Data on School Policies Defining Excused and Unexcused Absences, US School Districts, 2019

Two datasets were used for a two-part study explored whether discrimination encoded into U.S. school absenteeism policies leads to racially minoritized students being overrepresented in the juvenile court system. First, we examined excused and unexcused absenteeism policies in a nationally representative school district sample (n = 97). This dataset contains qualitative text drawn from the websites, parent handbooks, and/or district policies of 97 school districts that were randomly sampled from all public districts with 7,000-40,000 students listed in the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2018 Common Core of Data.<br>In the same paper in which we present the findings from the policy dataset we analyzed data from all 7th to 10th grade students from three public school districts in Ramsey County, Minnesota. All students who attended any of the districts between 2006 and 2015 and had daily absenteeism data available were included. Unexcused absenteeism data for the 2006 and 2007 academic years were missing for the second-ring suburban district, making that district’s follow-up period 2 years shorter. We obtained longitudinal administrative data on the students from four sources. Education data came from the state’s department of education. Data on juvenile court petitions for unexcused absenteeism were provided by the county attorney’s office, and longitudinal data on child welfare involvement were provided by the state’s department of human services. Daily absenteeism data (containing the date of each absence and whether it was excused or unexcused) were provided by the school districts. This data set consisted of 179,237 person-years from 75,276 individual 7th- to 10th-grade students.<br><br>Due to data security agreements, the linked administrative data cannot be shared. However, in accordance with our agreement with AERA, we provide the Stata files used to create the variables and conduct the analysis for the study published in AERA Open.<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>