Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Wladimir Zanoni

Senior Researchers. 

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

Abstract

Recurrent student absences during high school have been found to be a remarkably good indicator of the school disengagement process that eventually leads to school dropout. This paper documents that truancy during high school is characterized by a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the extent to which parents intergenerationally teach behavior to their children.

Using transition probability matrixes and non-parametric regression models, we find that, despite the majority of high school students who are in the fifth percentile in the schol absences distribution in their senior year were transmitted poor patterns of behavior during childhood from their parents, a sizable number of them were not. We reach that conclusion from the fact that, while some parents of truant high schoolers failed reccurrently to bring their children to school in early grades, some of them did not.

Some students “became” truants primarily because of influences other than the endowments of behavioral skills that their parents transmitted to them. Understanding truancy during high school, and designing policies to address this problem, requires a deeper understanding of the role played by the process of intergenerational transmission of non-cognitive skills. A targeted approach to anti-truancy policy is suggested, according to which, interventions that try to prevent truancy could be effective starting early and if focused on parents. Expected returns from interventions directed to adolescents will increase with the degree of endowments of non-cognitive skills that was transferred from their parents.