Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more of the school year, has reached historic levels in the past few years. While the policy world often treats this as a statistical trend to be managed by administrators, the reality is that schools cannot solve this crisis behind closed doors.

To turn the tide, there must be a radical shift in how schools, districts and states share information. At the state level, that means disaggregated chronic absenteeism data that helps educators peek behind the curtain of statewide averages. But there also needs to be school-level transparency that empowers the most important stakeholders in a child’s life: their parents and caregivers.

For too long, attendance data has been treated as a compliance metric, a number reported to the state to secure funding. But for a parent, knowing that their school has a 30% chronic absenteeism rate isn’t just a “stat.” It is an urgent signal.

Many parents are surprised to learn that missing just two days a month adds up to chronic absenteeism. They may see their own child’s absences as isolated incidents, unaware that their school is struggling with a systemic culture of disengagement. When schools provide clear, accessible, and frequent data on current rates and how those rates have shifted over time, it strips away the normalcy of the empty classroom.

Transparency builds awareness about the consequences. tells us that by third grade, chronically absent students are less likely to read on grade level. By middle school, it is a primary predictor of high school dropout rates. When parents see the data, they aren’t just looking at numbers; they are looking at the foundational health of their school community’s future.

Transparency isn’t just about showing a single percentage; it’s about providing the context necessary for decision-making. Parents deserve to know how their school compares to others with similar demographics or within the same district.

If School A has a chronic absenteeism rate of 40% while School B, just three miles away with similar resources, sits at 15%, that data tells a story. It suggests that School B may have found a successful recipe for student engagement, transportation solutions or mental health support that School A could learn from.

When parents have access to comparative data, they can move from being passive observers to active advocates. They can ask the right questions: What is School B doing differently? How can parents support teachers to implement those strategies here? This isn’t about shaming schools; it’s about using data to identify bright spots and scale what works.

has long helped families compare and choose schools based on factors that matter most to them. Understanding attendance patterns alongside traditional performance measures offers families a more detailed view of the overall school experience. That’s why GreatSchools recently introduced on school profiles in nearly 20 states (with more to come) — focusing the display on simple language (“81% of students are present nearly every day”) that would resonate with families.

Indeed, how we frame attendance data to families matters. Among the most significant barriers to solving chronic absenteeism is the “us versus them” mentality that often develops between families and front offices. When a school hides its struggles with attendance, it misses the opportunity to ask for help.

True transparency creates a bridge for partnership and builds trust. When a school leader stands before parents and says, “Our data shows that 25% of our students are missing critical instruction, and our biggest spike is on Friday mornings,” it invites a community-wide solution.

• Parents can coordinate carpools or “bike/walking school buses.”
• Students can voice the specific barriers — whether it’s bullying, a lack of belonging, or family obligations — that keep them from going to school.
• Schools can realign resources to provide the specific support families actually need, rather than what administrators think they need.

We have seen firsthand through our work in education innovation and leading schools that when you give parents high-quality, actionable data, they don’t just consume it — they act on it. They become partners in the “why” behind the absences. Is it a lack of reliable transit? Is it a chronic health issue? Is there a disconnect between engagement with the curriculum and its real-world application? 

This last one hits home, as from Edmentum in 2024 shows that personalization and engagement might be among our best solutions yet. In their research, a district featured in the study already had a strong Multi-Tiered System of Supports framework in place. Flexible, personalized digital curriculum was one component within that broader system of supports, not a standalone intervention. The district was actively examining attendance data and deliberately selecting tools to re-engage students.

The TL;DR: Schools and parents cannot solve these problems if they aren’t looking at the same map.

The “post-pandemic” era brings a new reality where the bond between home and school has been both strained and redefined. To strengthen that bond, educators must treat parents as the sophisticated decision-makers they are.

We call on district leaders and policymakers to make school-level chronic absenteeism data a centerpiece of their public reporting. This data should be:

• Real-time: Not a post-mortem delivered six months after the school year ends.
• Hyper-local: Broken down by school site.
• Accessible: Translated into multiple languages and presented in a way that is easy to digest and can spark a conversation.

The empty desk is a symptom of a larger disconnection. By pulling back the curtain on attendance data, schools do more than just count heads; they build a culture of accountability, care and partnership. It’s time to stop treating attendance as a private administrative burden and start treating it as a shared public priority. Our students cannot learn if they aren’t there, and they won’t be there unless we all — parents, educators, and community members — are looking at the truth together.

Statewide averages, while useful for tracking overall trends, often mask these disparities. Students who experienced the largest pandemic-era increases — Black and Hispanic children and those from low-income families — are generally the furthest from their pre-pandemic attendance levels. In many states, the gaps between these students and their peers have widened rather than narrowed.

Because chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% or more of the school year — is closely linked to academic achievement, engagement and long-term outcomes, these disparities carry significant equity implications. Without recovery, gaps in learning and opportunity are likely to persist.

This analysis examines trends in chronic absenteeism in 26 states and the District of Columbia, using data from the 2018-19 through the 2024-25 school years, broken down by income, English learner status and race. Together, the 27 jurisdictions educate just under half of the nation’s students.

Income

Low-income students had higher absenteeism rates in every state before COVID and experienced greater attendance disruptions than students overall during the height of the pandemic. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw chronic absenteeism among low-income students increase by more than 17 percentage points, versus 13 points statewide. In all but one state, Nevada, increases among low-income students exceeded the state average.

In some states, the divergence was especially pronounced. In Nebraska, 26% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2018-19; by 2021-22, that number had jumped to 43%. Over the same period, the state’s overall absenteeism rate rose by about 9 points — roughly half as much.

Since the peak, chronic absenteeism rates have declined for all students, with 21 of 27 states seeing larger reductions among low-income students. Those have varied widely, with decreases ranging from just 1 percentage point in Oklahoma to nearly 20 points in Rhode Island.

Despite these somewhat larger decreases, low-income students remain further from pre-pandemic attendance levels in almost every state. On average, chronic absenteeism in this population in 2024-25 remains more than 9 percentage points above 2018-19 levels, compared with about 7.5 points statewide. In Tennessee, absenteeism among low-income students remains roughly 10 points higher than before COVID, while the state overall is about 5 points above its baseline. In Rhode Island, West Virginia, Nevada and Ohio, low-income student attendance is closer to pre-pandemic levels than the state average.

As a result of these trends, attendance gaps between low-income students and their wealthier peers have widened in 23 of the 27 states analyzed. The average difference increased from about 7 to 9 percentage points in 2024-25. In Oregon, the gap widened from roughly 5 points to more than 13.

Where data are available for wealthier students as well, the divide is often stark. In Ohio, roughly 33% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2024-25, compared with 11% of more affluent kids. Similar gaps persist in Rhode Island (30% versus 12%) and Washington state (35% versus 19%).

English Learners

English learners followed a similar, and in some ways more striking, pattern. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw their chronic absenteeism rise by 16.5 percentage points — 3 more than the statewide average increase. In Iowa, English learner absenteeism rose by more than 21 points, from nearly 15% to more than 36%, compared with a nearly 14-point statewide jump. 

Post-peak declines among these students have been roughly comparable to statewide averages, around 6 percentage points. But because they experienced sharper increases initially, they remain further from their pre-pandemic baseline. On average across the states analyzed, English learner absenteeism rates in 2024-25 are about 11 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with 7.5 statewide. Except in Rhode Island and South Dakota, English learners are further from recovery than their peers overall — and in Rhode Island they have not only recovered, but now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic.

In several states, English learner absenteeism remains especially elevated: in Alaska, Hawaii, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah, more than 15 points above pre-pandemic levels. In Utah, it is 17 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with a 9.5-point gap statewide. 

Perhaps most notable is how these students’ relative position has shifted. Before the pandemic, English learners were not consistently absent more than their peers, as were low-income students. In 14 of the 27 states, English learner absenteeism was below the statewide average or within 1 percentage point of it in 2018-19. By 2024-25, that was true for only six states, and in every state, the gap has widened. In Missouri, for example, chronic absenteeism among English learners rose from 12% in 2018-19, about 1 percentage point below the statewide rate, to 27% in 2024-25, more than 5 percentage points above the state average  of 21.5%.

Race and Ethnicity

Pandemic-era increases also varied sharply by race. White students experienced smaller hikes than the average in nearly every state, rising by about 10 percentage points between 2018-19 and 2021-22, compared with 13 points statewide.

Black and Hispanic students saw substantially larger increases. Across states, absenteeism among Black students rose by about 16 points on average, and among Hispanics by about 16.5 points. In every state analyzed, except Washington, D.C., the increase among Hispanic students exceeded the statewide average, and in 14 of the 27 states, Hispanic students saw the largest spikes of the three racial groups.

Recovery since 2021-22 has been somewhat stronger for Black and Hispanic students than for white kids. Across states, Black and Hispanic students have each seen average declines in chronic absenteeism of roughly 7 percentage points, compared with about 5 points for white students. But because absenteeism rose more sharply for Black and Hispanic students during the pandemic, these improvements have not fully offset the larger initial increases.

White students’ attendance remains closest to pre-pandemic levels, averaging about 5.5 points above baseline. Black students remain nearly 9 points above pre-pandemic levels, Hispanic students, nearly 10 points. In 17 of the 27 states analyzed, Hispanic students are the furthest from their 2018-19 attendance rates. Rhode Island again stands out as an exception; there, they now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic. 

At the same time, Black students continue to show some of the highest absenteeism rates, leading in 14 states in 2024-25. In some cases, gaps are extreme: in the District of Columbia, absenteeism among white students is about 9%, compared with nearly 49% among Black peers; in Nebraska, the figures are roughly 15% and 43%, respectively.

Attendance has improved nationally since the pandemic, but underserved student groups remain further from their pre-pandemic attendance levels than others, and the gaps are wider than they once were. Rhode Island has bucked this trend, offering a promising example of what can achieve. Through a commitment to collecting and disseminating detailed, daily school-level data, and bringing together mayors, hospitals, business leaders and other community partners under the leadership of the governor’s office, the state has helped several student groups not only recover, but surpass their pre-pandemic attendance levels.

The persistent disparities in many states and Rhode Island’s progress in addressing them underscore the importance of timely, disaggregated attendance data. Without it, policymakers and educators risk overlooking which students are missing school and why, making it harder to direct supports where they are most needed.

FutureEd Policy Analyst Tara Moon and Research Associate Giana Loretta contributed to this analysis.

“Out with the flu for a week.”

“He’s moving to Texas.” 

“When we said we would show up at her house, she started coming.”

 “I don’t know where to go with him. When all his teachers are here, he’s OK, but he takes advantage of subs.”

Assistant Principal Evan Byron runs the meeting; grade-level counselors go through every student in danger of being chronically absent, missing 10% of the school year. On this day, Jan. 13, near the halfway mark of the school year, the team ran through 25 seventh-grade students in about 10 minutes. 

While the pace is rapid, it can be detailed, as they observed one student’s absenteeism problem stemmed from the days she had French class. Since the class isn’t required, they hope to resolve this issue by moving her to another subject. 

Their data is up-to-the-minute: They know whether all the students notified yesterday are in the building today; they know how parents are likely to react to repeated warnings; and they can even take an educated guess that the upcoming travel basketball season might improve one student’s attendance. 

The school follows a strict regimen about absences: an email home if a student misses two days in a row, a letter home once a student misses six days, another letter at 12 days, and an email home each day a student is absent if they have missed more than 10 days. School officials can also schedule home visits, where they can show parents a student’s academic and attendance records while extolling the wide variety of classes and extra curriculars that may entice a student into attending. 

“It’s effective,” Byron said. “A lot of students magically show up” after these correspondences. For any student who reaches the level of chronically absent –18 absences out of 180 school days – the school sends a referral to the state Department of Children and Families. 

“That’s an absolute last resort,” said principal Damon Lewis. 

Chronic absenteeism has spiked in schools nationwide since 2020’s pandemic. Before then, the number of students who missed at least 10% of school was about three of every 20 students, or 15%, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Data from 39 states and Washington, D.C., showed that number nearly doubled to 28.6% at its height, he said, although it has dropped back slightly under 23% in the last year. Malkus tracks school attendance nationwide at the website.

“The permission structure of when it’s OK to miss school loosened up” after schools were closed for the COVID-19 virus, Malkus said. If the new normal of students chronically absent is above 20%, “that’s not good.” 

At Ponus, a middle school in a small city north of New York City, Lewis and his team were not immune to this trend. The 637-student school’s chronically absent rate spiked to 31% after the pandemic; Lewis and his administrators were able to slice that number to under 10% in just one year. 

A lot of what Ponus officials do is the hard work of paying close attention to students and their patterns. Lewis mentions attendance in every weekly email he sends to all parents; homeroom teachers keep close tabs on their students; and the biweekly attendance meetings aim to make sure no student slips between the cracks. 

During the January meeting, seventh grade counselor Kaitlin Douglas points out a student who nearly did just that. “She wasn’t missing consecutive days, so she was flying under our radar,” Douglas said, noting that the student popped up on her list because of the total days missed. 

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck initiative,” Principal Lewis said. “We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘We’re not doing this anymore.’ ”

While all this effort is put into attendance, Lewis and his team have revamped the school to make children want to attend. “We try to entice the student back to school” through high-interest courses such as robotics, 3D printing, music technology, he said. The school has also beefed up its afterschool clubs; it currently offers 17 options ranging from weightlifting and rock band to crochet and jewelry making. 

Norwalk has become a choice district, meaning any student inside the city’s 23 square miles can attend any of the city’s five middle schools. (The Concord Magnet school is a K-8 school on the same campus as Ponus Ridge.) For the first time, the school has a waiting list this year, Lewis said proudly. 

Francesco and Brayden Christopher – who enjoy pointing out that they are in grades 6-7, hand motion included – attend the school from across town because their parents like the teachers and the people. “My dad texts with [principal Lewis] every day,” Brayden said. 

Eighth grader Olivia Hempstead agreed that her family was impressed with the frequent communication when her older brother attended the school. She said she has a “true relationship” with principal Lewis and that he cares about students without trying to be their friend. “I’ve never heard him yell,” she added. 

Lewis, who has been principal at Ponus Ridge for 11 years, works to include the entire community in the school. He features Walk-Through Wednesdays where anyone can visit the school once a month, a Hispanic parent group and an in-school food pantry for families. When ICE raids began in the city, he brought immigration attorneys to the school for a night-time event so parents could learn their rights. “I want to meet people where they are, and they are hungry for resources,” he said. 

Three of every four Ponus Ridge students are eligible for free or reduced lunch and 90% are students of color. 

Lewis was named the Middle Level National Principal of the Year by the this year. Lewis “demonstrates how visionary leadership can transform school communities,” said association CEO Ronn Nozoe. 

The attendance increase has had other benefits for Ponus Ridge students. Even though the school’s overall accountability index from the state is a mediocre 61.9 on a scale to 100, Lewis said his students’ Preliminary SAT scores have outpaced the district, the state and the nation. The school also outperforms its district and the state for ninth grade students on track to graduation. This measure looks at former Ponus Ridge students after their first year of high school; 91.5% are on track to graduate within four years, slightly ahead of the city’s 89.3%. 

But the area Ponus Ridge really stands out in is attendance. Of the city’s 21 schools, Ponus has by far the lowest rate of students chronically absent, with 9.1% in 2024-25 compared to Norwalk’s overall 17.2% rate. AEI’s Malkus points out that the increase in student absences has consequences even for students who aren’t chronically absentAchievement on standardized tests is pretty linear, he said, meaning the more days students miss, the worse they tend to achieve. “The long-term challenge is to change people’s behavior,” he added. 

