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.

From purchasing alarm clocks, donating Uber gift cards, showing up on families’ doorsteps and even attempting to help parents plan their vacations, Clear Creek ISD employees are exhausting their options to get students to show up to school.

In the roughly 40,000-student district southeast of Houston, 17 percent of students were considered “chronically absent” during the 2022-23 school year – meaning they missed at least 18 school days. That’s up nearly double from five years ago.

The issue is not unique to Clear Creek ISD. Mirroring a nationwide, persistent trend, rates of chronically absent Houston-area students exploded after the pandemic. It’s a phenomenon that leaves many wondering why kids aren’t coming to school like they used to – and what it will take to fix that.

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Houston’s other largest districts did not make administrators available for an interview for this story.

School leaders and education experts say high absenteeism has devastating ripple effects on students’ academic performance, school district funding and society’s overall perceived importance of the classroom. Yet there is no clear solution, causing schools to scramble to improve attendance habits.

“There did become the feeling of, ‘Is schooling optional?’” said Holly Hughes, Clear Creek ISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We know that the habits start in pre-K, in our earliest years, with parents understanding the value and the intention. It’s a lot to get our students to school in the morning.”

When schools returned in-person after the pandemic sent classes online, most large Houston districts saw their chronic absenteeism rates double. Those rates decreased in the 2022-23 school year — the most recently available state data — but still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

‘Do we even need the school?’

The pandemic shattered the routine of going to school each morning, and once students returned, the lingering option of remote learning was largely seen as an acceptable alternative for when students don’t show up in person.

“People became comfortable staying home and not going to school, where they could dial in or not dial in,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “There wasn’t anybody there to enforce that.”

That’s created an issue larger than anyone knows how to fix, let alone any one district, says Joshua Childs, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. To him, it signals to him a shift in the culture of American schooling.

“At this moment, we are wrestling, as a country, as a state, in terms of what we value when it comes to educating the kids under the age of 18,” Childs said. “Like, what’s the value of education, and what’s the purpose of the school itself? And do we even need the school?”

School leaders and education experts agree that a student’s attendance has major impacts on their academic achievement. The Texas Education Agency that chronically absent students are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests, and they’re less likely to attend or complete college.

In a late June State Board of Education meeting, TEA commissioner Mike Morath hypothesized that increased absences could be a reason why studentg across Texas.

“Our broad hypothesis of this is that Covid caused much higher absenteeism from instruction, and as a result, much more mathematics gaps,” Morath said. “The linear nature of mathematics as a discipline is such that if a student misses little chunks of that discipline along the way, that may or may not cause them immediate problems, but it will certainly, at some point in time, prevent them from achieving higher levels of mathematics.”

But the problem lies in getting students and families to understand these stakes.

“One of the things that the pandemic … maybe raised more questions around, is, ‘What’s actually the purpose of schooling? If I can do it through my phone. I can learn through TikTok. I can learn through using technology in different ways, and arriving in a building every single day may not be what’s best for my kids or myself,’” Childs said. “It has big impacts, as far as academic outcomes, employment, post-secondary opportunities, social, mental, physical health outcomes. All of that is impacted based on a child’s attendance.”

Across-the-board issue

Chronic absenteeism affects students across different demographics – campus-level data shows that in some Houston districts, schools in both affluent and underserved communities post similarly high rates of absenteeism.

Students in underserved areas may miss school because they lack necessities like transportation, or because they have a job to support their families. Meanwhile, students from more affluent families may miss class to take regular vacations or visit colleges. Across the board, it’s easier to keep kids at home because parents are increasingly able to work remotely.

With no simple root cause, there’s no crystal-clear solution to keeping kids in the classroom.

Hughes, the Clear Creek administrator, said she found it isn’t as simple as providing more “wraparound” resources such as clothing and transportation. They’ve had to urge families to schedule doctor appointments and college visits on staff professional development days, supply suggested dates for vacations, and try to communicate the overall importance of the in-person school routine.

