This study analyzed data from a cohort of 5234 students, using an analytic technique that allowed the measurement of deflection scores in a child's academic trajectory from third to sixth grade. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether this approach, which had been used in previous research for predicting academic trajectories, would generalize to a broader based sample. A secondary goal was to see whether specific factors associated with schools, at both the third and sixth grades, could significantly predict academic trajectories. In a potentially important extension of previous research, these school protective factors were examined along with more proximal factors associated with the students' family environments. As a further extension of previous research, the sample was split into low- and middle-SES sub-samples. For both the lower- and middle-SES samples, variables from the child's family and school were successful in predicting academic deflection scores.
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