Lewis and other administrators understand how difficult that can be. Sometimes parents complain about all the school’s correspondence, but the school remains committed to following its plan. “We’re not afraid to put our heads in the lion’s mouth,” Lewis said about dealing with criticism. 

“When people say to me, ‘Stop sending emails,’ I say, ‘Send your son to school and I will,’ ” Lewis said. “I try to tell them, this is bigger than Ponus. This is a life lesson.”

But not all parents resist the emails, the principal added. In one recent case, a father had to leave home for work before his child left for school. When he saw an email mid-morning that his son wasn’t at school, the father called the school and said he was leaving work to go home. “He’ll be there within the hour,” he told Lewis. 

Today, with thousands of federal agents targeting Minnesota schools, bus stops, day care centers and other places where immigrant parents gather with their children, remote learning options have been revived in numerous districts, with varying degrees of success. And, unlike the pandemic-era emergency measures, the steps schools are taking to keep kids safe are anything but uniform. 

In many schools — especially those that enroll diverse student bodies — who can show up and who can’t changes by the day, forcing teachers to improvise continually. Still confronted with the absenteeism, mental health crises and lost learning of the pandemic shutdowns, educators know what’s being lost — and exactly which children are going to suffer the disproportionate impact of an emergency now in its ninth week.   

Two St. Paul Public Schools teachers recently gave The 74 glimpses inside their classrooms. In his 18th year on the job, John Horton teaches at Barack and Michelle Obama Montessori, where classes contain multiple grade levels and the student body, as he puts it, “looks like the people that live in St. Paul.” So far, all 28 of his first, second and third graders have been in school, every day.

Across the city, in the equally diverse Como High School, 31-year veteran Eric Erickson teaches a host of subjects where current events are inescapably relevant: AP Psychology; a University of Minnesota College in the Schools government course; and U.S. history, co-taught with an English learner instructor. 

As improbable as it sounds, the families of Horton’s pupils want them physically present in class and have moved mountains to get them there safely. But the divides in in-person attendance in Erickson’s classes are illustrative of a deepening inequity. He knows that a persistent chasm of unequal opportunity is likely to yawn wider. 

Until the abduction of a child or violence at or near their school forces them into the spotlight, most Minnesota educators have been too fearful to speak out, using their names and those of their schools, about what it’s like in classrooms right now. Yet Horton and Erickson, both of whom have been Minnesota Teacher of the Year finalists and/or semifinalists, told The 74 they want people to know what school is like in this unprecedented moment. 

These excerpts from conversations with them have been edited for length and clarity.

Who’s in class in person, and who isn’t

Horton: Children really, really thrive on structure, routine, predictability. The problem that’s different from COVID to now is that during COVID, even though things were upended, there were still some structures and routines and things in place. But with the way things are heading right now, those things aren’t present anymore. 

Our school has some teachers that have been reassigned to take on virtual learning. They’re pausing their in-person job and moving to the online school. They’re teaching children who haven’t ever been to online school. So it’s a whole new program and a whole new mode of instruction.

My classroom has 28 kids normally, and I have 28 kids still here. I have a very good relationship with a lot of the families, and they really wanted to stay in person as a community. There’s definitely some fears and anxiety, but for young children, that predictability is really important. 

We are fortunate to have a community of volunteers keeping watch around the school. We have precautions in place for children who don’t feel safe waiting for the bus. There’s been a lot of community- and school-level action that has helped mitigate the fear. But there’s a lot of anxiety about leaving the house. 

Erickson: The students who are not here tend to be students with brown skin and black skin. And in many ways, this division along race and ethnicity makes this version of virtual learning feel a lot more like battles we thought we had overcome in the Civil Rights Movement, and with equal access to opportunity and education.

The difference in who’s here and who’s not can be seen in the difference between a U.S. history English-language cohort and a senior-level, University of Minnesota college-level government course. I’ve got 95% of my seniors in college-level government present, and about 30% of my co-taught U.S. history classes are online. But our English-learner classes, some of them are less than half in attendance in person. 

(Students are) not able to listen to their (in-person) peers and process what’s happening. They’re living in isolation with their family and social media as connectors, as opposed to the support of peer-to-peer and caring adult interaction. 

We are still their teachers. They are still on our class lists. We are pushing out lessons, videos, documents and assignments to students in their homes. But there’s no substitute. Students who miss live instruction and interaction with peers and their teachers cannot obtain the same quality of education.         

What they’re hearing from students 

Horton: The challenges the kids are experiencing at home and in the community are real. Children talk openly about the immigration crackdown. They’re making posters and expressing their frustration. A couple of my kids have been to protests. A few of my kids have had knocks at the door and agents enter their homes.

And, of course, a lot of children are aware of what’s going around the community because of parents’ stress. In a lot of ways that’s very similar to COVID, where families are trying to isolate children from everything that’s going on and yet the children know something is going on.

I don’t know if I can share all my stories. There was an incident at a child’s house a couple weeks ago. And that was scary. The child was scared, the family was scared. I was shook. They called me Sunday at 6:50 in the morning to tell me what was going on. Some of the people in our community are going through a lot, and they don’t have a lot of people they might be able to know or connect with or trust.

I’ve worked with these families for three years in a row, and I have good relationships. There’s a lot of blessings with that and also heartbreak. It’s really hard to hear what’s transpiring, but I’m also really surprised by the outpouring of love. 

When they’re struggling through traumatic events — and our city has been through so many over the last few years — children also need a sense of hope and joy. To see their friends, to have things they know how to do, be it an art project or something. Having those things, those distractions, those avenues are really important. The children that have been coming to school have been very happy in my class.

Erickson: When we are debriefing the current events in the news cycle, Minneapolis and St. Paul are at the center of a federal surge that has drawn the attention of the world. It’s imperative that we’re able to discuss, analyze and evaluate the impact of the situation surrounding us. I take pride in listening to my students, taking their questions and helping them think critically about what we’re experiencing in relationship to what we’ve studied with the Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. 

They ask appropriate questions. They see injustice. They observe an overreach of federal power. They notice that the guardrails are off with regard to checks and balances. Congress is not holding the Executive Branch accountable. Court decisions are not necessarily checking the expansion of presidential power. They wonder if it’s their time and place to exercise their First Amendment rights.

How students are expressing themselves   

Horton: This is a Montessori school, and we believe in honoring children’s voices. The posters children have written are very simple. They say “ICE out.” Or, “Leave our friends alone.” “You are not welcome” is one of my favorite ones. The kids are expressing themselves through art. Having that outlet is so important. 

The kids started a food shelf in the classroom. And they’re collecting money for the [a St. Paul nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants resettle]. Two children are carrying around a box, collecting change. 

Families have donated gift cards to support other families. To see all the people coming together, that makes me hopeful.

Erickson: We saw a highly organized, peaceful student protest on Jan. 14, a week after Renee Good’s killing, where students from across St Paul high schools — mostly public, but also peers from private and charter schools — converged on the state Capitol to call out the injustices they’re seeing and to ask for human decency from the federal government. 

We were fearful as a school community about what might happen to them if they exercise their freedom of speech and freedom to assemble. We were inspired to see them advocate for themselves. We, of course, did not attend or endorse the student walkouts. But parents and community members coordinated to serve as unofficial marshals and watch over the routes they were taking to the Capitol, and to be there for support, to be observers of their constitutional rights. 

There were three students in the room with me, the other 20 were at the rally. We were able to watch a livestream. And as we observed democracy in action, two of their classmates gave speeches on the steps of the Capitol. One addressing the humanity of all people and immigrants being the backbone of this country, and another addressing the impact of ICE’s actions. They were articulate messages — positive and hopeful in tone — while also criticizing the overreach of the federal government.

Their own mental health

Horton: Well. Oh boy. That’s a doozy of a question. My job is to make sure the children are safe and secure, and sometimes that means that you have to co-regulate with them. You have to show them what calm, caring and compassion looks like. And also anxiety. You need to model it: “I’m feeling this way, and this is how I can deal with it.” It’s almost like you’re teaching as you’re feeling, which is tough. 

And then my own children. You know, what they hear when I talk at home. I’m trying to be a really good role model, and that comes first. Sometimes as an adult and a parent and someone in the community, you just have to put aside your own preferences for the good of the group. 

Talking to children about hard things is important, but they can only take so much at a time. As a teacher, and especially a teacher of young kids, having difficult conversations is part of life. But they really need time to process things. Talking briefly about these incidents and then giving them an opportunity to have a say and have some hope and have some joy in their life is very important.

The hardest thing for me is I know the impact it’s having on our families. That’s really hard. And I also know it’s impacting staff. There’s staff that carry around documents now, and they’re scared to go out. 

I keep using the word “community,” but I really have found a lot of comfort in that. You know, comfort with the children, the families, the staff. But to say it’s easy would be a lie. 

It’s a relief in some ways that they can be together. Just being in community is such a powerful thing for the people out protesting — even in our classroom.

Erickson: As much as I pride myself on teaching from a non-partisan perspective and analyzing political issues and the role of government with objectivity, seeing the harm to our students and families has caused me to choke up more than once in class while listening and guiding discussion on these matters. 

Yes, it has taken an emotional toll on teachers. Teachers love and care for all of our students. To have 30% of them not be able to reach school and go to your class where they belong is a cruel and sad injustice.

When enrollment drops, districts often slash programs, lay off staff and close schools. All this hurts students in the process. Yet fewer students can be an opening to improve learning. In fact, declining enrollment offers a rare chance to to better incorporate research on how students learn best, paving the way for smaller learning communities, expanded personalized learning options and stronger relationships — all of which can lead to more individualized, joyful and relevant learning.

State leaders can help districts seize this moment by rethinking California’s practice of funding schools by daily attendance, not overall enrollment, which punishes districts for every absence. The current system worsens budget instability for those districts already experiencing long-term enrollment declines; it also hits immigrant communities hardest in an era of heightened enforcement and fear.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee that immigration enforcement in five Central Valley school districts led to a 22% increase in absenteeism compared to the same months in the prior years. Similar patterns emerged during in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The financial implications are significant: LAUSD loses approximately in state revenue for every one percentage point drop in average daily attendance. For a district already navigating declining enrollment, this revenue loss compounds fiscal strain and penalizes schools that serve communities most affected by immigration enforcement.

Stabilizing school budgets amid enrollment decline starts with a simple fix: fund districts by whom they enroll, not who shows up each day. This would recognize that school districts hire teachers and other staff and equip schools with computers and textbooks , not attendance. The California legislature offered a short-term safeguard by approving , which would hold districts’ funding harmless if they experience sudden changes to average daily attendance due to immigration action.

The state can also increase its funding amounts under the Local Control Funding Formula to recognize that California is still falling short of providing adequate funding. Two other bills in the two-year legislative session, and, aim to increase school funding so that districts can pay teachers what they are worth, keep pace with rising costs, and remain nationally and globally competitive. 

But districts can’t afford to wait while these proposals move slowly through the legislature[. The fiscal challenges created by declining enrollment are already here, leaving districts like LAUSD with limited options for achieving financial stability as they serve fewer students. The district’s enrollment decline is acute. In a we detail how LAUSD has lost more than 316,000 students – approximately 40% of its enrollment – since the 2002-03 school year. This trend stems from falling birth rates, demographic shifts and a housing crisis; it’s further exacerbated by the pandemic, wildfires and federal immigration raids. 

State policymakers could turn this fiscal challenge into an opportunity by enabling districts to experiment with new staffing models, flexible use of facilities and innovative instructional designs. These require local will, but also stable, equitable funding and regulatory flexibility, which are tools only the state can provide.

Without them, even the most promising local ideas will fall short. LAUSD’s per-pupil funding has risen, but costs and long-term obligations have grown faster, narrowing the district’s fiscal margin. The real challenge isn’t just fewer students, but the widening gap between needs and resources. Districts like LAUSD are being asked to do more with less in a system that remains inadequately funded. 

Education leaders nationwide are watching how California navigates this moment. Districts must redesign for the future as enrollment shrinks, and the state must ensure they have the means to do so. Enrollment decline may be inevitable, but a decline in student opportunity doesn’t have to happen.

As an in longstanding partnership with public schools and the of a nonprofit organization focused specifically on attendance, we’re hearing questions from educators, district leaders, families and policymakers about whether the old standards for attendance are still reasonable. Do students still need to go to school every day? Is it fair to ask educators to work on improving attendance when so many barriers exist outside of school? 

Given what we know from research and from schools across the country, backing away from a strong focus on chronic absence places children’s well-being in jeopardy, because attendance matters as much now as ever.

Early evidence from a UChicago Consortium on School Research study that is underway shows that the relationships among attendance and grades, test scores and test gains remain as strong as before COVID-19. This suggests that, despite all the extra supports that have been put into schools since the pandemic, chronic absence is a key factor in poor performance on exams across the country. This is for every age and demographic group.

These findings affirm decades of research showing that school attendance matters for students’ academic success, holistic development and well-being. Children in pre-K-2 who were chronically absent for several years by grade 3. Attendance also is important in the elementary and middle grades for students’ eventual , ability to pass their classes and graduate. And it’s not just the absent students who are affected; the content and pace of the classroom and even how adults and resources across the school are deployed can be detrimental to those who do show up.

Beyond academics, school is a key space for young people’s development — building social connections and skills with peers and adults, exploring their interests through classes and extracurriculars, and accessing resources, whether directly in school or through referrals from teachers. Students who are absent frequently miss out. 

Attendance rises when schools focus on fostering students’ development. Those with strong — where young people feel safe and supported and teachers collaborate with one another and with families — have higher attendance rates than other schools. No wonder boosting students’ is seen as a to chronic absence. When students and see their school as a place of community, stability, safety and support, they are more likely to come consistently, even when there are challenges. Teachers and school staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help. They are more likely to seek assistance when they need it and work with to find solutions that work for them. In turn, school leaders and staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help.

Addressing chronic absence can feel like an overwhelming, or even an impossible, problem because it is affected by many aspects of a young person’s life. Yet, we’ve seen schools make substantial progress when they focus on key data and supports. Chicago moved ninth grade attendance rates from 80% to 91% from 2008 to 2018 after showed absenteeism in the first year of high school was the driving factor behind low graduation rates. The district provided schools with real-time data on ninth graders’ attendance and grades, and principals and teachers were held accountable for a metric they could actually move, while being helped with by organizations like the Network for College Success. 

Nathaniel Green Middle School in Providence reduced its chronic absence rate from in three years after Principal Jackson Reilly organized students into cohorts taught by teams of teachers so they could build in time for relationships among students, teachers, and students and their teachers. This created a sense of community that brought back joy into the classroom. They then used data on who was missing 10% or more of school to identify which students needed extra outreach and support.

At Compass Berclair Charter School in Memphis, absenteeism dropped from 28% to 2% between 2021-22 and 2023-24. Principal Camie Cowan used morning meetings with all students and monthly family check-ins to strengthen relationships. Like Nathaniel Green, it also used chronic absence data to identify and offer assistance to students still struggling with attendance barriers.   

