Many school districts up and down the East Coast and in the Midwest have been forced to cancel several school days this winter, and some districts in the Northeast have already announced students will forgo part of their spring breaks to make up for lost time.
Public Policy Professor and Graduate Program Director Dave Marcotte was cited in two recent articles in The Atlanta Journal Constitution and Bloomberg Businessweek for a study he did on the impact of winter weather on schools.
“Dave Marcotte, in a 2010 online article for Education Next, found that each additional inch of snow reduced the percentage of third-, fifth-, and eighth-grade students on math assessments by from one-half to seven-tenths of a percentage point,” reads the Bloomberg Businessweek article.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution article cites Marcotte’s research while examining the impact on learning a significant loss of time due to snow days can have on students.
“To put that seemingly small impact in context, Marcotte reports that in winters with average levels of snowfall (about 17 inches) the share of students testing proficient is about 1 to 2 percentage points lower than in winters with little to no snow,” the article stated.
You can read about Marcotte’s research in The Atlanta Journal Constitution here and Bloomberg Businessweek here.
Tags: CAHSS, PublicPolicy, Research
