Causes and consequences of teacher absenteeism

Dutch education faces high absenteeism rates and high inflow rates into disability (WAO). Teacher shortages aggravate the problems associated with absenteeism because replacements are more difficult to find and possibly less qualified and less experienced than the teachers they are replacing. The effect of teacher absence on student achievement is however unknown, just like the effect of schools replacement policies. Although the Dutch government has introduced work time reduction schemes to reduce teacher absenteeism and disability, it is not known whether these are effective. To address these issues it is important to better understand the causes and consequences of teacher absenteeism and to study the effectiveness of public policy in this respect. To better understand the causes of absenteeism it is necessary to study the behavior of teachers and schools at the micro level. The challenge here lies in distinguishing causal mechanisms from correlations that arise because of confounding factors. This proposal develops new identification strategies to address these issues. To the extent that less learning takes place when regular teachers are absent from the classroom, student performance may suffer. It is therefore important to understand the consequences of teacher absenteeism where it is important to disentangle the effects of absenteeism from confounding effects such as school or student characteristics. The present proposal sets out to do this, using data on the whole population of primary and secondary school teachers in the Netherlands. In addition, student outcomes in primary education are studied by exploiting information on test scores from CITO. By studying the relation between teacher absence, student outcomes and the ways schools and education authorities intervene in a comprehensive framework, this proposal will increase the understanding of the mechanisms that underlie absenteeism in schools, the effects it has on pupils and colleagues, and about effective ways to reduce pressure on schools using policy interventions.