Kansas City Kansas Public Schools have reduced chronic absence districtwide from over 50%  in 2021-22 to less than 35%, and leaders anticipate further reductions in the coming school year. The district has moved away from taking a punitive approach to absences; a key component of its success has been a focus on relationship building. Every school has a team that reviews data as well as develops and implements a year-long plan of action that emphasizes universal strategies (morning meetings or restorative circles) along with targeted supports (positive phone calls and mentoring).

These examples demonstrate that schools can have a big impact on students’ attendance rates. The key is building relationships with young people and their families — asking students and families what motivates them to show up even when it isn’t easy. Are the barriers an unsafe path to school or a lack of access to health care? Is the student struggling academically or being bullied? Schools can use these answers to partner with students and families to find solutions. 

What educators in schools do matters — a lot. Progress is not just possible for improving attendance rates in schools; it’s critical. Children’s current and future well-being depend on it.  

States that joined a national pledge led by three high-profile education advocacy and research groups to cut chronic absenteeism in half over five years fared better. The 16 states and Washington, D.C. posted results “substantially above the average rate” of decline, though exact numbers are not yet available, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the trio.

The national chronic absenteeism average dropped from 28.5% in 2022 to 25.4% in 2023, and fell an additional two points to 23.5% in 2024. Virginia, which is among the 16 participating states, cut its chronic absenteeism by 4.4 percentage points, year over year, to 15.7%, as of spring 2024.

Speaking of the states collectively, Malkus told The 74, “That’s good but it’s not as good as we need it to be. I think it points to the need for sustained pressure and a sustained campaign to bring absence rates down and to bring more students back to consistent attendance.”

Last July, AEI and EdTrust, right-and left-leaning think tanks, respectively, and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to launch The 50% Challenge. This week, the organizations hosted in Washington, D.C., to report on their progress, re-up the call to action and hear insights from state, district and community partners on how they are improving student attendance and engagement.

With California and Georgia recently joining, the 16 states and D.C. who signed on to the pledge account for more than a third of all students nationally. While Malkus doesn’t necessarily attribute their better results to the pledge itself, he noted that their participation shows a willingness to commit to the cause and be publicly accountable for their results. 

“I will hold their feet to the fire on this goal,” he added during his opening remarks in D.C.

While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism from 13.4% in 2017 to 28.5% in 2022 before beginning to drop in 2023.

Only about one-third of students nationally are in districts that are on pace to cut 2022 absenteeism in half by 2027, according to an , and rates improved more slowly in 2024 than they did in 2023, “raising the very real possibility that absenteeism rates might never return to pre-pandemic levels.

Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. About 8% of all learning loss from the pandemic is attributed just to chronic absenteeism, according to soon-to-be-released AEI research.

The continued disproportionate impacts of chronic absenteeism were confirmed by recent , which found that in roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent — a far higher share of students than in rural or suburban school districts.

RAND also found that the most commonly reported reason for missing school was sickness and one-quarter of kids did not think that being chronically absent was a problem.

SchoolStatus, a private company that works with districts to reduce chronic absenteeism, also released  for some 1.3 million K-12 students across 172 districts in nine states. Districts using proactive interventions, the company reports, drove down chronic absenteeism rates from 21.9% in 2023–24 to 20.9% in 2024–25.

At this week’s event, numerous experts across two panels emphasized the importance of a tiered approach to confronting the issue, which has resisted various remedies. Schools must build enough trust and buy-in with kids and their families that they are willing to share why they are absent in the first place. Once those root causes are identified, it is up to school, district and state leaders to work to remove the barriers.

And while data monitoring must play a significant role, it should be done in a way that is inclusive of families.

“We need to analyze data with families, not at them,” said Augustus Mays, EdTrust’s vice president of partnerships and engagement.

It’s imperative to understand the individual child beyond the number they represent and to design attendance plans and strategies with families so they feel supported rather than chastised.

“It’s around choosing belonging over punitive punishment,” Mays added.

One major and common mistake schools make is “accountability without relationships,” said Sonja Brookins Santelises, the superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools.

“You can’t ‘pull people up’ if you don’t have enough knowledge of what they’re really going through,” she said.

Panelists were transparent that all this would require immense funding, staff and community partnerships.

Virginia achieved its noteworthy drop in chronic absenteeism after launching a $418 million education initiative in the fall of 2023, in part after seeing their attendance data sink, with about 1 in 5 students chronically missing school. At least 10% of those funds are earmarked to prioritize attendance solutions in particular, according to panelist Emily Anne Gullickson, the superintendent of public instruction for the Virginia Department of Education. 

These strategies are far-reaching, she noted: Because parents had been told throughout the pandemic to keep their kids home at the slightest sign of illness, schools partnered with pediatricians and school nurses to help counter the no-longer-necessary “stay home” narrative.

Gullickson said she also broke down bureaucratic silos, connecting transportation directors and attendance directors, after realizing the role that transit played in chronic absenteeism. The state now has second chance buses as well as walking and led by parents or teachers along a fixed route, who pick up students along the way.

And they are “on a mission to move away from seat time and really deliver more flexibility on where, when and how kids are learning,” she said. 

“This isn’t one strategy. It’s a set of strategies,” said Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang, who moderated the panel.

In Connecticut, state leaders have launched the , a research-based model that sends trained support staff to families’ homes to build relationships and better understand why their kids are missing school. 

A recent study confirmed that six months after the program’s first home visits, attendance rates improved by approximately 10 percentage points for K-8 students, and nearly 16 percentage points for high schoolers, said Charlene Russell-Tucker, the commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education.

Schools must also work to motivate kids to want to show up in the first place, panelists said, making it a meaningful place that students believe will support and help them in the long run. The only way to do this is to start with student and family feedback, said Brookins, the Baltimore schools chief.

During the pandemic many parents saw up-close for the first time what their kids’ classrooms and teacher interactions looked like, “and I don’t think a lot of folks liked what they saw for a variety of different reasons,” Brookins said.

“I think it opened up boxes of questions that we — as the education establishment — were unprepared to answer,” she added. But chronic absenteeism cannot be successfully fought without engaging in those uncomfortable conversations.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to EdTrust and The 74.

It is impossible to solve a problem without knowing what it is. A recent Attendance Works reveals that “as of mid-April 2025, the majority of states (43) published their chronic absence data for 2023-24. This represents a significant improvement.” Improvements are relative; this is embarrassing. There is nothing to celebrate in that,10 months after the previous school year, most states have shared data that is now wildly out-of-date. The federal government alone has spent around $1 billion in the past two decades to help states build longitudinal data systems, the exact kind of operation that can readily track and publish chronic absenteeism data. It’s the state longitudinal data system in Rhode Island, for example, that allows the state to for every school. Any state that continues to publish merely annual chronic absenteeism data is making a statement that attendance isn’t paramount.

This lack of detailed state data hides the fact that not all students are missing school equally, even though the attendance gap between low-income students and their more affluent peers has grown since the pandemic. University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff last month that show “substantial variation” between the chronic absenteeism rates of different groups of students. Least likely to miss school are gifted students, Asian children and students in grades 2 through 5. Most likely to be chronically absent? Homeless and foster youth, low-income students and 12^th graders.

Low-income kids, in other words, were most likely to suffer during the pandemic, were more likely to experience and remain significantly more likely to miss more than 10% of school days.  If “every day counts,” as the attendance slogan states, why won’t most states publicly report on this data but once a year?

Parents should demand better attendance data, too. It’s not only the kids missing school who lose out — research shows that all students with high chronic absenteeism rates. This finding holds , too. Parents have a right to know what the chronic absenteeism rate is at their child’s school and in their child’s classroom, and should receive clear information about their own child’s attendance patterns. 

Second, reset the messaging.

One explanation for the continued higher rates of chronic absenteeism is an uncomfortable one — that the education sector is allowing it to happen. State, district and school leaders, along with mayors, city councils, state legislators and other political leaders, all play a role. Schools have sent mixed messages to students and families over the past few years about attendance, whether that’s allowing students to “” an absence by attending a Saturday session or the fact that they continue to earn high grades and timely diplomas despite many absences. And don’t forget the biggest mixed message of all: When schools closed during the pandemic, whether for two months or two years, the clear signal to parents was “schools are closed but your child will be fine.” study shows that graduation rates continued to climb after COVID despite rampant chronic absenteeism and serious learning loss. This cemented the implicit idea that physically attending school every day is no longer required for academic success. 

To undo this unintentional messaging, political and education leaders can start by acknowledging that pandemic-era school closures harmed students and should be avoided in any future crisis at all costs. Next, they should tell parents that students are expected to attend school every day. The new message must be: “If your child is not in school every day, she will fall behind.” Consider incentives like one implemented by a , New York, with low absenteeism: Only seniors who maintain a certain are permitted to leave the premises for lunch. In middle and high school, talk to students directly about why coming to school every day is essential for their long-term goals. If incentives and motivations aren’t enough, make promotion to the next grade contingent on attendance. If a student has missed more than 20 days, require summer school or make the student repeat a grade. Think this unfair? It’s hard to conceive of something more unfair to children than passing them from grade to grade without ensuring they accumulate sufficient knowledge and experience.

Finally, it’s not enough to tell students, especially high schoolers, that they should come to school every day. The learning that happens in the classroom should be so good that they don’t want to miss it. This is a  massive challenge, to be sure, but the one that may matter the most. It’s one thing to convince parents and students of the importance of coming to school every day, and another to make that attendance worthwhile. If a robust academic experience is the long-term goal for every public school student, members of society, from parents to politicians, must reject the new normal of scattershot attendance and get all kids back in school buildings every day. No hope remains but Americans’ own actions; better data and clear messaging are places to start. 

School attendance is critical for success in the classroom, and success in school is core to health across a lifespan. Children who attend school regularly are far more likely to achieve academically and graduate from high school than those who are chronically absent. In turn, high school graduation leads to better health outcomes, and students who graduate are more likely to have fewer chronic illnesses and fewer injuries, and live , than those who do not.

Yet today, is chronically absent, defined as missing more than 10% of school days. In some districts, that proportion is closer to 1 in 2. The COVID pandemic widened and deepened a longstanding problem, and now, the obstacles that prevent children from coming to school — chronic illness, disengagement in the classroom and unmet social needs — are wide-ranging. While many teachers and principals have worked tirelessly to get students back into the classroom, chronic absence has become a problem too big for educators or schools to solve alone. 

A new public health , developed by education and public health experts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente and Attendance Works, offers a comprehensive, community-driven approach with three core elements: data, partnerships and prevention.

First, school attendance data should be tracked and analyzed on a regular basis by district-level teams of educators, epidemiologists and clinicians who can interpret patterns and target solutions. Key questions include: When during the academic year does attendance dip? At what age does it start to falter? Which neighborhoods are most affected? Public health departments can include chronic absence in their community health needs assessments. 

Sharing school attendance data securely with health providers can help identify children with particular conditions, like asthma, who are missing school and require extra attention. In the , for example, pediatricians — with the consent of parents — receive regular reports about which children in their practices are on track to become chronically absent. They then can talk to families about what’s happening. If children are missing school for health reasons, more intensive medical treatment may be needed. If the problem is disengagement in the classroom, clinicians can help assess whether there are additional educational needs. If there are social factors, such as inadequate child care or housing, clinicians can work with social workers in schools or community services to find resources to assist families.

Data alone is not enough; partnerships are essential. Beyond health care providers, community organizations, afterschool programs and religious institutions all have a role to play in supporting families in areas with low attendance rates. Such broad coalitions have a track record of success.

For example, the is a citywide collaborative anchored by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the public school system. The collaboration reviews education and health data and uses it to inform targeted action in the clinic and classroom; for example promoting access to primary care. The results include increased improved and reduced .

The third pillar is prevention. It can be easy to see troubling attendance patterns as simply an issue with a truant student, a problem family or a bad school. But punitive approaches are less likely to work than efforts that listen to parents, address their needs and anticipate future challenges. Using data and evidence to guide action, coalitions can take such steps as providing safer transportation routes to school by improving sidewalk safety, creating protected bike lanes, installing flashing lights on crosswalks and offering better public transportation options; adding services to afterschool programs; and expanding school-based mental health support. Communities can also set a widespread expectation that all kids must go to school every day. Encouraging the development of such norms is difficult, but doing so was at the core of other successful public health strategies, like smoking cessation and traffic safety.  

Not every approach will succeed. To sustain progress, it is important to document, evaluate and share what works and why. Research-practice partnerships such as the build long-term collaborations among researchers, health practitioners and representatives from districts and state agencies to quickly assess the implementation and results of innovative programs. In San Francisco, youth are to help in such efforts.

Most fundamentally, this framework’s approach to chronic absence means keeping focus on a measurable outcome and innovating with solutions until every child has the best chance of success, both in and out of the classroom. 

Like heart rate and blood pressure, school attendance is a vital sign for health. Like weight and height, it is fundamental to child development. Now is the time to prioritize reducing chronic absence to support the long-term health of children.

A new analysis of data from three states — North Carolina, Texas and Virginia — shows that prior to COVID, 17% of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year. By 2023, long after schools had to cope with new variants and hybrid schedules, that figure hit 37%.

“Absences are both more common for everybody, but they are also more extreme,” said Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University.

Additional new research shows that while post-pandemic chronic absenteeism lingers across the board, rates were substantially higher for low-income students. In North Carolina, for example, the chronic absenteeism rate for students in poverty before the pandemic was 9.2 percentage points higher than for non-poor students. By 2023, the gap increased to 14.6 percentage points.

“The income gap really was the main driver that showed up over and over again,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education researcher at the University of Southern California. But it’s hard for schools to make a dent in the problem, he said, if they aren’t investigating the reasons for chronic absenteeism. “There’s a big difference between the kid [who] has an illness and is chronically sick versus the kid [who] is super disengaged.”

Kirksey and Polikoff were among several researchers who Friday at an American Enterprise Institute event focused on facing what Kirksey called the “under-the-hood dynamics” of chronic absenteeism in the post-COVID era. Since 2022, when the national average peaked at 28%, the rate has dropped to 23% — still much higher than the pre-COVID level of about 15%, according to the conservative think tank’s . 

“I have a question that keeps me up at night. That question is ‘What’s the new normal going to be?’ ” said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at AEI. “We see this rising tide, but I think that it’s incumbent on us to say that chronic absenteeism still affects disadvantaged students more.”

The research project began in September with the goal of offering guidance to districts in time for students’ return to school this fall. The researchers stressed that those most likely to be chronically absent this school year — low-income, highly mobile and homeless students — are the same ones who will frequently miss school next year.

“Absenteeism should seldom come as a surprise,” said Sam Hollon, an education data analyst at AEI. “It’s hard to justify delaying interventions until absences have accumulated.” 

Teacher absenteeism

One new finding revealed Friday contradicts a theory that gained traction following the pandemic — that students were more likely to be absent if their teachers were also out. As with students, teacher absenteeism increased during the pandemic and hasn’t returned to pre-COVID levels. 

The relationship between teacher absences and student absences, however, is “pretty negligible,” said Arya Ansari, an associate professor of human development and family science at The Ohio State University. 

“These absences among teachers don’t actually contribute to the post-COVID bump that we’ve seen in student absences,” he said. “Targeting teacher absences isn’t going to move the needle.”

The researchers discussed how even some well-intentioned responses to the COVID emergency have allowed chronic absenteeism to persist. States, Malkus said, made it easier to graduate despite frequent absences and missing school doesn’t necessarily prevent students from turning in their work.

“In my day, you had to get a packet and do the work at home” if you were absent, Polikoff said. In interviews with 40 families after the pandemic, 39 said it was easy to make up work because of Google Classroom and other online platforms. “How many said, ‘Let’s make it harder’? Zero.”

