Giving Compass' Take:

• Erin Einhorn and Chastity Pratt Dawsey describe the harmful effects of high student turnover, a common problem in struggling urban school districts like Detroit's.

• How can funders help to mitigate the damage of changing schools? How can public policies be altered to reduce student turnover? 

• Read about ways to prevent students from changing schools. 

By the time she’d reached the eighth grade, Shantaya Davis had attended so many schools — at least five — that she couldn’t name them all.

Her classmate, Shawntia Reeves, attended four schools on the way to eighth grade. Or maybe five. Her parents weren’t exactly sure of the details, beyond the fact that she’d started kindergarten at the small neighborhood school her family had attended for generations. When the district shut the school down to cut costs, she bounced around, forced to repeatedly make new friends, then lose them again.

Both girls were members of the same eighth grade class at Bethune Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit last year. They posed with their classmates for a photo in June — a portrait of middle-school grads who looked like they’d known each other for years. But the 31 eighth-graders in Bethune’s “8B” homeroom had collectively attended a total of 128 schools — an average of more than four schools each.

Five of them said they’d cycled through seven or more schools on their path to eighth grade. Just three had attended the K-8 school since kindergarten.

These students are among countless others just like them in cities like Detroit — kids who’ve spent their childhoods starting over every couple of years, navigating new schools, trying to fit in.

Stories like theirs ripple through school districts across the country where the growing push to create new options such as magnet and charter schools has put an end to the days when most students enrolled in their neighborhood school. A comprehensive federal study that tracked a group of 20,000 children from 1998 until 2007 found that one in eight had attended four or more schools by the eighth grade. Those students were concentrated in large urban areas where people living in poverty are also grappling with evictions, foreclosures, and other forces that push people from their homes.

This kind of enrollment turmoil has a debilitating impact on schools, dragging down test scores, exacerbatingbehavioral issues, fueling dropout rates, and making it more difficult for all children to learn — not just those who are on the move.

In short, it’s a major — but often unrecognized — reason why improving urban schools has become one of the most intractable problems facing American cities.

Read the full article about high student turnover by Erin Einhorn and Chastity Pratt Dawsey at Chalkbeat.