Challenging the Core Assumption of Chronic Absenteeism: Do Excused and Unexcused Absences Equally Contribute to the Effective Early Identification of Students at Risk for Future Achievement Problems?

• In Event: Improving Data Use in School Accountability and Education Policy

Abstract

In response to the Every Student Succeeds Act, nearly three-fourths of states have adopted chronic absenteeism (CA) as a non-academic accountability metric. Major theoretical assumptions underlying this indicator, however, have never been validated. The current study represents the first effort to test the most basic assumption upon which CA is based—that both excused and unexcused absences are equally detrimental to student outcomes and should be utilized to identify at-risk students. Using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methodology, this study presented evidence that only unexcused absences provided diagnostic accuracy for academic risk status for an entire cohort of students in Philadelphia. Theses findings indicate that CA could be a more effective early warning indicator by taking absence types into account.

Authors

• Cassandra Henderson, University of Pennsylvania

• John Fantuzzo, University of Pennsylvania