Giving Compass' Take:

• A recent study indicates that high-quality principals can help to reduce student absenteeism at schools. 

• How are schools bolstering principals so that they can address the most pertinent issues? 

• Read how principal pipelines can improve schools.

Principals have just as much impact on student attendance as they do student achievement — especially in urban and high-poverty schools where unexcused absence rates can be at most twice as large as those in suburban and rural schools, a new study finds.

Replacing a principal whose prior schools have had poor attendance with one whose past schools had high attendance rates decreases absenteeism among all students by an average of 0.8 percentage points — or 1.4 days less during a 180-day school year, finds Brendan Bartanen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.

Bartanen, whose work has focused on the effects of principal turnover, examined data on 3,100 Tennessee principals from 2006-07 through 2016-17. He finds that the principal effect also lowered the chances that a student would be chronically absent by 4 percentage points.

“From the perspective of policymakers and district leaders, my results suggest that intervening with principals could be an effective means to address high rates of chronic absenteeism,” Bartanen wrote in Educational Researcher.

With states now responsible for tracking chronic absenteeism under the Every Student Succeeds Act and most states using that measure as an indicator of school quality, the results are particularly timely and have implications for how principals are trained, placed, supervised and evaluated. They also come as states and districts are revamping principal preparation programs to emphasize instruction.

The study, however, shows the principals who were effective at raising attendance rates were not always the ones who improved achievement. Therefore, Bartanen wrote, focusing only on student achievement to determine whether a principal is succeeding will ignore any positive impact they might have on “noncognitive or character skills, such as attendance.”

Read the full article about principals can help curb absenteeism by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.