生的行政小组数据来记录和探索“学术流动性”的变化，我们用这个术语来描述学生在公立学校教育生涯中学业成绩分布排名的变化程度。我们发现，中小学教育阶段的学生排名高度持久，也就是说，美国学校的学术流动性总体上是有限的。尽管如此，一些学生群体以及个别学区的向上流动程度仍存在不可忽视的差异。平均而言，学术向上流动性最大的学区服务于更多社会经济优势人群，并且对学生成绩具有更高的附加值。