“It’s important to start those traditions, those expectations and those structures in the home early,” Hughes said. “Going to school on a daily basis and committing to that follow through every day, it takes a lot on a family unit. … I think it became hard for parents.”

A pricey problem

Brown said declining attendance is a circular issue – the more kids miss school, the less money districts have to rectify low attendance.

The Texas government funds schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning total attendance counts for the year are divided by the number of instructional days to produce the number of students a district is funded for.

Proponents of attendance-based funding say it provides incentive for improving attendance, while critics have long argued it more heavily penalizes schools with students dealing with socioeconomic factors that drive absenteeism.

Many school districts across Texas have outlined multimillion-dollar budget deficits this year, and several Houston-area school boards have pointed to declining attendance rates as a factor contributing to their financial woes.

“Schools are working really hard to try to get the kids in but it takes the parents and the kids, as well, to get them into school,” Brown said. “Schools can’t do much on attendance, other than encourage and try to build an environment where kids want to be there.”

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

That’s how the U.S. Department of Education released last month for the 2020-21 school year. But more recent data, available from just four states, suggests the government’s figures seriously “undercount” the problem’s scope. 

If the rest of the country saw rates as high as those in California, Connecticut, Ohio and Virginia, that would mean over 16 million students missed large chunks of the 2021-22 school year. 

Compared to pre-pandemic rates in 2018-19, “we will likely see a doubling in chronic absence,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, which teamed with researchers at Johns Hopkins University . Those numbers showed that 10.1 million students missed at least 10% of the 2020-21 school year.  

Data Analysis

Chronic Absenteeism Rates:
Before and During Pandemic

One reason Chang suspects the federal count to be too low is because of the leap in chronic absenteeism in those four states. For example, the federal count shows 15.3% of California students were chronically absent in 2020-21. But according to , a company that works with districts to improve attendance, 27.4% of students were in the chronic to severe range last year — a time when schools were mostly open.

‘Highly dubious’

Attendance Works partnered with the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins to compile statewide chronic absence data available on the Education Department’s ED Data Express . But they call some of what they found “highly dubious.”

The attendance data is flawed, Chang explained, because of the inconsistent ways states and districts calculated attendance during remote learning. Some students were marked present if they just logged into Zoom and left. This year, she added, states and districts not only face the challenge of improving the way they track the data and release it to the public, but also reengaging students who missed large portions of last school year.

The data shows, for example, that only 3.7% of Idaho students were chronically absent in the 2020-21 school year, but , such as Coeur d’Alene and Boise, are reporting rates in the 10% to 15% range. 

In five states, chronic absenteeism rates actually went down. That’s unlikely, Chang said.

At the other end of the spectrum, rates in Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada and New Mexico were at least 30%. But that could still be far from accurate. Districts such as the Albuquerque Public Schools saw rates as high last school year.

Marguerite Roza and Chad Aldeman of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab drew attention to the lack of accurate education in a recent saying public schools have “missed the data revolution.”

“Good luck getting real-time data on how many children are enrolled in public schools, are chronically absent, or are making academic progress as a result of federally funded relief efforts,” they wrote. “We don’t have it on a national level. States don’t have it. Neither do most districts.”

In New Mexico, officials say just because most schools are no longer engaged in remote learning doesn’t mean the need to clearly define attendance for students learning virtually and collect accurate data is gone.

Some families still choose virtual when it’s available, and some schools use online learning for teacher training or emergencies, like a gas leak. Officials are currently drafting new guidelines to help districts count attendance for students learning at home and those planning to finish by January.

“We’re working on guardrails,” said Gregory Frostad, the director of policy and legislative affairs for the New Mexico Public Education Department, “There can be good reasons [for remote learning]. We don’t have to just say that learning can’t continue.” 

