Is There a Catholic School Effect on Kindergarteners’ Absenteeism?

Abstract

Over the past decade, identifying how schools might reduce student absenteeism has moved to the forefront of education policy. Yet little research has examined whether school type itself is important. We focus on the influence of Catholic schools using data from the past decade—the most relevant policy context for addressing absenteeism. The research that exists has acknowledged the limitation of omitted variable biases. Thus, the signature contribution of this study is the use of propensity score matching layered with exclusion criteria to account for bias in unobserved variation that confounds estimates. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 2011, we present several model specifications, all of which indicated that students in Catholic school missed fewer days of school compared to students in other types of schools. However, estimates from the adjusted matching models using the exclusion criteria indicate that OLS and classical matching estimates were downwardly biased.