Volume 26, Number 1 (Winter) 1991
Ehrenberg, Ronald G., Randy A. Ehrenberg, Daniel I. Rees, and Eric L. Ehrenberg. 1991. "School District Leave Policies, Teacher Absenteeism, and Student Achievement." Journal of Human Resources 26(1):72-105.
This paper addresses how provisions that address leave usage in teacher contracts influence teacher absences from the classroom, how teacher absences influence student absenteeism, and how teacher and student absenteeism influence student test score performance. Based on an extensive data collection effort conducted by the authors, it presents an econometric analysis using data from over 700 school districts in New York State in 1986-87. It concludes that changing some provisions (e.g., increasing the number of unused leave days teachers can cumulate and "cash in" at retirement) may simultaneously benefit teachers, students, and taxpayers.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Randy A. Ehrenberg is the principal at Ithaca High School, Ithaca City School District, Ithaca, NY; Daniel I. Rees is a doctoral candidate in labor economics at Cornell University; and Eric L. Ehrenberg is an undergraduate at Cornell University. Research support was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-8719592. The authors are grateful to the Foundation for its support, to Ann Gray, data archivist at the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) for obtaining some of the data sets used in our analysis, to Roberta Troike and Julie Hotchkiss for helping to code some of the data, creating extracts, and merging these together, and to numerous colleagues around the country for their comments on earlier versions. The data set used in this paper will be archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106) as of January 1, 1991.
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