Can teacher education programs help prepare new kindergarten and first grade teachers to address student absenteeism?

Deportations Near the Schoolyard: Examining Immigration Enforcement and Racial/Ethnic Gaps in Educational Outcomes

“…To answer the second research question, racial/ethnic gaps in the rates of chronic absenteeism in 2013–2014 and 2015–2016 were derived from CRDC, which provides the number of chronically absent students, disaggregated by race/ethnicity. While there is no consensus in research or policy on the definition of chronic absenteeism, it is most frequently defined as missing 10% or more of the school year (Gottfried & Hutt, 2019). But while states define chronic absenteeism differently across the United States, the Office of Civil Rights defines chronic absenteeism as missing 15 or more days of the school year.…”

Experimental Estimates of the Student Attendance Production Function

“…Given the consequences of student absences and the disproportionate level of absences among socioeconomically disadvantaged students, student attendance has been a growing concern for policymakers. Recent education policy, notably the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), uses chronic absence rates as an outcome for which schools and teachers can be held accountable (Bauer et al, 2018; Gottfried & Hutt, 2019). Such policies implicitly assume that there are school- or classroom-level policy levers available that can increase student attendance.…”

“…There is a growing consensus that student attendance is a critical input in the education production function, an important intermediate outcome influenced by teachers and other school-based interventions, and a type of noncognitive skill valued in the labor market (Gershenson, 2016; Gottfried & Hutt, 2019). Accordingly, education policy increasingly uses student attendance as a performance metric with which to hold schools and teachers accountable (Bauer et al, 2018; Gottfried & Hutt, 2019). Holding schools and teachers accountable for student attendance, however, only makes sense if available policy levers can improve student attendance.…”

The Signaling Power of Unexcused Absence from School

“…We do so by highlighting how unexcused school absences powerfully signal out-of-school crises in children's lives. Our study begins by discussing the well-documented attendance crisis, which has captivated education researchers (Gottfried & Hutt, 2019) and some of the nation's most prominent politicians and bureaucrats (Harris, 2013;United States Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice, 2015). An attendance crisis is plausible because showing up to school should have clear benefits: children who are chronically absent do struggle more in school than their peers (Whitney & Liu, 2017).…”