Teacher and Student Absences before and after the Pandemic

American Enterprise Institute. 1150 Seventeenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036. Tel: 202-862-5800; Fax: 202-862-7177; Web site: http://www.aei.org

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19

Teacher Attendance; Attendance; COVID-19; Pandemics; Trend Analysis; Correlation; Instructional Program Divisions; Elementary Schools; Middle Schools; High Schools; Incidence

This report documents the associations between teacher and student absenteeism across grade levels and before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic to understand whether teacher absences represent a lever for change and account for the increase in student absences over time. Data were drawn from Rhode Island from the 2018 to 2024 school years, in which a little under 207,000 students had multiple recorded teachers across 320 schools, resulting in approximately 1.8 million student-teacher matched observations. Results show that although teacher and student absences increased over time, their rates generally dropped from peak pandemic levels, except for student tardies and early dismissals. Given the statistical power of analyses and robustness of findings across different analytic specifications, this report's results provide strong evidence that, at least in Rhode Island, teacher absences are not a meaningful driver of student absences. Although there is great interest in discerning the underlying causes of student absenteeism, especially in the post-pandemic context, these results demonstrate that the rise in student absenteeism involves factors beyond teachers' absences.

ERIC

2026

ED677902