The Absentee Gap? Effects of Teacher Absences on Black and Latino Students

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Abstract

Do teacher absences negatively impact student achievement, specifically that of black and Latino students? This paper presents results of models from a data set containing over 25,000 student-level observations from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District collected over a three-year period. Results confirm findings from previous studies that teacher absences have a small but statistically significant negative effect on student achievement but provide insufficient evidence that black or Hispanic students are disproportionately harmed by one day of teacher absence. However, black students are more likely to be assigned to teachers with a history of high absence rates. Thus teacher absences to contribute to the black/white achievement gap through the exposure of black students to teachers with chronic absence concerns.

Authors

• Juan B Cortes, Johns Hopkins University

• Bryan Shelly, Cleveland Metropolitan School District