Despite efforts to integrate refugee children into host country education systems, their low school attachment remains a major policy challenge. Teachers play a key role in keeping students attached to school, yet classroom diversity poses difficulties for teachers who are not always adequately prepared to address the needs of minority students. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity approach, we evaluate whether a teacher training program—designed to raise awareness of primary and secondary school teachers in Turkey—is effective in reducing absenteeism of refugee students. We find that the program almost halves the absenteeism gap between native and refugee students and its effect persists into the next academic year, albeit fading out in size. We argue that the most likely channel through which the effects of the program operate is a school-wide mentorship role acquired by trained teachers, which has broad impact on raising diversity awareness within schools.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.