In another presentation, Ethan Hutt, an associate education professor at the University of North Carolina, estimated that chronic absenteeism accounts for about 7.5% of overall pandemic learning loss and about 9.2% for Black and low-income students — a “nontrivial, but modest” impact. 

He stressed that missing school also affects student engagement and relationships with teachers. While technology has made it easier for students to keep up, “there may be other harms that we want to think about and grapple with,” he said. 

From one to 49

The new research comes as states are mounting new efforts to more closely track chronic absenteeism data and share it with the public. In 2010, only one state — Maryland — published absenteeism data on its state education agency website. Now, 49 states — all but New Hampshire — report rates on an annual, monthly or even daily basis, according to a released Tuesday by Attendance Works, an advocacy and research organization. 

The systems allow educators and the public to more quickly identify which students are most affected and when spikes occur. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington D.C. post rates even before the end of the school year. Rhode Island offers real-time data, while Connecticut publishes monthly reports.

The New Hampshire Department of Education doesn’t monitor chronic absenteeism, but has a statewide 92.7% attendance rate, a spokesperson said. 

The report highlights states that have taken action to reduce chronic absenteeism. In Virginia, bus drivers ensure their routes include students who might be more likely to struggle with transportation. With state funds, , west of Washington, D.C., opened a center for students on short-term suspension to minimize the when a student is removed from the classroom. 

Overall chronic absenteeism in the state declined from 19.3% in 2022-23 to 15.7% in 2023-24. To Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, such improvement proves “we can still get things done in our country and in education, despite all of the culture wars and binary thinking.”

‘Priced out’

Some district and school leaders have looked to their peers for ideas on how to get kids back in school. After participating in a six-month program with 16 other districts across the country organized by the nonprofit Digital Promise, Mark Brenneman, an elementary principal in New York’s Hudson City Schools, started interviewing families about their challenges. 

He learned that Hispanic parents often keep their children home when it rains because they’re worried they’re going to catch a cold. Several had transportation challenges. His school, Smith Elementary, even contributed to the problem, he said, by holding concerts, award ceremonies or other family events in the morning. Parents would come to celebrate their children’s accomplishments, then take them out for lunch and not return.

Hudson, about 40 miles south of Albany, has undergone significant change since the pandemic, added Superintendent Juliette Pennyman. Some families leaving New York City have settled in Hudson, driving up the cost of housing. 

“Our families are being priced out of the community,” she said. “Housing insecurity was … affecting families’ and students’ ability to focus on school.”

As a result of the intense focus on the issue, Smith, which had a 29% chronic absenteeism rate last year, has seen an about a 15% increase in the number of students with good attendance. 

“It’s not like we’re down to like 10% chronically absent,” Brenneman said. “But we’ve hammered away.” 

This scenario played out in 15,700 elementary schools across the nation in the 2022-23 school year, our of the latest federal data shows, up from 3,550 elementary schools before the pandemic. 

The impact from so many students missing so much school has made learning more challenging not just for the students who are chronically absent (missing 10% of the school year) but also for those who . These very high levels of chronic absence are also causing teachers to feel less satisfied with .

The disappointing results of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) underscore that high levels of absenteeism continue to contribute to the decline in student performance. In fact, an analysis of past NAEP results show that students who missed more school scored far lower than their peers. Keep in mind that this year’s 4th grade NAEP scores are for students who were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit, causing huge disruptions to acquiring the fundamental habits and academic skills needed to lay a strong foundation for school success.

When chronic absence is pervasive, it has a profound impact on the learning experience of all students. When teachers are constantly having to reteach kids that have been absent, that limits their ability to continue making progress with the kids that are there every day. 

Recent studies show that when chronic absence reaches high levels, it has spillover effects dragging down the math and reading scores of even those classmates who aren’t missing too much school. It can also that regularly attending peers will become chronically absent.

The U.S. Education Department data for the 2022–23 school year shows that 61% of schools had chronic absenteeism rate of at least 20% – the level at which it affects all students, not just those who are chronically absent. That’s down from the previous year’s 65% levels but still more than twice the 28% of schools with these levels in 2017-18. This meant that for the average-sized school in 2022-23 that reached the 20% mark, there were at least 88 chronically absent students in each elementary school, 113 in each middle school and 139 students in each high school. 

The federal data also reflect that 30% or more of students are chronically absent at 36% of all schools, compared to 43% in 2021-22 and 14 percent 2017-18. This kind of absenteeism can overwhelm a school and certainly is too much for just one attendance monitor, social worker, or counselor to address. 

Overall, the federal data found that the share of students who were chronically absent slightly decreased from its high of 30% of students in the 2021-22 school year to 28% in 2022-23. for 2023-24 shows some improvement but still not a return to pre-pandemic levels.

The improvements reflected in the federal data were uneven – some places didn’t improve and some places even found it getting worse – but overall there were small improvements. This means that chronic absence remained highly elevated during the second year of in-person schooling for students, even though during the 2022-23 school year, attendance was not affected by widespread Covid-19 outbreaks.

While chronic absence was decreasing for all student groups, sizable gaps remained. We see that historically marginalized groups – Native American, Pacific Islander, Black and Hispanic students, students with disabilities and English language learners – continued to experience much higher absenteeism. At the same time, there were encouraging attendance improvements for Black and Hispanic students overall. 

The years following the pandemic have, for many families, resulted in a shift in s around education. High levels of schoolwide absenteeism can exacerbate the mindset that showing up to school in person is optional. It harms teachers’ perceptions as well. Research shows that significant chronic absence leads teachers to view students who are missing 18 days more negatively, and also leads teachers to feel worse about their jobs. 

Given the persistence of chronic absence, we can all agree that focusing on student engagement and attendance must be a top priority for every state, district, school and community. States and districts must set ambitious but achievable goals like reducing chronic absence  and implementing a systematic road map for change. 

It’s true that in many cases elevated levels of chronic absence will not be eliminated overnight. The good news is that we have seen substantially improved student engagement and attendance in states including , , ,  and  as well as in many districts across the nation. 

How did these improvements happen? Each involves an investment in a comprehensive, data-informed, prevention-oriented, all-hands-on-deck approach to improve engagement and attendance.

Nearly 5,000 Detroit high school students have earned at least one $200 incentive for perfect attendance since early January.

High school students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District in which they have perfect attendance, from Jan. 6 through March 21.

There have been two cycles so far for which students have received the gift cards and, in addition to the 4,936 students who had perfect attendance in at least one of two-week periods, 2,028 have had perfect attendance in both cycles, according to data Superintendent Nikolai Vitti shared with Chalkbeat this week.

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The attendance incentive is aimed at improving attendance in the district, where two-thirds of nearly 49,999 students were considered chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. The incentive is among a number of efforts the district has employed over the years to create an attendance-going culture among students. The district has invested heavily into and this school year announced that students with extremely high rates of chronic absenteeism will be held back a grade at the K-8 level and required to repeat classes at the high school level.

The number of students earning the perfect attendance incentive is a fraction of the nearly 15,000 high school students in the district, leading one school board member to question last week whether the incentive is working. But Vitti said he is encouraged that the program is and resulting in a small decrease in the chronic absenteeism rate for high school students. He said the district and board will have to evaluate the program’s success at the end of the school year.

Chronic absenteeism has been one of the district’s biggest challenges for years. The chronic absenteeism rate has declined, from a high of nearly 80% at the height of the pandemic, when quarantining rules meant many students missed school because of COVID exposure. But last school year’s much lower chronic absenteeism rate of 66% still means it is difficult to have consistency in the classroom and improve academic achievement.

Students in Michigan are chronically absent when they miss 10%, or 18 days in a 180-day school year. Statewide, 30% of students are considered chronically absent, . A recent education scorecard cited the state’s rate as being a factor in students’ slow academic recovery from the pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights of the students who’ve received the incentive so far::

• 3,473 students had perfect attendance during the first cycle.
• 3,492 students had perfect attendance during the second cycle.
• About 10% already had perfect attendance.
• About 4% were considered chronically absent at the time the incentive began.
• About 16% had missed 10% of the school year at the time the incentive began.
• About 25% had missed 5-10% of the school year.
• About 44% had missed 5% or fewer days in the school year.

At a Detroit school board meeting last week, Vitti said the statistic showing that just 10% of the students who earned the incentive already had perfect attendance is an indication that “this is not just rewarding those that have already been going to school.”

Board member Monique Bryant questioned what school leaders are doing to promote the incentive to students who haven’t earned it.

Bryant suggested that data Vitti shared at the meeting showing that chronic absenteeism is down by 5 percentage points for high school students since the incentive began is an illustration that most students aren’t rising to the goal of the incentive.

Vitti responded that it depends on how you look at the data.

“Right now, chronic absenteeism at the high school levels improved by five percentage points,” Vitti said. “That means that 700 high school students are not chronically absent where they were last year. I’d also say that at least on the 97th day, our chronic absenteeism at the high school levels is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic.”

The question for board members to decide at the end of the school year is whether the incentive “is the right investment with other challenges that we have districtwide,” Vitti said. “But I think the data is suggesting it’s working for many students … but not all.”

Board member Ida Simmons Short urged the district to survey students to learn more about what is preventing them from coming to school.

The causes of chronic absenteeism are numerous and include physical and mental health reasons, lack of transportation,and lack of affordable housing. Most of them tie back to poverty. Vitti specifically , because half of the students in the district don’t attend their neighborhood school and the district doesn’t provide school bus transportation for high school students, who must take city buses to get to school.

“Sometimes they’re unreliable, they’re late, they’re too far away from where the child lives,” Vitti said.

Vitti said traditional school bus transportation for high school students “was decimated” under emergency management and it could cost between $50 million and $100 million to bring that level of transportation back.

Another factor, Vitti said, is that for some students, school isn’t relevant. Middle and high school students, in particular, “struggle to understand, ‘why am I going to school every day? How is this connected to what I’m going to I need to know for life.’”

Mi’Kah West, a Cass Technical High School student who serves as a student representative on the board, said that when talking to other members of the District Executive Youth Council last week, many said students overall are excited about the incentive.

One thing that stuck out, she said, was council members saying they heard students in the hallways or on social media saying they were coming to school because they want the money.

“And, while we don’t want to just say we want to come to school for the money,” West said, “I think it’s important to see that students … may have stayed home because they don’t want to come to school, but they’re willing to come to school now.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Indiana’s top education officials applauded the state’s on Wednesday but conceded that too many Hoosier students are still missing a “significant”  number of school days.

The latest attendance released by the Indiana Department of Education reported that 17.8% of K-12 students — roughly 219,00 kids — were “chronically absent” during the most recent 2023-24 school year, meaning they missed at least 18 days.

It’s the second year in a row that the number of chronically absent students went down, dropping from 19.2% in 2023, and 21.1% in 2022.

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“It’s an improvement — and we always want to celebrate improvements and data moving in the right direction— but we still have some work to do,” said John Keller, IDOE’s chief information officer, during Wednesday’s State Board of Education meeting.

Keller maintained that the reasons for absences vary, but “the interpretation of the ‘why’ is really going to have to be a locally determined thing.”

“Our general focus has been making sure that there are no insights in the data that remain unturned. But what we’re doing is holding up the mirror on this attendance data and allowing schools to slice it any way they can possibly think of,” Keller said. “I’m guessing there are probably different approaches that we use to address the most chronic of the chronic absenteeism, versus things that are maybe a little bit more episodic and not as much of a long-term pattern. But that’s what we’re trying to look at with broader analysis.”

Educators around the state have pointed to family challenges some students face at home, along with hard-to-break tendencies to keep kids home when even mildly unwell — a habit borne out of the pandemic — as key factors.

to try to combat the growing problem, like increasing communication with parents and incentivizing absence-prone students to come to class.

IDOE officials are also working on responses to improve school attendance, including development of a new “Attendance Insights” dashboard that breaks down weekly habitually truant and chronic absenteeism rates at the local and school levels. The state has already made the tool available to Hoosier school officials and plans to launch a public version later this month.

“It is statistically significant — students who are coming to school 94% of the time are doing better, significantly,” said Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner. “As a parent or a grandparent or whatever, that 94% or more really, really matters. Teachers could have told us this before we ran the data, right? But running the data, it is very clear students need to be in the classroom in order to make the greatest performance.”

A deeper look at the data

Student absences have been on the rise since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indiana and across the nation. Chronic absenteeism surged during the pandemic, nearly doubling to peak at 21.1% in 2022, according to IDOE.

Keller said the latest data suggests Indiana has “turned the corner” and appears to be reversing from its high-absence period during the pandemic. He emphasized that all grades levels improved their chronic absenteeism rates in 2023-24 by one to two percent when compared to the year prior.

“These are not insignificant improvements,” Keller said. “But obviously, we have not returned to the pre-pandemic attendance.”

According to the 2023-24 data, 23.7% of students who receive free or reduced lunch were chronically absent — nearly 11% higher than their peers. English language learners were also slightly more likely to miss class; 18.5% of English learners were chronically absent during the last school year, compared to 17.7% of non-English language learners.

The Indiana Code as being absent 18 or more days within a school year for any reason — a higher standard than “habitual truancy,” which is ten or more days without an excuse.

Under the “compulsory education” laws in Indiana, children must regularly attend school from the time they’re seven years old until they turn 18, with some exceptions.

But unless they’re excused, students who cut class too often could end up under a juvenile court’s supervision. Built-up absences could also prompt prosecutors to file misdemeanor charges against Hoosier parents, given that they are legally responsible for making sure their children go to school.

Keller took notice of “consistent, dramatic differences” in academic performance for students who are chronically absent versus those with better attendance.

“The data pretty much speaks for themselves. There are stark differences between the populations on all these measures,” he said, referring to “noticeably” lower scores on IREAD, ILEARN and the SAT among chronically absent students.

“No matter the quality of the interventions, it doesn’t matter so much if (students) are not in the room,” Keller continued.

IDOE officials further noted that students who are chronically absent are significantly less likely to read by third grade, master key ELA and math skills, or be college-ready.

“The magnitude of that is startling,” Jenner said. “We look at the high schools, which is certainly the most significant, but if you look at kindergarten and first grade — that is a lot higher than it should be. That’s when our teachers are working on the foundations with kids. So, we’ve got to make sure that habit is early, that kids are getting to school.”

New tools going live

At IDOE, Keller said state officials have “shifted” their focus from “just a school-focused look at attendance” to honing in on individual students.

“The old way of looking at attendance was adding up all the days kids could have attended school, looking at all the days they did attend, and then creating a rate out of that number,” Keller explained. “Now we’re looking at the student level and saying, ‘For this kid, did they attend 94% of the time they could have attended?’”

Other ongoing analyses at the state level are digging into patterns of chronic absenteeism.

“Are the students who are chronically absent in any grade this year, were they the prior and the prior and the prior and the prior years?” Keller questioned.

Data shows that in 2023-24, about half of the chronically absent students had been chronically absent in one of the last prior three years. “And half of them were new to the roster, if you will,” Keller said.

The new “Attendance Insights” dashboard — meant to help state and local officials investigate data trends — went live for school officials Aug. 23. A public version will be available later this month or early in October. 

The dashboard shows several years worth of week-by-week attendance data — including excused and unexcused absences, as well as rates of chronic absenteeism and habitual truancy — for individual schools. Because schools already report their attendance numbers to IDOE, Keller said the dashboard will show the most up-to-date data.

