Sidewalks for Students: Google Street View Measures of Walkability Around Schools and Chronic Absenteeism Rates

This study brings together ideas from education, public health, and urban planning to assess whether the walkability of the built environment around schools is related to their chronic absenteeism rates. We use national data from the 2018–2019 NCES Common Core of Data and the Office of Civil Rights and computer vision-derived estimates of the physical environment captured in Google Street View Images. We compare schools in the same district to one another and find that schools with a higher proportion of images with sidewalks and streetlights within 1 mile of their location tend to have lower chronic absenteeism rates. These findings support the idea that physical infrastructure can be an important structural barrier to attendance.