University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.
University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, 55108, USA.
Prev Sci. 2019 Oct;20(7):996-1008. doi: 10.1007/s11121-019-01027-z.
Over 60% of US school districts implement court diversion programs to address chronic unexcused absenteeism, yet the effectiveness of these programs is not known. We evaluated whether the Truancy Intervention Program (TIP) improved the school attendance of students in grades 7-10 in a metropolitan county in the Midwestern USA. Similar to most truancy court diversion programs, TIP consisted of three increasingly intrusive steps: (1) a parent meeting, (2) a hearing to develop an attendance contract, and (3) a petition to juvenile court. The intervention group consisted of students from the intervention county who had been referred to TIP between 2006 and 2009. The comparison group was drawn from a contiguous, same-sized, and socio-demographically similar county that petitioned truant students directly to court. To construct the comparison group, we applied multi-level matching procedures to linked, individual-level administrative data from eight state and local agencies for all public school students in the state between 2004 and 2015. Using the matched samples, we conducted difference-in-differences analyses to identify program effects for two intervention groups: all students referred to TIP and students whose family participated in the group parent meeting. In the 4 years after the intervention, the intervention groups had similar or slightly lower attendance than the comparison groups. However, most coefficients were not statistically significant, and there was no consistent pattern of effects across different samples and different specifications of the intervention. This pattern of findings was not robust enough to conclude that the program influenced school attendance.
超过 60%的美国学区实施法庭转移计划来解决长期无故旷课的问题，但这些计划的效果尚不清楚。我们评估了辍学干预计划（TIP）是否提高了美国中西部一个大都市县 7-10 年级学生的出勤率。与大多数逃学法庭转移计划类似，TIP 包括三个逐步强化的步骤：（1）家长会议，（2）制定出勤合同的听证会，以及（3）向少年法庭提出申请。干预组由 2006 年至 2009 年期间被转介到 TIP 的学生组成。对照组来自一个相邻的、相同规模且社会人口统计学上相似的县，该县直接向法庭请愿传唤逃学学生。为了构建对照组，我们应用多层匹配程序，将来自八个州和地方机构的与个体相关的行政数据进行链接，这些数据涵盖了该州所有公立学校学生在 2004 年至 2015 年期间的信息。使用匹配样本，我们进行了差分分析，以确定 TIP 转介的两个干预组（所有被转介到 TIP 的学生和其家庭参加小组家长会的学生）的计划效果。在干预后的 4 年内，干预组的出勤率与对照组相似或略低。然而，大多数系数没有统计学意义，而且不同样本和不同干预方案的效果没有一致的模式。这种发现模式还不够稳健，无法得出该计划影响出勤率的结论。
