Are Student Absences Worth the Worry in U.S. Primary Schools?

By S. Gershenson, A. Jacknowitz, Andrew Brannegan. Education Finance and Policy, 2017

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Student absences are a potentially important, yet understudied, input in the educational process. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative survey and rich administrative records from North Carolina, we investigate the relationship between student absences and academic performance. Generally, student absences are associated with modest but statistically significant decreases in academic achievement. The harmful effects of absences are approximately linear, and are two to three times larger among fourth and fifth graders in North Carolina than among kindergarten and first-grade students in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. In both datasets, absences similarly reduce achievement in urban, rural, and suburban schools. In North Carolina, the harm associated with student absences is greater among both low-income students and English language learners, particularly for reading achievement. Also, in North Carolina, unexcused absences are twice as harmful as excused absences. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a1778d13b1bf2631053d8a0fa5bfa2bd240ece0

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1. J. Soland
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4. Erik A. Ruzek

Citations in the corpus

• Connect-Text: Leveraging Text-Message Communication to Mitigate Chronic Absenteeism and Improve Parental Engagement in the Earliest Years of Schooling (2018, methodology): “Using data from the ECLS-K, Gershenson et al. (2017) estimated a significant, causal relationship between student achievement and attendance such that each additional absence reduced test performance by 0.002 SD, on average, for children in kindergarten and first grade.”
• Projecting the Potential Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement (2020, background): “However, two studies have indicated that low-income students suffer more from school absences than their wealthier peers (Aucejo & Romano, 2016; Gershenson et al., 2017).”