Michael Gottfried from UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School is one of three international keynote speakers at the first International Network for School Attendance conference in Oslo, Norway October 16-18, 2019. Gottfried’s talk is titled “Addressing absenteeism: Myths, methods, and morals.” In addition to his lecture, the conference will feature more than 45 presentations from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK, and USA.
The International Network for School Attendance (INSA) promotes school attendance and responds to school attendance problems. INSA compiles, generates, evaluates, and disseminates information, assessment, and intervention strategies. The network brigs together a wide range of stakeholders: students, families, schools, communities, practitioners, researchers, policy-makers, and representatives of cultural and indigenous groups. INSA encourages multidisciplinary, rigorous research and practice that emphasize individual, family, school, community, and cultural factors associated with school attendance and absence. The group works to both develop and test conceptual models to advance understanding of school attendance and absence and develop and test assessment methods as well as prevention and treatment interventions. INSA fosters international collaboration—partially at events like this first ever conference—to enhance attention to cultural factors and achieve consistency in conceptualizing, classifying, and communicating about attendance problems.
Michael Gottfried is a Professor in the Department of Education at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on absenteeism, schooling context, and STEM with an interest in disabilities running through all of these areas. He has served as PI on grants focusing on schooling context and outcomes specifically for elementary school students (NSF, AERA/NSF, NIH/NICHD R03, Foundation for Child Development, Stuart Foundation, Spencer Foundation). He has published work in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Teachers College Record, Education Finance and Policy, American Journal of Education, Elementary School Journal, among others. In 2016, he released a co-edited book on educational policy with Harvard Education Press. Michael is on the Editorial Board of American Educational Research Journal and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. He holds a PhD and MA in Applied Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Economics from Stanford University.