The short- and long-run impacts of secondary school absences
By Jing Liu, Monica G. Lee, S. Gershenson. Journal of Public Economics, 2021
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract We provide novel evidence on the causal impacts of student absences in middle and high school on state test scores, course grades, and educational attainment using a rich administrative dataset that tracks the date and class period of each absence. We use two similar but distinct identification strategies that address potential endogeneity due to time-varying student-level shocks by exploiting within-student, between-subject variation in class-specific absences. We also leverage information on the timing of absences to show that absences that occur after the annual window for state standardized testing do not affect test scores, providing a further check of our identification strategy. Both approaches yield similar results. We find that absences in middle and high school harm contemporaneous student achievement and longer-term educational attainment: On average, missing 10 classes reduces math or English Language Arts test scores by 3–4% of a standard deviation and course grades by 17–18% of a standard deviation. 10 total absences across all subjects in 9th grade reduce both the probability of on-time graduation and ever enrolling in college by 2%. Learning loss due to school absences can have profound economic and social consequences.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1565bc898d49f78abe44a5b35d24ec9dc5743a4c
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Citations in the corpus
- Projecting the Potential Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement (2020, background): “Specifically, missing 10 school days decreased student mathematics test scores by 0.06 to 0.08 SDs, with slightly smaller effect sizes for ELA (English language arts) scores (Aucejo & Romano, 2016; Gershenson et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2020).”