Unscheduled School Closings and Student Performance

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. In this paper, we examine the impact of school closures on student performance using data from Maryland public schools. We begin by describing the context within which unscheduled school closure decisions occur, and how these might affect student performance. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SWe then describe relevant research by economists, and our empirical approach. Next we discuss our results, and finally consider their implications.

When the Bell Tolls: The Effects of School Starting Times on Academic Achievement

“…The general pattern in these studies is that the students who have better sleep habits do in fact receive higher grades, but these papers generally only measure simple correlations. 8 More broadly, research on school starting times is related to recent research by economists on the structure of the school day (Eren and Millimet 2007) and the amount of time spent in school (Eren and Millimet 2007;Krashinsky 2006;Marcotte 2007;Marcotte and Hemelt 2008;Hansen 2008;Pischke 2007). Even more broadly, economists studying time use have expanded their analysis beyond the simple hours tradeoff between labor and leisure to include sleep (Biddle and Hamermesh 1990;Brochu, Deri Armstrong, and Morin 2009), other activities (Aguiar and Hurst 2007;Guryan, Hearst, and Kearney 2008;Krueger 2007), and timing of activities throughout the day (Hamermesh 1998(Hamermesh , 1999a(Hamermesh , 1999b(Hamermesh , 2002Hamermesh, Myers, and Pocock 2008 The ACT data is student-level data on all students in grades 10-12 in public schools from the 48 districts (73 schools 2010).…”

Assessing the effect of school days and absences on test score performance

“…Marcotte and Hemelt (2008) examined the effect of fewer days of class resulting from snow related school closures on test score performance and found that the pass rate for 3rd grade math and reading assessments falls by more than a half percent for each school day lost to an unscheduled closure. Hansen (2011) examined both school closures due to weather in Colorado and Maryland as well as state-mandated changes in test-date administration in Minnesota and found that in both cases more instructional time prior to test administration increases student performance.…”

The Causal Effects of Increased Learning Intensity on Student Achievement: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

“…A first set of studies (Thile,Thomsen, A related literature exploits exogenous variation provided by natural events, i.e., changes in the number of school days missed due to inclement weather (Marcotte, 2007;Marcotte and Hemelt, 2008;Marcotte and Hansen, 2010), finding that more time in school before tests improves student performance on state-wide exams.…”