Negative Effects Of Snow Days

Do Snow Days Negatively Impact Students Success?

Snow days does negatively impact student's success. I can conclude this because according to phys.org it clearly states that ¨School administrators may want to be even more aggressive in calling for weather-related closures. A new study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor Joshua Goodman finds that snow days do not impact student learning. In fact, he finds, keeping schools open during a storm is more detrimental to learning than a closure.

The findings are "consistent with a model in which the central challenge of teaching is coordination of students," Goodman writes. "With slack time in the schedule, the time lost to closure can be regained. Student absences, however,

Using student-level data from Massachusetts, I find that each one-day increase in the student absence rate driven by bad weather reduces math achievement by up to 5 percent of a standard deviation, suggesting that differences in average student attendance may account for as much as one-quarter of the income-based achievement gap in the state. Conversely, instructional time lost to weather-related school closings has no impact on student test scores.

What could explain these apparently conflicting results? It appears that teachers and schools are well prepared to deal with coordinated disruptions of instructional time like snow days but not with absences of different students at different times. In short, individual absences and not school closings are responsible for the achievement impacts of bad weather. The major challenge of studying the effect of disruptions to instructional time on student achievement is that students and schools with high absence and closing rates are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those with low absence and closing

Superintendents are typically reluctant to call a snow day for a number of reasons. Parents of school-age children may struggle to make child-care arrangements when schools close unexpectedly. Massachusetts law requires all schools to provide 180 days of instruction. When schools close too often during the winter, instructional days must be added to the calendar in June. Because the state’s standardized tests are administered in the spring, snow days also reduce the amount of instructional time that schools have to prepare students for the