Littauer Center 315
1805 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email: jgracie@g.harvard.edu
| Raj Chetty | chetty@fas.harvard.edu |
| Larry Katz | katz2@fas.harvard.edu |
| Amanda Pallais | apallais@fas.harvard.edu |
Every Day Counts: Absenteeism and the Returns to Education
in High-Poverty Schools
(with Benjamin Goldman)
Abstract: Why do students in high-poverty schools perform worse academically and in the labor market than their peers in low-poverty schools? We show that a key difference is how regularly students attend school. To estimate the effect of improving school-wide attendance, we construct a leave-out instrument based on neighboring schools, using transitory shocks to absences caused by factors like respiratory illnesses. We establish the validity of the instrument by showing that only shocks that occur before outcomes are measured have an impact on those outcomes. In high-poverty schools, we find that reducing absences from the 75th to the 25th percentile of the distribution would increase high school graduation rates by 2.3 percentage points and raise average earnings at age 25 by $3,600. Our results suggest that absenteeism may account for up to one-third of the achievement gap between high- and low-poverty schools. In the second part of our analysis, we further demonstrate that policies focused on improving attendance in high-poverty schools can reduce these outcome disparities. Nationwide adoption of “Communities in Schools,” the country’s largest student support program, could reduce the achievement gap by 20%, largely through its impact on attendance.