Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Both anecdotal and systematic evidence points to the importance of teachers for students’ long run success. Previous research on effective teachers has focused on student test score gains in math and reading in the year in which the teacher teaches the student, and shows that a high value-added teacher improves student short-term achievement (e.g., Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005) and can have long-term impacts on college attendance, income and other adult outcomes (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014). However, a large portion of teacher effects on student long-term outcomes, like college attendance, is not explained by teacher effects on student achievement (Chamberlain, 2013), suggesting that good teachers not only increase students’ test scores, but also impact other outcomes.

Using a decade of class-level attendance data from a large urban district, the current paper is the first that estimates teachers’ impact on student absences for the entire secondary grades. Absence from school, particularly unexcused absence, is a compelling outcome to look at given its prevalence, especially for older students and for students with other indicators of low school engagement. Whitney and Liu (2017) show that about half of class absences in secondary school are on days when students attend at least one other class. Given this large amount of variation in attendance across different classes during the school day, class-level absence is likely to be a useful metric for examining teacher effects on attendance as a proxy for teachers’ effects on student engagement more broadly.

Overall, we find that teachers have large effects on student attendance. A student would have about 45 percent fewer unexcused absences in math classes, and 55 percent fewer in English classes, if she had a teacher who is one standard deviation above the average in value added to attendance than if she had an average teacher, holding other variables constant. Compared with value-added to achievement, value-added to attendance is similarly stable across years, though it is more stable for math teachers than for English teachers. While in general value-added to attendance is weakly correlated with value-added to achievement, the correlation is relatively stronger for math (Spearman rho = 0.127) than for English (Spearman rho = 0.069). Having a high value-added to attendance teacher in English improves a student’s opportunity to graduate from high school and reduces her probability of dropping out before 12th grade, net of the teacher’s contribution to student test score, but not so for math teachers.