‘One of the best indicators’

Skyrocketing absenteeism, meanwhile, is helping Robert Balfanz, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, target efforts to match students with tutors and mentors as part of a new national effort announced in July. The National Partnership for Student Success, housed in the center, is fielding requests for assistance from districts, nonprofits and government agencies. 

Chronic absenteeism is “one of the best indicators of which schools are likely in need of additional … supports,” Balfanz said. “It signals both a high likelihood of interrupted instruction and disconnection from school.”

The partnership’s website offers a where potential tutors and mentors can search for opportunities to serve in their community.

Chang said her organization has also been hit with a “deluge” of requests for expertise on tracking data. She’s encouraged that district leaders have boosted training for school staff instead of “just throwing up their arms and saying ‘Oh no.’ ”

Districts and other community agencies have launched an array of efforts to . In , teams of educators — including social workers, administrators, nurses and teachers — are delving into the reasons students aren’t showing up. 

And in California’s Merced County, the district attorney’s office started whose children have missed so much school that they’re at risk of being referred to the juvenile justice system.

“We try not to treat them like they’re in trouble,” said Monica Adrian, a behavior support specialist with the Merced County Office of Education. “We look at … some of the stressors that might lead to chronic absenteeism. There’s always another side of the story.”

But Chang said there was still so much disruption last school year — with quarantines and high staff vacancies — that it was hard to determine if those strategies made an impact.

“I think we’ll know better this year whether people are able to engage students [when it’s] a little less crazy,” she said.

“Being taught through the internet kind of sucked,” Benito said. “If I was in class, I wasn’t paying attention.”

It wasn’t until she returned to school in the spring that she saw her grades improve enough to pass. 

The Hartford Public Schools, like other districts across the country, is now providing extra support for students like Benito after chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year — spiked among ninth graders during 2020-21. While it’s clear the pandemic has set back learning for in the early grades, the transition to ninth grade has often fallen under the radar, even though experts call it a make-or-break year in terms of high school success.

Lacking many of the typical routines to help incoming freshmen adjust to the demands of high school and hindered by remote learning, many teens missed Zoom classes and turned up on lists of students considered most in need of support this fall. Now districts are using federal relief funds to hire staff and build new programs to target students that missed too much school.

Hartford — one of 15 districts participating in to prevent further chronic absenteeism — has funded visits to students’ homes, hired staff members focused on student engagement and offered prizes for perfect attendance to help keep teens from backsliding.

When Connecticut officials examined monthly data, they saw a sharp increase in chronic absenteeism among ninth-graders learning remotely — close to 30 percent. Among Black and Hispanic students learning from home, the rates were nearly 40 percent.

Across the country in California, the same pattern emerged in data examined by School Innovations and Achievement, a software company that works with districts to track and improve attendance. Chronic absenteeism rates hit 25 percent in ninth and 10th grade in the 2020-21 school year.

Experts note that even among those who have returned to in-person school, many teens still face pandemic-related challenges that impact attendance.

“We know that many high school students are continuing to struggle with trauma, grief, economic and housing instability, academic disengagement, [a] lack of social connections, or staying in school while holding a job or caring for family members,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization, “High schools can make a real difference despite these challenges.”

‘We went out to their homes’

Research shows that if students are not in ninth grade, their chances of graduating drop, and that ranks nearly as high as good grades in determining whether freshmen stay on track through high school. Districts often use the spring and summer months to smooth the transition from middle school into ninth grade with activities such as campus tours, summer bridge programs and new student orientation. But in 2020, and again this year, many of those efforts were cancelled or replaced with virtual sessions. Students often missed opportunities to meet new friends and teachers.

Administrators looked for new ways to strengthen those connections. In north Georgia, Murray County High School Principal Gina Linder assigned every incoming ninth-grader a counselor and a social worker. Even though her school started the fall of 2020 in person, she said she always loses some students as they “roll up” to ninth grade, and she feared it would only worsen because of the pandemic.

“We went out to their homes. We looked for the kids on social media,” she said. “We went to their job sites and said, ‘We miss you at school and we’ve got programs that allow you to work and still be in school.’”

