While existing literature documents disparities in and implications of absenteeism and truant behavior, less is known about truancy as defined in state laws. Habitual truancy, which can trigger external punitive responses, is particularly underexplored. The current study utilizes administrative data from the universe of Pennsylvania schools to…

Background/Context: Parents, policymakers, and researchers uphold that missing school has negative implications on schooling success, particularly for students in urban schools. However, it has thus far been an empirical challenge within educational research to estimate the true effect that absences have on achievement outcomes. This study…

At the request of Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT), Mathematica has developed value-added models (VAMs) that aim to estimate the contributions of individual teachers, teams of teachers, and schools to the achievement growth of their students. The authors' work in estimating value-added in Pittsburgh…

This article addresses the relationship between academic achievement and the student characteristics of absence and mobility. Mobility is a measure of how often a student changes schools. Absence is how often a student misses class. Standardized test scores are used as proxies for academic achievement. A model for the full joint distribution of…