Filters additionally allow users to break data down by students’ race, ethnicity and socioeconomic and English learner statuses.

“We want to set the table for schools to do that analysis, identify trends and patterns, areas where data collection can be improved,” Keller said. “We want to work with a variety of stakeholders to identify root causes.”

Board member Pat Mapes said the dashboard can help school and district administrators show parents “that difference between academic achievement and whether or not you’re at school.”

“Because it doesn’t matter how much the school sends letters, makes phone calls — parents have to understand that your kids in our buildings is how they can progress academically and build the skills they need to be successful,” Mapes said. “We’ve really never had anything like this to be able to pull data out to really make that story.”

Also in the works is an “early warning system” that studies more than a decade of data patterns among students who graduated high school — and those who did not graduate — to identify possible behaviors of concern and risk factors for becoming chronically absent.

Currently, the 11 Hoosier school corporations are participating in a two-month pilot.

“We want to get it out as soon as possible. We want to stop the trial, take away the placebo, and give everybody access,” Keller said. “But we’re not going to do it until we’re confident.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

Most districts try to prevent chronic absenteeism through early warning systems that identify students who miss too much school, according to the report by . Districts also conduct home visits, call families when students are out and hire staff who specifically address attendance. 

But those efforts meet with pushback from parents. Some say, for example, that letters sent home nudging students to attend school are “too harsh.” 

“Parents’ overall feelings about the importance of school have changed,” said Jessica Hull,  executive director of communication and community engagement for the Roseville City School District, outside Sacramento. Chronic absenteeism in the district has dropped from its pandemic high point of 26% to 11%, but that is still roughly double its pre-COVID rate.

Some students with family members outside of the U.S. can be gone for weeks at a time. Others frequently miss Fridays and Mondays, while some older children are tasked with caring for younger siblings. 

“I’m generally a very positive person,” Hull said. “But I don’t know that we’ll really dramatically change those things.”

The report comes as more states are showing leadership on the issue. On Monday, Attendance Works, an advocacy and research organization, announced that have committed to cutting chronic absenteeism in half over five years in response to a challenge it issued in July along with the American Enterprise Institute and EdTrust. Chronic absenteeism peaked at 28% nationally in the 2021-22 school year. The Rand survey of nearly 200 district leaders estimates that rates dropped to about 19% last school year, but that’s still above the pre-COVID level of 15%. 

In a statement, Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, said states are “uniquely positioned to alert everyone to the size of this challenge.” 

But the Rand report suggests district leaders feel a sense of urgency to reach families with children who miss the most school now.

“The leaders we interviewed were frustrated because there are chronically absent students for whom their interventions aren’t working,” said Lydia Rainey, a researcher with the 

Center on Reinventing Public Education, which with Rand on the survey. “Some of the leaders had ideas for new programs to try; others were at a loss for what to do next. No one talked about giving up.”

The authors urged districts to emphasize approaches that foster stronger relationships between students and staff — an ingredient that even discouraged leaders say is the key to more successful strategies. Parents need to understand how poor attendance impacts their children’s academic performance, researchers said, and districts should collect better evidence on which methods make students want to come to school.

The U.S. Department of Education last week encouraged similar strategies in for low-performing schools identified as part of states’ accountability systems. The public has until Oct. 4 to provide comments on the draft. In addition, a recently posted  from the Department of Transportation offers other ideas, like teaching students to if transportation is unavailable.

In its effort to address the problem, the Roseville City district supplies gas cards to families who can’t afford to fill up and encourages transient and homeless families to transfer schools if their living situations have changed. 

“One school that works at the beginning of the year might not be the school that works at the end of the year,” Hull said.

Lines of communication 

School leaders sometimes modify district-level practices to keep the connections with parents positive. 

In central Wyoming’s Fremont County district, for example, home-to-school liaisons call families when students miss too much school. But Katie Law, principal of Arapahoe Charter High School in the district, changed the title for these liaisons to student advocate — “so families see that it is an attempt to help.” 

To comply with state laws and tribal codes, the district also sends letters and truancy citations to families of chronically absent students. But Law said those messages are often counterproductive.

“This just made relationships and trust between the school and the parents worse and led to students dropping out entirely,” she said. “It wasn’t effective.”  

Law has tried some of the conventional strategies Rand studied, but she has also added some home-grown ideas, like handing out prepaid phone cards so she can text students when they’re not in class.

“We can open those lines of communication instead of trying to find four different phone numbers that might be disconnected,” she said. 

Food is another incentive. Once a month, the school holds a community day, including a “giant potluck.” Last week, students and staff made pancakes and volunteered at the local food bank. 

“Kids start to feel that somebody’s depending on them the way they depend on other people,” Law said. “It shows them that accountability.”

‘Tricky’ questions

That mixture of approaches demonstrates how schools can connect with students socially. The “next phase” is ensuring families see an academic payoff as well, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a research center at Georgetown University. She recently examined a to reduce chronic absenteeism in Rhode Island.

“Do students, especially high school students, feel that going to school has value? Is it a good use of their time?” she asked. “We have to start tackling the tricky and sticky questions of what happens within the school day, academically, that makes it worth it for students to stay in those buildings.”

As part of the Rhode Island effort, the state posts data showing how chronic absenteeism affects the percentage of students meeting math and reading expectations. The state also operates a that is updated every night and gives the public a real-time picture of absenteeism rates.

This year’s data is promising, with the rate declining from almost 29% in 2022-23 to less than 25%. 

Nearby Connecticut, which publishes on chronic absenteeism at the district and school level, has seen a decline from 20% in 2022-23 to 17.7%. 

But few states offer such timely, localized data, and most don’t even release statewide figures until October or later.

That’s part of the problem, Cohen said.

“This should be unacceptable,” she said, “given the agreement on how urgent this problem is.”

Knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school, the workers told parents of assistance the district could offer with transportation, school supplies, and even clothing. 

The effort, a standard strategy for LAUSD at this point, was designed and implemented by the district after the pandemic, when the number of students deemed chronically absent reached nearly half of total enrollment.  

Since then, the number of kids missing class has fallen, but it’s still nearly one-third of all students, so LA Unified has continued its push, said superintendent Alberto Carvalho. 

“The first priority is having kids at school,” he said. “We need kids in school.” 

Both for academic and financial reasons, as it turns out. 

Rates of chronic absenteeism – defined by the district as missing ten percent or more of a school year – exploded in the pandemic, with nearly half of students missing that much class.   

Prior to the pandemic, the fire had already started. In the two years before Covid,  percent of students deemed chronically absent jumped from 13% to more than 18%. When school returned after shutdowns it rose to nearly half of all students.

The situation in LA wasn’t unique. But it threatened both academic and financial standing of the district, as well as endangering the lives of children who missed school. And causes for the persistent problem are complex, said Victor Flores, principal of John H. Liechty Middle School in Westlake.  

“Sometimes it’s the parents that are working long hours, double jobs, and so it’s hard to get them to and from school,” said Flores. “Sometimes it’s chronic illnesses that some students may have. There may be mental illness or other issues in the family.” 

Even though daily attendance in LAUSD is rising, rates of chronic absenteeism stood at nearly one-third of students at the end of the last academic year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. Officials in Los Angeles, around the state and even don’t see a full recovery any time soon. 

Here’s what’s to know about the sticky issue and how it affects LA Unified: 

1. No easy fixes for a long-term problem impacting LA’s most vulnerable students 

In L.A. Unified, just over 45% of students were chronically absent in 2021-22. The percentage dropped to 36.5% in 2022-23. The preliminary rate for the 2023-24 school shows improvement to 32.3%, but that’s still way above historic norms — and Carvalho said yearly, incremental gains will be how the district digs itself out.  

“Some of the challenges faced by these families transcend that which the school system can address,” said Carvalho.  

The students impacted by the problem are the city’s neediest, said Graciela Ortiz, field coordinator for pupil services and attendance. Data kept by the district show homeless kids, poor kids and students with disabilities are far more likely to be absent. Likewise for kindergartners and pre-kindergarteners entering the system, and high school kids.

“It’s our working-class families and low-income communities that are affected the most by attendance issues,” said Ortiz. “After the pandemic, it’s as if those barriers [that prevent kids from getting to class] were just exacerbated.”  

2. Showing up for class makes nine times the difference when it comes to LAUSD  academics 

Research has long shown chronic absenteeism is bad for academics. And showing up for class is good. But LAUSD has now quantified just how important this is, Carhvalho said at a press conference given at Venice High School on the first day of class. 

“For every one percent of daily attendance improvement, particularly for the most fragile students, we see a nine percent improvement in academic performance,” Carvalho said. The calculations were made with principals from 100 schools that are fighting the problem, he said.  

3. Chronic absenteeism creates a financial problem in LA Unified, too  

Unlike many other large states that look more aggressively at enrollment, California uses attendance as a weighty measure to make decisions about school funding, said Carvalho. For every 1% of improved attendance in the district, that’s an additional $60 million in state funding it would receive, he said. So students who don’t go to class regularly “actually deflate the total potential revenue for all students in the district,” he said. 

Like other districts, Los Angeles is under and is trying to avoid closing schools amid enrollment declines. Given those circumstances, Carvalho said, the money is more important than ever, even if the district managed to avoid layoffs this year.  

4. LA Unified’s novel toolbox to fight absenteeism includes “concierge” bussing for kids who miss class

The complex causes of chronic absenteeism demand a complex response. So LAUSD is using an array of tools at the problem, including “concierge” transportation that’s “almost door-to-door,” Carvalho said. Transportation is one of the most challenging obstacles in getting kids to class, so the district is rerouting its bus lines to pick up students as close to their homes as possible. “We’re constantly rerouting,” said the superintendent.

Customized bus routes are just part of the package. The district is continuing with home visits, attendance counselors at each school, and provides wraparound social services meant to boost attendance, such counseling, medical care, or even laundry. Other novel approaches include trying to make school fun, for example, and principals taking the time to talk to parents individually at pickup and dropoff.     

The researchers found that in 2016 there was no discernable difference between the chronic absenteeism rates of English learners and non-English learners. But around 2021, there was a marked shift: suddenly English learners were absent more frequently than their peers, both in the raw data and when controlling for other variables like socioeconomic status.

This trend was particularly acute for older students and those who had been classified as English learners for six or more years. 

The magnitude of this shift is small but “troubling,” according to the study, especially because previous research has shown a disproportionate effect of absences on English learners’ achievement in and . 

And these results seem to match statewide trends: the most recent data from California (2022–2023) show that the chronic absenteeism rate among English learners was close to , four percentage points above the rate for non-English learners. 

Across the nation, chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — surged during the pandemic, from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022, and remained high in 2023. While most acute among students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike cut across districts regardless of size, racial breakdown or income.

“I think our findings really highlight this as an issue that should be looked at with a sense of urgency,” lead researcher Lucrecia Santibañez told The 74. She noted that missing a significant amount of classroom time has a negative impact on both test scores and social emotional learning, effects that can compound over time. “Clearly this population has struggled to recover to where they were before. So if we were already worried about them before the pandemic … these higher absenteeism rates are probably going to make that worse.”

Santibañez, who is Mexican and a mother of three, said her personal experiences helped spur her interest in studying Latino populations in schools. During the COVID recovery period, she began hearing from English language development teachers who were struggling to engage their students and get them back to school.

Santibañez and her co-researchers analyzed data from 444,000 students in four urban, rural and suburban mid- to large-size school districts over eight school years, from 2014 to 2022. The researchers did not disclose the names of the districts in the study.

Data was also broken down by grade level, year and type of English learner status. Although English learners are often treated as a homogenous group, they’re made up of five different categories of students who typically have different needs, outcomes and prevalence of chronic absenteeism, according to Santibañez. This study is the first to disaggregate this group, which Santibañez said will allow district leaders and policy makers to better understand how to best serve students’ unique needs.  

“It’s important, I think, for the research community to look at these groups differently, because they’re going to exhibit things that — when you lump them all together — it’s going to wash out some of these nuances,” Santibañez said.

The rising absenteeism trend is most evident and persistent for students currently identified as English learners and long-term English learners — students who have been classified as English learners for at least six years, the research found. Reclassified students — those who were previously identified as English learners but have since demonstrated English proficiency— are less likely to be absent, which matches previous research. Although they also saw a rise in chronic absenteeism in 2021, they’ve since returned to previously lower levels.

The study also found that as English language learners enter middle and high school, they’re more likely to be absent. Santibañez said that this mirrors when these students tend to get put into lower-rigor — often lower-quality — classes, which might lead to a dip in engagement.

English learners are a growing population, representing just over of students enrolled in public schools nationally. The vast majority (76%) as their primary language, followed by Arabic (2%) and Chinese (2%).

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said she’s not surprised by the outcomes of the study and has noticed similar trends across California over the past year and a half. It’s harder to nail down national trends, she said, because they’re not tracked the same way, but the 2021-22 federal data shows that the English learner chronic absenteeism rate was about 36% — six percentage points higher  

‘Something changed’

While English learners often face to educational success — stemming from lack of services, deficit-laden instructional practices and inconsistent inter-district policies — researchers hypothesize a number of demographic factors may have historically encouraged strong attendance. For example, the majority of English learners are the children of immigrants who tend to move less and

After the onset of the pandemic, though, absenteeism among English learners rose disproportionately as additional factors came into play, including a to services and support. 

English language learners and their families were often among “the essential workers and the communities most affected economically — and health-wise — by the pandemic [so] they may experience extreme death and trauma,” according to Chang. Parents who were essential workers were also less likely to be home to make sure their kids were attending remote classes.

“Now coming back from the pandemic,” she added, “you still have issues of access to health care to prevent kids from getting sick in the first place.” And families may still be confused and overly cautious about when to keep sick kids at home. 

There are also safety and bullying concerns, Chang said. According to the 2023 — which surveyed 980 families, the vast majority of whom identified as Latino with kids who are English learners — almost two-thirds of families reported having concerns about gun violence, 79% reported they were worried about an illness outbreak and 1 in 3 said they do not have access to medical care. 

Chang emphasized the need to understand and combat the root causes of chronic absenteeism since “remediation is always more costly than making sure kids get what they need in the first place.”

“I think we should be understanding the reasons from an assets-based perspective,” said lead researcher Santibañez, “from a sense of knowing that this was not a group that was disengaged with school before. This is not a group that’s been traditionally absent from schools. So something changed, and I think we need to understand how it changed and how can we go back to re-engaging these students and their families with schools.”

After nearly three decades working in education, I would hardly call myself naive. I’ve been a school counselor, principal and district superintendent. I’ve served or worked in rural, urban and suburban schools. Along the way, I’ve received recognition for closing learning gaps, increasing graduation rates and recruiting male teachers of color to the workforce.

Yet, for all my experience, there’s one thing I underestimated: chronic absenteeism and the challenge of addressing the many factors that contribute to it.

I now recognize that chronic absenteeism is a symptom of deeper, systemic issues in schools and broader society. The reasons for missing class are complex, representing a confluence of school, home and community factors. Logistical challenges like transportation or lack of child care can pose insurmountable barriers, while young people who lack a sense of belonging at school or are generally disengaged may simply opt out.

Because students and families are the groups most impacted by these impediments to attendance, they must also be a part of developing the solutions. consistently shows that engaging communities leads to innovative and effective solutions.

