Experimental Estimates of the Student Attendance Production Function

Student attendance is both a critical input and intermediate output of the education production function. However, malleable classroom-level determinants student are poorly understood. We estimate causal effect class size, composition, observable teacher qualifications on by leveraging random classroom assignments made Tennessee’s Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project size experiment. A 10-student increase in increases probability being chronically absent about 3 percentage points (21%). For Black students, assignment to reduces chronic absence 3.1 (26%). naive mediation analyses suggest that not mechanism through which same-race teachers improve achievement.