Once we got through this year's/week's round of "how do superintendents decide on snow days, anyway" followed by "here are people who disagree with whatever this week's decision was," we got--thanks, I think, to how BIG last weekend's storm was!--a round of "what do snow days do for learning?" And in two cases, they found Professor Joshua Goodman's 2014 paper "Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time" (good title!). He was interviewed by NPR here and is included in Chalkbeat's newsletter here, from which I quote:
Goodman compared test scores in years where there was more or less snow. A year with lots of heavy snow (days with more than 10 inches) had no effect. Yet math scores were lower in years with more days of moderate (4-10 inches) snow.
These counterintuitive results can be explained by how schools responded to different levels of snow. Heavy snow meant more snow days. Moderate snow meant more days when schools stayed open but attendance was sharply down, particularly among low-income students.
In other words, snow days did not seem to set students back much; missing regular school days due to snowy conditions did.
The takeaway is not that schools can close indefinitely without consequence, and Goodman did find some small negative effects of closures for high-poverty schools. But the study suggests that a few snow days won’t be terribly harmful because teachers figure out ways to adapt.
Yet when schools are open and a big chunk of students are missing, teachers are in a tough spot. Some may continue teaching new material, and then try to help students who missed the original lesson catch up. This creates a dual challenge, though: The makeup work isn’t quite as effective, and teachers’ time and energy is diverted from moving everyone else forward.
I will be interested in seeing if anyone cites this in future decisions!
PS: Don't miss this cartoon from The New Yorker.
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