I’m encouraged by the efforts I’ve seen through my work with Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation. Inclusive innovation — an education research and development model that fosters deep district-community partnership to create novel student-centered solutions — is an opportunity for students and families, who are often excluded from positions of influence in education, to lead, participate in and benefit from problem solving and decision making. Inclusive innovation is not a new concept, but it is underutilized — and has the potential to significantly impact the nation’s attendance crisis. 

To that end, Digital Promise has Chronic Absenteeism: Insights and Innovations — a six-month cohort supporting 17 school districts ranging from suburban California to rural Ohio. The goal is to address chronic absenteeism through the deep investigation of its root causes, collaboration among districts around shared challenges and partnerships with students and families to identify solutions for improving attendance in their communities.

With the potential to impact more than 210,000 students, the cohort will develop strategies that meet the unique needs of their students and families, together with and alongside their students and communities. These districts will develop a chronic absenteeism blueprint by conducting data analysis; identifying the systems, conditions and processes needed to improve attendance; and engaging students in the design and development of solutions.

El Segundo Unified School District, Greenfield Union School District, Lynwood Unified School District and Mountain View Whisman Schools in California; Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Colorado; Wilmington Learning Collaborative in Delaware; NOLA Public Schools in Louisiana; Roselle Public Schools in New Jersey; East Irondequoit Central School District, Hudson City School District, Mount Vernon School District and Suffern Central School District in New York; Springfield City Public Schools in Ohio; Allentown School District and Elizabeth Forward School District in Pennsylvania; Richland School District 2 in South Carolina; and Spokane Public Schools in Washington.

The cohort will be co-led by Lynwood Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite, whose district is making progress in addressing chronic absenteeism. To start, the district asked a basic question of families: What conditions and barriers are preventing each and every student from participating and engaging in school? 

To find answers, Lynwood, which is over 90% Latino/a, distributed four surveys and hosted in-person meetings with families to hear their concerns. They increased communications with parents, including a social media campaign highlighting real students and their positive experiences in school, to remind families how being present and engaged can contribute to young people’s physical and mental well-being. As a result of these efforts, the district went from 1,200 students who attended virtually last year to 55 attending online this year and the rest returning to classes in person. 

Lynwood is also improving attendance among foster youth through a program created with student councils and staff. The program “hires” foster youth, who have lower attendance rates than other students, to work in their schools’ front offices or provide tutoring. This motivates these students because they know they know they have a purpose, build relationships with caring adults and are seen as role models to their younger peers. It also sets them on a pathway to entry-level jobs within the school district or at partnering agencies and afterschool programs, guiding them toward potential careers in education as well.

Another promising approach also draws a clear connection between attending school and students’ career and employment prospects: 

Digital Promise’s district- and community-led cybersecurity initiative provides access to inclusive STEM pathways for high schoolers in 10 school districts, from Alabama to New York. Students participate in a three-year, in-school cybersecurity program, earning industry-valued credentials and, ultimately, opportunities to secure employment and/or enroll in vocational and trade schools or colleges and universities in a related field. In all 10 districts, actual enrollment doubled or tripled projections due to student and parent demand. And those districts have seen a decrease in absenteeism among students in the program. 

For school leaders who want to develop lasting solutions for chronic absenteeism, the first step is to ensure the conditions — and the commitment — are in place to work alongside students, families and community members. This will lead to the next, crucial step: building trust and relationships to design and sustain solutions that enable all students to participate, engage in and thrive at school.

Three high-profile education advocacy and research groups crossed political lines in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to announce an ambitious goal: cutting chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years. 

For the first time, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to confront an issue that continues to plague K-12 classrooms four years after the pandemic first hit. 

“This is not a problem for some schools. This is not a problem for some subset of students. This is a nationwide rising of a tide that’s going to harm [all] students,” said Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy studies. 

While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022 and remained high in 2023. 

Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. The three organizations are eyeing a return to those pre-pandemic percentages.

“The goal is to get us back to a baseline where we knew we needed to do a lot more work anyway, but at least we can work towards that and do so aggressively,” Lynn Jennings, The Education Trust’s senior director of national and state partnerships told The 74. 

Five years from the launch would be 2029, but the groups are hoping that districts further along in their efforts will be able to hit the benchmark by 2027 — five years after chronic absenteeism’s 2022 peak.

The goal is doable, according to Topeka schools Superintendent Tiffany Anderson, who spoke at a panel discussion Ed Trust, AEI and Attendance Works held in D.C. this week to launch their initiative. The 12,858-student district was able to lower its chronic absenteeism by investing in families through home visits. In Topeka, if a student is absent for more than two days without parent contact, it warrants a visit.

“You cannot serve needs you don’t know. So the key is understanding … it works,” she added.

Numerous experts at the event discussed the importance of a tiered approach to confront an issue that has resisted various interventions. Schools, they said, must create trust and communication with families so they can learn why students are absent — as officials did in Topeka — but then, they must work to actually remove those barriers. 

Anderson said in speaking with her Kansas families she learned that chronic health issues, such as asthma, were impacting student attendance. So, she brought health care to the school, partnering with a local hospital. Now students and their families can see a pediatrician on site.

Some schools, panel experts noted, get stuck in that first tier: understanding families’ struggles in getting their children to school, but never implementing the solutions. Another remedy discussed at the panel, which included the vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Caitlin Codella Low, was emphasizing career pathways so school feels more meaningful to students and necessary to their own futures.

At the event, Attendance Works presented a six-step roadmap to assist states in achieving a 50% reduction in chronic absenteeism and will develop resources to share with state leaders moving forward.

“Our work over the past 10 years shows us that state leaders are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge,” they wrote. And these three organizations, they believe, are uniquely positioned to help.

Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang said her organization brings the “how:” They’re able to provide states and districts with the advice, tips, and resources to take action. Education Trust brings the advocacy lens and helps keep school districts accountable through data. And The American Enterprise Institute brings a more conservative audience to the conversation, along with the data.

�Ѳ�����ܲ�’s , where he compiles and analyzes district-level attendance data for over 14,700 school districts and charter schools nationwide, will serve as the hub to help states see if they are on track to meet the five-year benchmark. 

“We’ve got to take a long-term approach, and we’ve got to use our data to call everyone,” Chang said. “It needs all hands on deck.”

Denise Forte, president and CEO at Education Trust, noted the importance of the cross-organization partnership, saying that while she and Malkus haven’t historically always agreed on policy issues, this was one where they knew they could — and needed to — come together. 

The urgency of the issue created a shared sense of purpose, all three groups said.

“We’re in a pretty partisan world. People feel so divided on so many things,” Chang added. “But we can’t risk our children’s future by being divided on this one.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to better reflect the timeline in which the three organizations aim to cut chronic absenteeism by half.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The Education Trust and The 74.

The AI bot, created by Boston-based AllHere Education, was launched . But just three months later, AllHere posted that a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin was no longer on the job. AllHere was up for sale, the district said, with several businesses interested in acquiring it.

The news was shocking and certainly bleak for the ed tech industry, but several observers say the partnership bit off more than it could chew, tech-wise — and that the ensuing blowup could hurt future AI investments.

Ed was touted as a powerful, easy-to-use o for students and parents to supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and help families navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues, all in 100 languages and on their mobile phones.

But Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of , a consulting and training firm, said that was an overreach.

“What they were trying to do is really not possible with where the technology is today,” she said. ”It’s a very broad application [with] multiple users — teachers, students, leaders and family members — and it pulled in data from multiple systems.”

She noted that even a mega-corporation like McDonald’s had to trim its AI sails. The fast-food giant recently admitted that a small experiment using a chatbot to power drive-thru windows had resulted in a few fraught customer interactions, such as one in which a woman angrily tried to persuade the bot that she wanted a caramel ice cream as it added to her order.

If McDonald’s, worth an estimated $178.6 billion, can’t get 100 drive-thrus to take lunch orders with generative AI, she said, the tech isn’t “where we need it to be.”

If anything, L.A. and AllHere did not seem worried about the project’s scale, even if industry insiders now say it was bound to under-deliver: Last spring, at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, Smith-Griffin and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho showed off Ed widely, with Carvalho saying it would revolutionize students’ and parents’ relationships to school, “utilizing the data-rich environment that we have for every kid.”

In an interview with The 74 at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego in April, Carvalho said many students are not connected to school, “therefore they’re lost.” Ed, he promised, would change that, with a “significantly different approach” to communication from the district.

“We are shifting from a system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one,’” with personalization and individualization for each student, he said, and “meaningful connections with parents.”

Better communication with parents, he said, would help improve not just attendance but reading and math proficiency, graduation rates and other outcomes. “The question that needs to be asked is: Why have those resources not meaningfully connected with students and parents, and why have they not resulted in this explosive experience in terms of educational opportunity?”

Carvalho noted Ed’s ability to understand and communicate in about 100 different languages. And, he crowed, it “never goes to sleep” so it can answer questions 24/7. He called it “an entity that learns and relearns all the time and does nothing more, nothing less than adapt itself to you. I think that’s a game changer.” 

But one experienced ed tech insider recalled hearing Carvalho at the conference in April and say it was already solving “all the problems” that big districts face. The insider, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely about sensitive matters, found the remarks troubling. “The messaging was so wrong that at that point I basically started a stopwatch on how long it would take” for the effort to fail. “And I’m kind of amazed it’s been this long before it all fell apart. I feel badly about it, I really do, but it’s not a surprise.”

‘A high-risk proposition’

In addition to the deal’s dissolution, The 74 reported last week that a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere told district officials, L.A.’s independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that Ed processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of the district’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of being hacked — warnings that he said the agencies ignored. 

AI for Education’s Bickerstaff said developers “have to take caution” when building these systems for schools, especially those like Ed that bring together such large sets of data under one application.

“These tools, we don’t know how they work directly,” she said. “We know they have bias. And we know they’re not reliable. We know they can be leaky. And so we have to be really careful, especially with kids that have protected data.”

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with the education consulting firm , said what often happens is that district leaders “try to go really big and move really fast to adopt a new technology,” not fully appreciating that it’s “a really high risk proposition.”

While ed tech is of overpromising and disappointing results, Spurrier said, other districts dare to take a different approach, starting small, iterating and scaling up. In those cases, he said, disaster rarely follows.

Richard Culatta, CEO of the (ISTE), put it more bluntly: “Whenever a district says, ‘Our strategy around AI is to buy a tool,’ that’s a problem. When the district says, ‘For us, AI is a variety of tools and skills that we are working on together,’ that’s when I feel comfortable that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Culatta suggested that since generative AI is developing and changing so rapidly, districts should use the next few months as “a moment of exploration — it’s a moment to bring in teachers and parents and students to give feedback,” he said. “It is not the moment for ribbon cutting.” 

‘It’s about exploring’

Smith-Griffin founded AllHere in 2016 at Harvard University’s . In an April interview with The 74, she said she originally envisioned it as a way to help school systems reduce chronic absenteeism through better communication with parents. Many interventions that schools rely on, such as phone calls, postcards and home visits, “tend to be heavily reliant on the sheer power of educators to solve system-wide issues,” she said.

A former middle-school math teacher, Smith-Griffin recalled, “I was one of those teachers who was doing phone calls, leaving voicemails, visiting my parents’ homes.” 

AllHere pioneered text messaging “nudges,” electronic versions of postcard reminders to families that, in one key study, modestly. 

The company’s for L.A., Smith-Griffin said, envisioned extending the attendance strategies while applying them to student learning “in the most disciplined way possible.”

“You nudge a parent around absences and they will tell you things ranging from, ‘My kid needs tutoring, my kid is struggling with math’ [to] ‘I struggle with reading,’” she said. AllHere went one step further, she said, bringing together “the full body of resources” that a school system can offer parents.

The district had high hopes for the chatbot, requiring it to focus on “eliminating opportunity gaps, promoting whole-child well-being, building stronger relationships with students and families, and providing accessible information,” according to the proposal.

In April, it was still in early implementation at 100 of the district’s lowest performing “priority” schools, serving about 55,000 students. LAUSD planned to roll out Ed for all families this fall. The district “unplugged” the chatbot on June 14, the Los Angeles Times , but a district spokesperson said L.A. “will continue making Ed available as a tool to its students and families and is closely monitoring the potential acquisition of AllHere.” The company did not immediately responded to queries about the chatbot or its future.

As for the apparent collapse of AllHere, speculation in the ed tech world is rampant.

In the , education entrepreneur Ben Kornell said late last month, “My spidey sense basically goes to ‘Something’s not adding up here and there’s more to the story.’” He theorized a “critical failure point” that’s yet to emerge “because you don’t see things like this fall apart this quickly, this immediately” for such a small company, especially in the middle of a $6 million contract.

Kornell said the possibilities fall into just a few categories: an accounting or financial misstep, a breakdown among AllHere’s staff, board and funders or “major customer payment issues.” 

The district also may have withheld payment for undelivered products, but he said the sudden collapse of the company seemed unusual. “If you are headed towards a cash crisis, the normal thing to do would be: Go to your board, go to your funders, and get a bridge to get you through that period and land the plane.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said L.A. deserves a measure of credit “for being willing to lean into AI technology and think about ways that it could work.” But he wonders whether the best use of generative AI at this moment will be found not in “revolutionizing instruction,” as L.A. has pursued, but elsewhere. 

“There’s plenty of opportunities to think about how AI might help on the administrative side of things, or help folks that are kind of outside the classroom walls,” rather than focusing on changing how schools deliver instruction. “I think that’s the wrong place to start.”

ISTE’s Culatta noted that just down the road from Los Angeles, in Santa Ana, California, district officials there responded to the dawn of tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating evening classes for adults. “The parents come in and they talk about what AI is, how they should be thinking about it,” he said. “It’s about exploring. It’s about helping people build their skills.” 

‘How are your financials?’

The fate of AllHere’s attendance work in districts nationwide isn’t clear at the moment. In one large district, the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Public Schools, near Washington, D.C., teachers piloted AllHere with 32 schools as far back as January 2020, spokeswoman Meghan Thornton said. The district added two more schools to the pilot in 2022, but AllHere notified the district on June 18 that, effective immediately, it wouldn’t be able to continue its services due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.” 

District officials are now looking for another messaging system to replace AllHere “should it no longer be available,” Thornton said.

Bickerstaff said the field more broadly suffers from “a major, major overestimation of the capabilities of the technology to date.” L.A., she noted, is the nation’s second-largest school district, so even the pilot stage likely saw “very high” usage, raising its costs. She predicted a fast acquisition of AllHere, noting that they’d been looking for outside investment for several months.

As founder of the startup , which offers teachers tools to streamline their workload, Adeel Khan is no stranger to hustling for funding — and to competitors running out of money. But he said the news about AllHere and Ed was bad for the industry more broadly, leaving districts with questions about whether to partner with newer, untested companies.

“I see it as something that is certainly not great for the startup ecosystem,” he said.

Even before the news about AllHere broke last month, Khan attended ISTE’s big national conference in Denver last month, where he talked to school district officials about prospective partnerships. “More than one time I was asked directly, ‘How are your financials?’” he recalled. 

Usually technology directors ask about features and what a product can do for students, he said. But they’re beginning to realize that a failed product doesn’t just waste time and money. It damages reputations as well. “That is on the mind of buyers,” he said. 

When school districts invest in new tech, he said, they’re not just committing to funding it for months or even years, but also to training teachers and others, so they want responsible growth.

