“A” For Attendance: Do Certain Types of Absences Affect Students Differently?

In the discussion of how to best improve our nation’s public schools, attention is often focused on certain controversial topics—are charter schools a good idea or not?—or debating the details of particular initiatives. But there are a few essential building blocks that form the foundation of our schools, without which they can’t succeed; one of those is student attendance. Attendance and its direct link to student success have been in the recent spotlight at both the national and local level. We know that missing even a few days of school has a profound negative impact on a student’s chance for success, but new research suggests that all absences are not created equal.

In “Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time,” Harvard professor Joshua Goodman uses data from Massachusetts to explore whether students are negatively impacted by absences because of lost instructional time or if there are other factors at work. Goodman highlights the national conversation on the importance of instructional time and the national push to lengthen the school day and year to provide students with more time in class. But are absent students hurt more by the fact that they spend fewer minutes in class or that when they return they are out of sync with their peers?

To answer this question, the paper highlights an important difference between what Goodman calls “coordinated disruptions,” when many students miss school at the same time, and absences that affect different students at different times. Goodman makes use of Massachusetts’ snowy winters to examine how these two types of absences differ. On some days in the school year, the weather is so bad that schools close and all students miss that day; on other days, the weather is bad enough that some students don’t come to school, but others do. By measuring differences in the effects of these days, Goodman can answer the question of whether all absences are created equal.

The author uses data from all Massachusetts public schools and students between 2003 and 2010, including both attendance and achievement data. In his sample, Goodman observes that poor students miss school more often than their peers, on average, and that there are also differences in absence patterns in students of different races, with gaps in attendance worsening as children get older. Further, he notes that coordinated disruptions like school closures account for less than a quarter of all missed school time.

When he looks at the differences between missing school due to coordinated disruptions and missing school for normal absences, Goodman finds some striking relationships. Like previous research, his analysis finds a relationship between students’ absences and their scores on math and reading tests. But more striking is that this relationship does not hold for absences due to school closures. More specifically, Goodman estimates that when students miss school due to bad weather, but the school does not officially close and their peers spend that day in class, those absent students’ math scores suffer by about 0.05 standard deviations for each day missed. This may not sound like much but means that attendance patterns could account for up to a quarter of the math achievement gap between students from different income backgrounds. The same pattern holds for reading scores, though on a much smaller scale.

Goodman’s findings confirm what our intuition already suggests is true, but offer important insights into student learning that could impact future policy. The differences experienced by students who are absent for different reasons mean that schools and teachers can handle coordinated disruptions well but are not well equipped to deal with students who miss days of instruction intermittently. Goodman suggests that we invest in strategies to help teachers catch up those students who have missed crucial learning time, without consequentially disrupting their peers’ progress—a frequent negative spillover effect that he documents in his data. Recognizing that all absences are not equal is the first step towards tailoring policy to help schools better deal with the important issue of student attendance and the consequences of missed school days.

Article Source: Goodman, Joshua, “Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 20221, June 2014.

Feature Photo: cc/(Shavar Ross.com)