Authors: Kira Swann, Cody Dirks
Mentors: Joshua Price
Insitution: Southern Utah University
As students, we have personally noticed that when we had a long-term substitute in the classroom, we didn't learn as much compared to our peers in other classrooms. It has been found in California as well as other states that a teacher’s absence, leaving a substitute in place, leads to worse off standardized scores for students. This paper tests the impact of long-term substitutes on the STAR/CAASPP scores of students. The purpose of this study is to see if there is a detrimental effect on student scores and if long-term subs should be something addressed by the state. Using testing and demographic data from the California Department of Education, we use a fixed effects regression to test the true impact of the impact of long-term substitute teachers. Our results show that there is a small, but statistically significant impact on student performance.