“There’s a lot of disruption to K-12 when a product goes out of business,” Khan said. “So people remember this. They remember, ‘Hey, we committed to this product. We discovered it at ISTE two years ago and we loved it. It was great — and it’s not here anymore. And we don’t want to go through that again.’ ”

Pint-sized hall monitors in yellow neon vests greet their fellow students first thing in the morning at the Tornillo PreK-8 School as part of a program meant to encourage them to come to class every day.

As children shuffle into their classrooms, teachers begin taking counts of who’s absent the moment the school day starts at 7:30 a.m., even though attendance isn’t due until 10 a.m.

From there, it’s a sprint for staff to reach parents and find those missing students.

“Staff start making calls to parents to find out if a kid is going to be making it to school,” said Tornillo Independent School District Superintendent Rosy Vega-Barrio. “If we don’t get an answer right then and there, we send an officer to the house to find out what’s going on.”

Once a student starts accumulating absences, school leaders like Tornillo PreK-8 Principal Myrna Lopez-Patty set up meetings with parents to talk to them about Texas attendance laws, which require school districts to begin court proceedings if a student has three unexcused absences.

“You’re meeting with me as a preventive measure because we don’t want to file for court,” Lopez-Patty told parent Brenda Guillen and her son Nathan during one of those meetings in March.

Guillen said that she did not know her son could be in danger of losing credit if he missed more than 10% of his classes for the year. In the end, she said she was glad she went to the meeting before Nathan’s attendance became a bigger problem.

“I was confident with his grades. I thought he was doing great, but I completely disregarded the fact that he needed to be on time more and in school more,” Guillen told El Paso Matters.

Vega-Barrio said that these efforts helped it become the only district in El Paso County to lower its chronic absenteeism rate since students returned to school from the pandemic, although it still remained higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The 2018-19 school year was the last before the pandemic disruption. Schools across the country shut down in March 2020 and most remained closed the rest of the 2019-20 school year. In El Paso, most classes remained closed in the fall of 2020 and reopened in early 2021.

Throughout Texas, the number of chronically absent students — characterized as students who miss at least 10% of class, or about 18 days a year — rose from 11% during the 2018-19 school year to 15% in 2019-20. That increased to 26% during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent Federal Report Cards data released by the Texas Education Agency.

Nationally, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 15% in 2018-19 to 28% in 2021-22, according to a compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with the Associated Press.

El Paso County saw a similar trend, as chronic absenteeism rates in school districts countywide grew between 11% to 26% on average over those three years.

Tornillo ISD, a rural school district on the eastern outskirts of the county with less than 900 students, was an outlier. The district saw its chronic absenteeism rate drop from 10% in 2018-19 to 2% during the 2019-20 school year but then shot up to 22% in the 2020-21 school year. The rate dropped to 14% during the 2021-22 school year – the lowest in the county that year but still above the pre-pandemic rates

That year, the El Paso Independent School District had a 36% chronic absenteeism rate — the highest in the county. The Socorro Independent School District had a 28% rate and the Ysleta Independent School District reported a 25% rate.

Outside the city limits, 35% of students in the San Elizario Independent School District were chronically absent, with 32% in the Fabens Independent School District, 28% in the Clint Independent School District and 20% in the Canutillo Independent School District. The Anthony Independent School District kept its chronic absenteeism rate the same — at 25% — between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

Texas schools are required to keep track of which students are chronically absent, but most do not monitor the data at the district level and rely on the TEA’s annual reports.

While most El Paso schools don’t track their overall chronic absenteeism rates, some school leaders said average daily attendance has improved since the 2021-22 school year but has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Now some experts are concerned that this rise in absenteeism could have negative effects on students who missed out on some of the benefits of attending school every day, like getting counseling, socializing, and participating in extracurricular activities.

“The earlier students attend school consistently, in terms of their age, the more likely they’re going to graduate and go on to whatever postsecondary success looks for them,” University of Texas at Austin education professor Joshua Childs told El Paso Matters. “It can provide some structure and some organization. … It’s a place where they can get a couple of meals a day, and be around adults that care about them and engage with them. For many kids, it’s a critical component of their daily life.”

Research shows chronically absent students tend to perform worse academically and are more likely to drop out of school.

One Chicago found that students who are chronically absent in pre-kinder, kindergarten and first grade are less likely to read at grade level by the end of the second grade. 

Chronic absenteeism during the sixth grade is an indicator that a student will drop out of high school, and students who were chronically absent between eighth and 12th grade were seven times more likely to drop out, according to a 2017

What is chronic absenteeism and what causes it?

In Texas, students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% — or 18 days — of a school year, even if an absence is excused. 

States have been required to report and track chronic absenteeism to receive Title I funding since 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act — or ESSA — was signed into law to replace the No Child Left Behind Act. Before 2015, Texas only tracked average daily attendance, which made it hard to tell if absences were concentrated among specific students.

“What ESSA has allowed us to do is get at the frequency of students missing school and how much they’re missing,” Childs said.

Experts and educators say that in many cases, students who are absent for long periods often face obstacles that make it hard for them to get to class every day. This can include a lack of transportation, illness and personal issues that disrupt a family’s normal day-to-day lives.

San Elizario ISD Superintendent Jeannie Meza-Chavez said she has seen cases where students have lost a parent or family member and missed several days of school afterward. In another case, a family’s home burned down, leaving their children at risk of becoming chronically absent as they face potential homelessness.

The data suggests students living in poverty and those with disabilities face even more of these obstacles than their peers, keeping them from attending school regularly. In Texas, a third of economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year.

“There’s just so many different factors,” Meza-Chavez said when asked about the causes of chronic absenteeism.”Sometimes our families just will not send kids to school.”

Because the reasons students miss school vary, Childs said educators and researchers need to dig into why students are missing school and find ways to support them.

School leaders say most districts already make efforts to address the obstacles that keep students from getting to school. Most have social workers who connect parents with outside resources. Some take matters into their own hands finding ways to help families.

At Tornillo ISD school administrators have helped students get transportation to and from school when they are unable to take the bus.

In San Elizario, counselors worked with the family that lost its home to make sure they had a place to go and the children had clothes and shoes to wear to school, Meza-Chavez said.

Why did chronic absenteeism increase?

While changes in chronic absenteeism rates varied by school district, most followed a similar pattern. Chronic absenteeism dropped slightly when the school first closed during the 2019-20 school year, likely because districts did not need to report attendance for the last few weeks of the year, said Ysleta ISD Director of Student Services Diana Mooy.

Chronic absenteeism began to rise slightly during the 2020-21 school year. At this time Texas schools worked under a hybrid model where some students could attend class online while others went in person. Mooy said chronic absenteeism didn’t rise too much in Ysleta ISD because the state gave school districts more flexibility when taking attendance to accommodate for virtual classes.

“We usually take attendance in second period, and if you’re in your seat, you’re counted present and if you’re not you’re absent. In (2021-22) we were able to take attendance later in the day so we were given more time and more opportunities to count kids present,” Mooy said. 

Then chronic absenteeism skyrocketed during the 2021-22 school year when all students were required to return to school in person.

Some school leaders El Paso Matters spoke to said they saw parents keep their kids from school more often because of illness and concerns over masking and vaccination policies.

EPISD’s former truancy prevention director Mark Mendoza said he noticed a shift in families’ attitudes around school attendance.

“Before the quarantine, we had students that were chronically absent for a variety of reasons, but the general culture was that it’s important to go to school every single day,” Medoza told El Paso Matters. “Then when the pandemic happened, and the entirety of in-person schools shut down, both students and their families lost that.”

Mendoza suggested that one of the reasons EPISD has the highest chronic absenteeism rate in the county is because as a District of Innovation, it is exempt from the state law that requires students to attend 90% of their classes to get credit.

The District of Innovation concept, adopted under House Bill 1842 during the 2015 legislative session, allows school districts to excuse themselves from certain state requirements. The initiative was intended to give school districts some of the same flexibility as charter schools as long as they adopt an innovation plan.

Mendoza said that since students were allowed to miss more than 10% of their classes and still get credit as long as they got passing grades, attendance suffered.

“Many people began to have the idea that I can learn and get good grades without going to school every single day,” Mendoza said.

EPISD did not respond to a request for comment.

What did Tornillo ISD do differently?

Tornillo ISD is encompassed by expansive desert and farmland along the Rio Grande, with some families living miles from their closest neighbor.

While most schools in Texas saw their chronic absenteeism rates go up when students returned to in-person learning, the rural district saw an increase when students were learning from home. With limited broadband service in the area, district leaders said many students who could not connect to their virtual classes were counted absent.

“The majority of our kids didn’t have access to Wi-Fi,” Vega-Barrio said. “Even though we provided hotspots to every single household, you had multiple kids online at the same time and it just created a lot of issues. I think that’s what hurt us in (2020-2021).”

Additionally, the district has several students who live in Mexico and cross the Tornillo-Guadalupe International Bridge every day to get to school. 

After schools closed and international travel was restricted during the pandemic, “it was really hard to get those students to partake in online learning,” Vega-Barrio said.

In many cases parents and guardians also struggled to help their kids with school work or troubleshoot technology issues, leaving them feeling like their children needed to be back in school, Vega-Barrio said.

Tornillo ISD also implemented several programs and measures in 2021 to try to reduce absenteeism including hiring an attendance officer and educating parents on the importance of not missing school.

Texas truancy courts may require parents to participate in counseling, take special classes or do community service. Parents could also face fines and up to three days in jail if they do not comply. They can also face misdemeanor charges if they are found criminally negligent for not forcing their children to go to school, according to the Texas Education Code.

Students with five or more unexcused absences in a semester can also have their enrollment revoked, which could prevent a student from graduating or progressing to the next grade.

Tornillo PreK-8 also started a morning hall patrol program to encourage students to show up to school on time every day.

“The goal was for us to get students on time but also to build leadership skills and make them feel like they had a role here in the district,” the school’s secretary, Cassandra Soto, told El Paso Matters. 

Soto, who came up with the idea for the program, said she focused on students who were missing class or showing up late excessively, and those with behavioral issues. Now many of those students have improved their attendance and are eager to go to school every day.

“We’ve seen a difference in attendance and in their behavior. They actually even told me, ‘It’s our job,’ so they get here very early,” Soto said.

Tornillo ISD school leaders say these efforts have allowed them to get students back in the classroom and rebound its attendance rates. 

Soto said she thinks that success can be replicated by other schools.

“We are a small district and we don’t have a lot of resources or the amount of staff other districts have. So I think that if we’re able to do it, they’re able to do it as well,” Soto said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

However, focusing on that type of COVID recovery framework feels less and less meaningful with each passing day. Since the start of the pandemic, most students have moved up multiple grade levels (or graduated!), and districts are already in the last year of their federal emergency COVID relief funds. 

There isn’t and won’t be an educational equivalent to the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaiming the end to the global health emergency. But it’s time for a new framework that shifts from a temporary recovery mindset to a more lasting and permanent emphasis on growth, equity and continuous improvement. 

What could that look like? There’s a growing consensus around three key levers: getting kids back in school, expanding and monitoring high-dose tutoring and increasing summer or afterschool learning time. Along with the Biden administration’s recent proposal for $8 billion in , researchers such as are all pointing to the same problem areas and potential solutions. 

Three structural shifts must happen to address the needs of the next generation.

First, students must get back in school. consistently that attendance, behavioral infractions and successful completion of academic coursework are strong predictors of outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance and college persistence. That’s true even after controlling for a student’s standardized test scores. In fact, in , NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford found that measuring academic behaviors such as regular attendance also did a good job of capturing other social-emotional skills like self-management, a belief in one’s ability to succeed, growth mindset and empathy for others from diverse backgrounds. 

Their work also uncovered a promising nugget for policymakers. Given how strongly partial-day absenteeism predicted long-run outcomes, policymakers could consider tracking and monitoring it closely. Other factors, such as tardiness, referrals for in-school discipline and participation in extracurricular activities are also relatively easy to measure and potentially contain rich information about students. Tracking these interim outcomes — and then helping students improve on them — is likely to help boost longer-term outcomes as well. 

Second, students who need it most should receive high-dosage tutoring. There’s finding that students who complete high-dosage tutoring post impressively in test scores when those programs are implemented appropriately. That research has convinced to create or expand their tutoring programs. But as the federal ESSER funding cliff approaches, policymakers should work with local education leaders to sustain high-quality, high-dose tutoring programs that are delivering the biggest gains for academically at-risk students. 

Third, schools should provide extra learning time through summer programs. Like tutoring, intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks have shown success in raising student achievement. Multiple studies on the effects of summer learning programs have found positive impacts on student outcomes, especially in . Those producing the strongest gains tend to offer for and pair struggling students with the most effective teachers.

Learning programs during shorter school breaks can also boost student achievement. For example, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, district offered week-long acceleration academies to students who were having difficulty in a particular subject. They were placed in small groups of 10 to 12 and taught by carefully selected educators. In total, students received about 25 hours of extra instruction per week, and the program was a key part of the district’s successful . 

As the sun sets on the COVID recovery era, state and district leaders will need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments in things like tutoring, summer programs and acceleration efforts. It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost. Those questions must now be part of the new normal.

Focused on schools in Washington, D.C., the preliminary results show middle school students attended an additional three days and those in the elementary grades improved their attendance by two days when they received tutoring during regular school hours.  

But high-impact tutoring —defined as at least 90 minutes a week with the same tutor, spread over multiple sessions — had the greatest impact on students who missed 30% or more of the prior school year. Their attendance improved by at least five days, according to the study from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University-based center that conducts tutoring research. 

Susanna Loeb, who leads the center, called the data “the first evidence of a strong causal link between tutoring specifically and attendance.” 

Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said it makes sense that students come to school more often when they’re keeping up in class and getting good grades. 

“Part of why kids don’t show up is because they don’t feel successful in school,” she said. Forming a connection with a tutor over several weeks or months can also make students more motivated to attend, she added. “I do think it’s an impact of high-dosage tutoring, not necessarily just tutoring.”

The early findings, which will be expanded in a future paper, reinforce the benefits of offering high-impact tutoring during the school day. The extra instructional time helps schools address two of their biggest post-pandemic problems — learning loss and chronic absenteeism, the researchers said. The White House has urged districts to not only target remaining federal relief funds toward those areas, but explore ways to sustain those efforts when they dry up. 

Districts that continue tutoring programs will likely keep “student achievement top of mind,” Loeb said, “with greater engagement — including increased attendance — as another outcome they hope to see.”

also demonstrated how to successfully integrate tutoring sessions into the school day. The state education agency, which has spent $35 million on the program, funds staff members in charge of rearranging the schedule to accommodate the sessions and track data on student participation. 

“They took that off the plate of the principal,” Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent, said at a January conference hosted by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. She added that working with researchers like those from Stanford can help districts communicate the impact of federal relief funds. Without those partnerships, she said, “we would look back three years later and not be able to tell the authentic story around what happened to $35 million.”

The district, which had a chronic absenteeism rate of last school year, began its tutoring program in 2021. Officials awarded grants to a variety of providers, including , which focuses on high school math and teacher preparation program.

Sousa Middle School, in southeast D.C., works with George Washington University’s , which pays college students interested in STEM or education to work as tutors.

“My challenge, when this program first began, was getting students to come and not look at it as a form of punishment,” said Sharon Fitzgerald, Sousa’s tutoring manager. Now students who have “graduated” out of the program ask why they can’t come back. 

