Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners commonly assume that student absences matter. When students are not in school, we uphold that they miss out on learning opportunities and forgo valuable social/developmental activities; consequently, when absent students return to school, they are said to be behind and often feel alienated. Moreover, student absences may affect teachers and classmates by disrupting routines and causing teachers to spend time helping students to “catch up” following an absence spell. Given these concerns, recent discourse has emphasized the importance of school attendance.

This research note shows that value-added measures of teacher effectiveness (VAMs) are insensitive to controlling for lagged or concurrent student absences.

We find that spring-to-spring “cross-year” value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher effectiveness, relative to fall-to-fall “cross-year” VAMs, are more valid, as they are more consistent with “within-year” VAMs. This suggests that spring assessments are preferred to fall assessments, at least when the objective is to obtain valid VAM-based estimates of school or teacher effectiveness.