Absenteeism further increased when students had to quarantine because it wasn’t always clear if and when they were supposed to log on to classes. At one point, about a third of the school’s 1,200 students were out and some had to quarantine six times, Linder said. When cases spiked, parents kept their children at home.

Then the district shifted to remote learning over the winter months when transmission rates increased. Students had Chromebooks and hotspots, but that didn’t guarantee they were keeping up with school. 

“We were pushing work out to them, but these kids needed the same learning expectations at home” that they had in school, Linder said. They were more likely to attend virtual classes if they had to follow the same “bell schedule” at home. Even if teachers recorded their lessons, students “were not going to watch seven videos at 8 at night,” she said.

This fall, the district is using $255,000 in relief funds from the American Rescue Plan to hire extra bilingual staff members at each school to focus exclusively on attendance.

In the northwest corner of Arkansas, the Gravette School District is using relief funds to support a new director of academic success. 

Last year, if ninth-graders learning remotely skipped classes, the district urged parents to switch to in-person instruction. This year, Kelly Hankins, who took the new position, is relying on data and her personal relationships with many families to nudge students back toward consistent attendance. Working with School Innovations and Achievement in California, she’ll be able to identify patterns, such as whether students are more likely to miss morning or afternoon classes. When students quarantine, she contacts them daily.

“Hopefully, that will keep them motivated,” she said. “It’s hard on those at-risk kids to be in a routine, and [then] all of a sudden, they’re not.”

The return to school this fall hasn’t necessarily solved the problem. Districts like in California are still seeing at least 20 percent of ninth graders chronically absent. And students are missing instruction because many states and districts stopped offering remote learning. According to a recent review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, only 12 states have provided guidance to districts on how to track attendance for students in quarantine.

In Hartford, when leaders surveyed every chronically absent student, they found that teens were often helping younger siblings with remote learning or doing household chores. The return to in-person learning has removed many of those distractions.

“When a student is in school, they can’t be asked to do anything family-related,” said Isaiah Jacobs, a at Weaver High and a graduate of the school. 

Melvin Viard, a 10th grader at Weaver, said he had trouble understanding some of his assignments last year and couldn’t stay focused during remote classes. He either fell asleep or got up and walked around the house during lessons. But now he said his grades are good and he’s on the football team. “It was way better for me in person,” he said.

The state’s data showed that ninth-graders who attended in person had fewer absences than those learning remotely — about 13 percent compared with the 30 percent for those at home.  But Jacobs said even among those with a hybrid schedule, students sometimes decided to come to school “based on how they woke up in the morning.”

Some students started working during the pandemic and need to continue, so the district has added — with dinner included — to allow them to make up credits. And during the day, Weaver students can get more individual attention to help them with academic and personal challenges through the school’s new success center, an expansion of launched at Hartford Public High School before the pandemic. 

‘No magic solution’

After the initial survey, staff members followed up with interviews to learn more. 

Corinne Clark Barney, the district’s executive director of school leadership, said among high school students, a common barrier to attending school in person was the .

That fear hasn’t necessarily gone away. Milly Arciniegas, executive director of Hartford Parent University, a nonprofit advocacy group, said some parents still worry that the full return to school was too abrupt.

She wants the district to offer a virtual option and to prioritize free, high-speed internet access.

The district, meanwhile, is hoping to entice teens to come to school through incentives like “dress-down” days, attendance competitions between grade levels and raffle prizes like AirPods and big-screen TVs. Weaver added it’s own incentive for September — a $100 Foot Locker gift card — and saw 140 students earn perfect attendance that month. 

Jacobs said the school plans to add smaller goals for students to hit as well, such as two weeks of perfect attendance. “A lot of students need instant gratification,” he said.

In Murray County, Linder found last year that rewarding students with a distance learning Friday was another effective way to increase attendance. Those who were still struggling had to come to school. 

