Yes, I went "Say what?" too, which is why I decided to have a look. (I got there through trying to figure out how many students weren't really attending school. I read an estimate that over 1/3 of the Chicago Public School students never connected, and I see quite a few kids playing outside during "school-time. Maybe they're homeschooled.)
Evidence suggests that missing school has adverse effects on eventual educational attainment. A longitudinal study of teacher strikes in Argentina revealed that disrupted schooling lowered graduation rates, total educational attainment, and subsequent income. An educational reform in Belgium differentially affected Flemish-speaking and French-speaking parts of the country and resulted in strikes of approximately 60 days in the French-speaking part of the country against none in the Flemish-speaking part. Using this natural experiment in a difference-in-difference framework, economists estimated the long-term effects of these strikes on educational attainment to be a 5.8% reduction in total years of educational attainment, a somewhat larger effect than that identified in Argentina. Prolonged strike studies in the United States and Canada are lacking, but even short-term strikes were found to result in diminished test scores. One US report found that the single best predictor of high-school graduation was fourth-grade reading test scores: 23% of children who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade will not graduate high school, compared with 9% of those who are.
One of these things is not like the other things, of course--the predictor is a correlation that doesn't distinguish between test scores that are lower because of lack of teaching and those that are lower because of lack of interest or ability. The Belgian study is an estimate, not a measurement--and the Flemish and French speakers have different distributions to begin with. Only the Argentine study is relevant to the issue at hand.
That Argentine study is interesting. One of the effects they found was a shift from studying to "home production" when strikes lasted a long time, which in that environment would contribute to the lower lifetime income they find. ("males to sort into lower skill occupations", "females to move toward home production") I'd like to have seen the distributions rather than just the averages, but the effect looks real.
In our case we don't have teacher strikes--at least for now. We do have a lot of kids who get much less schooling attention than they used to. The number of students who don't log in every day overestimates the number not studying that day ("doing assigned work that does not require a daily check-in"). The 15,000 high school students that LA is worried about here sound like they were in marginal situations to begin with thanks to family situations and family dynamics, and now are completely off the school's radar. The odds of them excelling were never good--now they probably need some kind of adult education catch-up to reach those that will eventually want an education.
I wonder how much of the lack of student contact is a measurement of underlying problems not ever under the schools' control. I wonder if the teachers in the City Journal article have as much impact on student's lives as they think they do.
Homeschooled students are probably doing fine, but I'd guess that parents motivated enough to do that would also notify the school about it, and thus the kids would not be counted as missing.
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