Are Student Absences Worth The Worry In U.S. Primary Schools?

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Student attendance is a potentially important, yet understudied, input in the educational process, as absences disrupt learning, weaken schools’ and classrooms’ sense of community, and reduce students’ exposure to classroom instruction. Student absences reduce students’ exposure to investments in school and teacher quality. Accordingly, student absences potentially contribute to the achievement gap in two ways. First, absence rates are higher among low-SES students. Second, absences may cause greater harm to students from disadvantaged households, as such households may be less able to compensate for lost instructional time than their more advantaged counterparts. It is particularly important that policy makers and educators understand the consequences of primary school student absences, as children’s socio-behavioral skills are affected by their early environment and problems of chronic absence and school disengagement manifest as early as first grade.
However, the relationship between student attendance and academic achievement is relatively understudied, particularly at the primary level. Much of the existing literature is correlational and the few studies that have attempted to identify causal relationships are limited to single urban districts. We contribute to this gap in the literature by investigating the impact of primary-school student absences on academic achievement using survey data from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and rich longitudinal student-level administrative data on the population of third through fifth graders in North Carolina’s public schools. We do so by including absences as a current input in value-added models (VAMs) of the education production function that condition on classroom fixed effects. Specifically, we examine the functional form of the relationship between student absences and academic achievement, test for heterogeneity across observed student characteristics and type of absence in the relationship between student absences and academic achievement, and examine the sensitivity of these estimates to VAM specification and estimation method.

Author

• Seth Gershenson, American University