“There’s no magic solution,” she said. “The biggest thing I’ve told my whole faculty is we have to know where our kids are, especially during these times. Try everything to find them and hold them accountable.”

States didn’t have student performance data to report from the 2019-20 school year because tests were cancelled. But many also left the public in the dark about how many days of school pupils missed or which students were less likely to graduate, according to on state report cards.

Nineteen states either failed to break down graduation rates by race and ethnicity or didn’t report rates for groups such as special needs, low-income or homeless students, the Data Quality Campaign’s review shows.

“When we talk about the drop in students enrolling in community college, or any postsecondary option, all of those data points start with high school graduation,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the nonprofit organization. It’s important, she added, to have evidence of the pandemic’s higher toll on low-income and minority students. “We just had so little data about what was happening in schools.”

The federally mandated report cards are the primary way states make complicated school-level education data accessible to parents and other members of the public. Each year, the nonprofit releases which states it thinks are doing a good job of making the information easy to find and understand. Leaders say despite the pandemic’s disruption in testing — and waivers from the federal government dropping accountability requirements — states could have used their report cards to give families more insight into why some data is missing or to report on students’ access to at-home internet access. But most didn’t.

“Why do we continue to rely on Congress to tell us what we need to know?” Kowalski asked. “States did not use this as an opportunity to provide more information. They chose not to use it to shine a light.”

According to “Show Me the Data,” just nine states posted the percentage of students missing at least 10 percent of school last year. Another 26 reported chronic absence data from previous years or didn’t specify the year.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization, said she suspects many state officials felt their 2019-20 data wouldn’t be accurate once students shifted to remote learning or that it wouldn’t be comparable to previous years.

“Districts were really confused about whether to take attendance or not and how,” she said, but added that states could have added an explanation rather than not release it at all.

Almost half of the states didn’t include all of the data required on educators, such as those teaching out of their field or those with emergency credentials. And many states still aren’t reporting results for at least one group of students, which Kowalski said will be important in the future to track which groups of students at each school were most affected by the pandemic and distance learning.

For example, even if they collect it, 13 states still don’t break down data by gender on report cards. Kowalski said teens in general have gone to work or picked up more responsibility at home to help families facing economic hardship. But, she added, it’s not “a stretch” to assume older girls assumed more additional household duties than boys and cared for younger siblings so their mothers could stay in the workforce.

Some states provide links on their report card websites that lead to additional information, but Kowalski said those looking for data shouldn’t have to hunt for it.

“To ask anyone, let alone a parent, to dig through and Google multiple websites and cobble together a full, robust picture of what happened in a school is absurd,” she said.

‘A financial footprint’

A few states tried to put the results in context instead of cutting back. Pennsylvania and Iowa used their annual report cards to be upfront about what was missing — and why — or point readers to waivers from the federal government showing which data wasn’t required.

And North Dakota posted the number and percentages of students in virtual, hybrid or in-person learning, long before the U.S. Department of Education started its own tracker a year after the pandemic began.

Ross Roemmich, the North Dakota education department’s director of management information, said all districts in the state use the same technology platform — Powerschool — making the data collection easier.

“When COVID hit, everything changed,” said Roemmich. “We knew that someday, the federal government would probably ask us which schools were face-to-face, hybrid or remote.”

Kowalski noted that just because states couldn’t hold schools accountable for results didn’t excuse them from reporting other data mandated by law — including per-student spending for each school. Several states made progress on that requirement, which went into effect last year. Thirty-six states reported the spending data for 2019-20, up from 19 the previous year.

Last year’s report cards likely won’t provide a lot of information on how states are directing federal relief funds. But Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said going forward, the per-pupil spending data will help the public track whether districts direct funds toward schools serving the neediest students. “There will be a financial footprint to this,” she said.

Kowalski said she’d like to see all states add information on students’ access to devices and Wi-Fi to their report cards.

“We already knew devices were important,” she said, but added that during the pandemic, a computer and a reliable connection “became school.”