Students responded well, she said, because it’s a “break away from seeing their regular teachers every day” and because they look up to the college students. The tutors, she added, also have a clever way of giving students a taste of how much more they’ll learn during their next meeting and if they attend class everyday.

“It was what the tutors left them with in the last session that encouraged them to come to school,” Fitzgerald said.

The results are likely to spark more interest in how tutoring and attendance initiatives can work in tandem.

“We have not intentionally used tutors as a way to address attendance. I can imagine that it could help if part of their work focused on that,” said A.J. Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education. “I see potential.”

Chang, with Attendance Works, said the results are “on the right track,” but don’t go far enough. During the , several states still had chronic absenteeism rates over 30%, including Alaska, New Mexico and Oregon.

Tutoring doesn’t address all of the barriers that keep students from attending school, like health conditions or bullying, she said. But tutors could refer students to school attendance teams when those concerns surface.

“What more could we get,” she asked “if tutoring was tied to a bigger strategy, a more comprehensive approach?’ ”

But even that prediction rests on optimistic assumptions about continued improvement in the coming years. For some states, it could take longer. In Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina, for example, the percentage of students chronically absent for at least 10% of the school year went up in 2022-23, from the American Enterprise Institute. 

The report, based on available data from 39 states, calls chronic absenteeism “schools’ greatest post-pandemic challenge.” 

“We need to make a hard pivot moving forward,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank. Minor decreases in chronic absenteeism rates are not enough to stave off “a disaster for the long term” he said, especially in low-performing and high-poverty districts that had serious absenteeism problems before the pandemic.

Malkus, a former middle school teacher, called for districts to make attendance a high priority, especially among elementary educators. Parents, he said, are more likely to respond to messages from children’s teachers than from “a stranger from the school district.” 

The report, one of two separate studies of chronic absenteeism released Wednesday, further underscores the enormity of a national crisis that is hindering students’ ability to recover academically from the pandemic. The second analysis shows a substantial increase in the share of districts where at least 30% of students missed 18 or more days of school. 

The review of federal data breaks down the rates into five levels of chronic absenteeism, with extreme being the highest. 

“We came up with these categories before the pandemic,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. At that point, nearly 11% of districts nationally had extreme levels. “Then the pandemic hit, and it was like ‘Oh my God.’ ”

By 2021-22, the rate had more than tripled to almost 39%, , the final installment in a three-part from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The data “compels action from state education agencies and policymakers,” researchers wrote. 

‘It’s alarming’

Some state lawmakers share that sense of urgency. So far, eight bills in seven states aim to reestablish good attendance habits among the nation’s students. 

Earlier this month, a Maryland called interim state chief Carey Wright to testify about whether news reports of shockingly high rates — with over half of students repeatedly missing school — were true.  

“It’s alarming,” she told the members, after sharing district and state-level data. “We have a lot of children who are chronically absent at very young grades, and that’s a real concern, particularly when you’re thinking that they’re starting their educational career.”

In Maryland, 274 schools out of 1,388 had an extreme chronic absenteeism rate in 2017-18. By 2021-22, that number had reached 700.

Lori Phelps, principal of Woodbridge Elementary in Catonsville, joined Wright to explain how her staff reduced its rate from 28% in 2021-22 to just over 9% in 2022-23.

Identifying patterns that increase absences is part of the answer, she added. For example, students were more likely to miss school on early-release days, so the staff worked with parent leaders to offer an afternoon program on those days. The PTA charged $10, but waived the fee for students with the most absences.

“We all want to prioritize those very important state scores,” Phelps said, “but we made a decision two years ago to prioritize attendance.”

No buses

But even parents determined to get their children to school face significant obstacles if they don’t have transportation. In Colorado, every district has to save money or because of driver shortages, said Michelle Exstrom, education director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. She serves on a expected to propose transportation solutions by the end of the year.  

“In rural areas all over the country, where kids don’t have a ride to school, it’s like, duh, they’re not going to be at school,” she said. A lot of parents can’t leave work at 2:30 to pick up their children, she said, and even high school students with cars often can’t drive to school because there’s not enough parking, she said.

In Ohio, two lawmakers think some might reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and ninth grade, two grade levels with rates around 30%. 

The bill, from Democrat Rep. Dani Isaacsohn and Republican Rep. Bill Seitz, would offer $500 annually to families in low-income districts to boost attendance rates in those grades and ideally save money on dropout recovery services in the long run. If passes, it would start as a pilot this fall .

Seitz told The 74 he expects “significant supportive testimony,” based on the success of a similar program led by a .

Another proposal in , which had a 30% chronic absenteeism rate last year, would provide for home visits and tutoring to keep frequently absent high school students on track for graduation. And a would update the definition of “educational neglect” to include a parent’s failure to comply with attendance requirements.

‘Studied in real time’

But both Malkus and Chang expressed skepticism of state solutions that fail to factor in the highly localized nature of the problem. , for example, one reason chronic absenteeism levels haven’t dropped is because “there are whole communities still feeling the effects of wildfires,” said Marc Siegel, spokesman for the state education department. In general, Malkus said it’s unlikely state legislation would be “a rapid-enough response.” And Chang worried that legislators could be “too prescriptive.”

“I think folks have to have local flexibility to unpack the issues,” she said. 

But she does think states are helping in at least one critical area: producing more accurate and timely data. 

In the past, it was often June before states released chronic absenteeism data from the year before — a fact that delayed efforts to help students. In Rhode Island, the public can the percentage of students at each school on track to be chronically absent by the end of the year. Malkus would like to see more leaders take that approach.

 “If we want to address it with eyes wide open,” he wrote, “chronic absenteeism needs to be studied in real time.”

Student absenteeism is one of the biggest problems facing South Dakota public education, said state Secretary of Education Joseph Graves.

Chronic absenteeism among South Dakota students jumped from 14% during the 2018-2019 school year to 21% during the 2022-2023 school year. That increase is more pronounced among Native American students, whose chronic absenteeism rates jumped from 31% to 54% in the same timeframe.

Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses 10% or more days of school within the school year.

Attendance and academic performance are directly correlated.

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“School is how we bring kids to understand their role in the world. You can’t educate kids who aren’t there,” Graves told South Dakota Searchlight. “The key to the American Dream is a great education. If you get a great education, you can go anywhere in life.”

The state Department of Education is handing out millions of dollars in grants to school districts over the next three years to address student absenteeism through research-based programs.

‘Doesn’t feel right’: Some schools with significant Native American representation miss out on grants

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated absenteeism in school districts across South Dakota.

“The pandemic put education as a lower priority over other issues,” Graves said. “That sunk in with a lot of people, and we saw a definite decline in attendance rates of students.”

Recovery is taking longer than expected — both in South Dakota and nationally, Graves said. Some demographic groups are faring worse than others — including Native American children, Hispanic or Latino children, and economically disadvantaged children.

Sioux Falls will be awarded $1.5 million over the next three years to address absenteeism. The district was one of nine to receive awards, including Pierre, Wilmot, Waubay, Sisseton, Watertown, Mitchell, Leola and Spearfish — all at varying amounts.

Out of the school districts selected, Sisseton has the highest representation of Native American students at 54% of its student body, according to . Waubay and Wilmot’s student bodies are 34% and 22% Native American. All of the other schools receiving grants have Native American student populations lower than 20%. School districts that serve majority Native American student bodies, such as Oglala Lakota County, Todd County and White River, were not awarded the grants. 

Superintendent Roberta Bizardie of the Todd County School District said the district applied and was surprised when it was not awarded a grant. Native American students make up 94% of the student body, and the school district has a chronic absenteeism rate of 40%.

“I just didn’t feel right,” Bizardie said when she saw which schools were awarded grants.

There are three social workers serving the school district’s 2,000 children — many of whom are economically disadvantaged. The application planned to use money to hire more social workers and attendance liaisons dedicated to absenteeism issues.

Since the district was not awarded a grant, Bizardie plans to work with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s truancy department to reach out to families. They’ll continue using their social workers, sending daily calls to parents when their child isn’t in school, creating more family engagement events and encouraging attendance with incentives for students.

A representative from the Department of Education told the district that the reason it did not receive a grant was because some of the line-item expenses listed in the budget weren’t “clearly listed in our narrative,” Bizardie said.

While Native American students, on average, have higher chronic absenteeism rates and lower academic achievement rates than other demographic groups, it goes hand in hand with socioeconomic status, Graves said.

Out of the demographic groups, low socioeconomic status is the most important to address, he added.

Graves said Native American education is seeing a “small renaissance” through private programming closely connected with culture and language. He plans to keep an eye on those programs.

“What I think public schools need to do, and what I’m hoping they’ll do, is that they’ll watch that renaissance of private education and think about what we can do to adapt and serve students who attend public education,” Graves said.

Districts spend grants on transportation, mentoring & engagement

The student absenteeism grant effort is funded through the federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022. The schools will report on progress at the end of each school year until the grant is finished.

The awarded districts are addressing absenteeism differently, though all will spend some of the money on transportation, mentoring or engagement activities to entice students to attend school.

Sioux Falls will target elementary and middle schools with predominantly economically disadvantaged students. Working with younger children will “catch them at an early age” before a student loses too much ground or incentive to attend school, said Assistant Superintendent James Nold.

“A significant way out of poverty is through education,” Nold said. “We can encourage attendance, have staff and programs in place all to give a meaningful education and pull children out of poverty. Education hits on so many fronts; it’s so important to have a child in school on a daily basis.”

Attendance liaisons focus on relationships, mentoring

The most popular use of the grant funds is hiring an attendance liaison or advocate to build connections with students and families who struggle with attendance.

In Sisseton, the school district hired Michelle Greseth to implement the national intervention program “Check and Connect,” which focuses on relationship building between a mentor and a student. During the 2021-2022 school year, 26% of Sisseton high school students were chronically absent. So far during the 2023-2024 school year — after implementing the program and an attendance awareness campaign for students and families — 11% of high school students are chronically absent.

Greseth or other trained staff plan to work with students and families for a minimum of two years, reviewing data and educational progress, behaviors, attendance and intervention efforts.

Greseth said she’s already seeing progress in the nearly dozen middle school and high school students she began meeting weekly during the fall semester.

“If you don’t have the relationship then the data isn’t that meaningful because they’re not willing to buy in — you really want to know the kid and what drives them and motivates them,” Greseth said. “They won’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Sioux Falls hired six liaisons committed to student attendance and one recovery teacher to help middle school students who have fallen behind in their academics. Wilmot School District Superintendent Larry Hulscher said about 10% of its students are chronically absent.

Hiring just one attendance advocate for the small school district will help alleviate the burden on already overworked staff, Hulscher said. Principals, teachers and school resource officers across the state have attempted to build those attendance relationships in years past.

“Quite honestly, we haven’t been able to dedicate much time to that as the other responsibilities that come with those jobs,” Hulscher said. “This person can dedicate all of their time to this.”

Watertown plans to hire three family support specialists. Watertown’s chronic absenteeism rate has hovered around 20% over the last three years, said Superintendent Jeff Danielsen.

“The principal represents authority and the SRO represents authority,” Danielsen said, using the abbreviation for “school resource officers,” the law enforcement officers present in some schools. “This position is for someone who won’t have those titles; someone who can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Enhancing extracurricular activities

Getting students involved in at least one extracurricular activity they’re passionate about — sports, theater, debate, student government — will help carry them through school and to graduation, Graves said.

“Almost nobody liked every subject in school, but almost everybody got through it even though they didn’t like them,” Graves said. “Like a student who isn’t fond of English but has to pass the class because he loves football and can’t play otherwise. That engagement is huge. If you’re not engaging kids, you’re missing a large part of the boat.”

Graves served as the Mitchell superintendent before joining Gov. Kristi Noem’s administration.

The Mitchell School District plans to hire an attendance liaison and social worker like other awarded schools, but Superintendent Joe Childs also plans to build a “robust offering” of extracurriculars in the district’s “Kernel Club,” which is an after-school program for children transitioning from elementary school to middle school. The school district has an 18% chronic absenteeism rate.

Kernel Club activities are currently limited to two sports: volleyball and basketball. Childs plans to expand offerings to cover more sports, performing arts and visual arts opportunities.

Graves hopes school districts across the state will continue to invest in Career and Technical Education and Jobs for America’s Graduates programs, which have also led to higher attendance rates and student participation rates.

The goal, Graves said, is to course-correct and bring statewide chronic absenteeism and general absenteeism rates back down to pre-pandemic numbers.

The hope for Sioux Falls, Nold said, is that the programs implemented by the district are “so effective that we can’t do without them in three years.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on and .

At 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles, a big, bright trophy goes to the class with the least absences and latenesses — and Cristales’ students are eager to win.

“My kids are motivated, we want that trophy, and we want to keep it,” said Christales, explaining the winning class gets to display the trophy in their classroom for a month. “They tell each other ‘Don’t be late, don’t be late.’ “

For Cristales, the nationwide problem of chronic absenteeism has hit home, with roughly three of her 22 students not attending class regularly, and the problem seeming to be getting worse. Last school year Cristales’ class won the trophy twice – but this year they have not won it at all.   

LA Unified schools saw a severe decline in students’ attendance post-COVID-19, with 40% of students chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year — a 19.8% increase compared to before the pandemic, an LAUSD spokesperson said. 

“Where do I start,” said Cristales when asked what challenges chronic absenteeism creates for her. 

“Each day is vital to the content being delivered to the students,” she said. “Each day missed is a loss. As an educator [we do] not have the luxury to waste any time.” 

Cristales compared learning to climbing a mountain, with each day in the classroom a step towards reaching the top. Missing just a day of school can impact a student’s learning, she said.

“You feel the obligation to help that student to catch up,” she said, “ [even] when you have other students to help…it is frustrating to me as a teacher because I know what the loss of the day means for those students.” 

Cristales’ school also has a partnership with the University of Southern California, which provides tutors and mentors to students twice a week for 30 minutes.

“But if the student is not present, they are missing out on the support that they so much need,” she noted. 

LA Unified identify students as chronically absent if have they missed at least 10% of school days or about three and a half weeks of classes. 

“We’ve seen a lot of difference [in my classroom] after COVID,” said Cristales. “Many of them are not coming, and when you ask them why, many will tell you they woke up late, the traffic was bad…It’s like their priorities have changed, and that’s what I’ve observed.”

Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of USC Rossier School of Education, said COVID has changed many students’ and parents’ behaviors toward school. 

“Certainly, COVID has made people more sensitive to illness and more likely to keep kids home if they’re not feeling well,” Polikoff said. “There’s also some evidence to suggest that kids are just less engaged in school than they were before.” 

Online classes also created an unintended consequence, creating the belief among families that it’s not a big deal if kids miss school, Polikoff added.

A conducted by Polikoff and his colleagues found there are clear demographic trends in the increases in absenteeism among Black and Hispanic students. These declines have been especially large for historically underserved student groups, with those students not recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

“What we know about the pandemic and its impact on students is that it just widened every gap,” Polikoff said. “The way that our education systems and our society are set up is that all these disadvantages are sort of stacked on top of one another.”

Polikoff said some factors that can lead Black and Hispanic students to have a higher absence rate are , which can lead to sickness or aversion to getting sick.

“There are a million reasons, but they all point in the same direction: Black and Hispanic students are subject to many different forms of cumulative disadvantage both within school and outside of school,” Polikoff added. To combat higher absent rates, LAUSD has established the aimed to improve student attendance and help prepare students to be “ready for the world” through accumulated data, community outreach, and improvement on staff education.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.