COLUMBIA — It’s probably not surprising that students who are chronically absent from class tend to perform poorly on end-of-year tests. It’s the extent of the problem in South Carolina that seemed to stun lawmakers.

An analysis found that 1 of every 5 South Carolina students missed at least 10% of their school days during the 2022-23 school year, according to a presentation Monday to the Education Oversight Committee, an independent oversight group that evaluates K-12 achievement.

“One out of five? That’s a lot of kids,” said Rep. Terry Alexander, D-Florence, who’s among legislators on the committee. He repeated himself, drawing out one word for emphasis: “That’s a lot of kids.”

Among those chronically absent students, fewer than a quarter could do math as expected, and less than half could read on grade level, committee researcher Matthew Lavery found.

“My data point is a very simple one,” Lavery said: “Chronic absenteeism hurts achievement — kind of a lot.”

On average, fewer than half of South Carolina’s third- through eighth-grade students meet math expectations, and barely over half can read well for their grade, according to . State report cards being released Tuesday grade elementary and middle schools based on how well their students performed on those tests.

Contributing to those dismal results are students simply not being in class for much of the school year, said Lavery, the oversight agency’s deputy director.

By law, the school year must include at least 180 days of instruction. The data analyzed absences over 115 school days, leaving out the weeks at the beginning and the end, so as not to count students who moved into or out of the state partway through a semester. But it did include those who switched schools within the state, Lavery said.

A student who skips 10% or more of their school days, including half days, is considered chronically absent. For the study, that meant students missed at least 12 days’ worth of classes.

The numbers

More students missed out as they got older, Lavery said.

In third, fourth and fifth grades, 15% of students missed 10% of the year or more. By eighth and ninth grades, that was up to 22%. And in 12th grade, 37% of students qualified as chronically absent, according to the data Lavery presented.

That could be because older students have more freedom. Parents usually put their younger children on the bus and see them off. But high schoolers who drive or have another way of getting to school might find it easier to cut class, said Sen. Kevin Johnson, a former school board member in Clarendon County.

“These higher grades, these students may not be going to school, and parents may not even be aware of it,” the Manning Democrat said.

Nationally, more students have been absent since the years of virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the 2019-20 school year, 13% of students were chronically absent. In the 2021-22 school year, that spiked to 28%, and in 2022-23, it was 26% nationally, according to data presented to the committee.

That could be because of a shift in attitudes toward virtual learning as opposed to classroom instruction, committee members said.

“A lot of the time, if you’re working from home, you think your child can do the same thing,” said Dana Yow, director of the oversight agency.

But the more a student misses school, the more likely they are to fail the benchmark tests the state uses to gauge achievement, according to the report.

For instance, 23% of students who missed at least 12 school days got a passing score on the end-of-year math test, compared to 47% of those who missed fewer days.

The same pattern was true for reading, with 40% of chronically absent students getting a passing grade for English language arts, compared to 60% of other students.

And 26% of chronically absent students received a passing science score, compared to 49% who were not chronically absent, according to the presentation.

Test scores worsened the more often a student was absent.

Among middle school students considered “extremely chronically absent,” meaning they missed 20% of the school year or more, 8% met math expectations.

In high school, 12% of extremely chronically absent students could do math at grade level, according to committee data.

“This impact is big for being chronically absent at all, but it’s severe when you’re extremely chronically absent,” Lavery said.

Changing schools can also affect a child’s performance.

Regardless of absences, 22% of students who switched schools partway through the year could do math and 34% could read on grade level. Among those who didn’t switch, 42% could do math as expected, and 57% could read, according to the data.

“To me, the takeaway here is go to school. Go to the same school. Stay there. Learn,” Lavery said.

Why students are absent

What causes a student to be frequently absent can vary.

The committee did not have data on the reasons. But member  said she had heard from students who worked long hours at night to help pay bills, which made them too tired to come to school the next day. Other long absences are due to families going on long vacations in the middle of the semester.

“We’re battling (absences) across all socioeconomic” groups, said Pender, principal at Coosa Elementary School in Beaufort County and a former teacher of the year.

In other cases, it could just be that students and parents don’t understand why their child needs to go to school, said Melanie Barton, the governor’s education adviser.

“I am fearful that this is now a cultural shift for all kids, that they just don’t see the value, and parents don’t see the value anymore,” said Barton, the agency’s former director.

That’s especially true among high school juniors and seniors who may be considering going into a field that doesn’t require a high school diploma or college degree.

When Sen. Dwight Loftis worked as an insurance agent, students would sometimes shadow him and tell him they were considering dropping out because they didn’t need to finish school, the Greenville Republican said.

“I’ve heard some other talk from other students who begin to think about what they want to do career-wise: What is the incentive to stay in school that they don’t see?” Loftis said. “They don’t get it.”

What to do

By law, school officials and parents are supposed to jointly figure out how to get those students back in class.

After three consecutive absences or five total absences unapproved by administrators, state law requires school officials to develop a plan alongside the absent student and their parents. If a child continues not to show up to school, district officials can then refer them to family court, according to the state Department of Education.

Making a change could be a matter of making sure schools enforce that rule, said Rep. Neal Collins.

“State law already contemplates this question, and it’s not enforced,” the Easley Republican said. “Locally, statewide — it’s just not enforced.”

Or, state education officials and local school leaders might need to do more to hammer home just how important it is for students to go to school and what children are losing by missing classes, Lavery said.

“If the student doesn’t understand the benefit of being here, it’s definitely going to be more challenging to get them to be here,” Lavery said. “And it might suggest that we could do a better job of narrating that, to make it clear to students what they stand to gain and, if they are not seeing the benefit, then changing our delivery or changing our approach so they can find that benefit.”

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Despite heavy pushback from students, the change had its intended effect. The new rule reduced overall absences by 20-28%, according to a published in July by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“There is a quite substantial impact on absenteeism,” explained co-author Nina Drange, an economist at the and . “These students do indeed reduce their absences.”

What’s more, it became much rarer for students to miss school days en masse. Some 29-39% fewer Norway high schoolers were what researchers call “chronically absent,” missing more than 10% of all school days. Chronic absenteeism remains one of the pandemic’s most serious consequences for U.S. schools.

In Norway, the policy change produced a “sharp” drop, Drange observed. 

Drange and her colleagues were able to document the policy’s impact by comparing Norway high schools students in 11th-13th grade, who faced the strict consequence of missing multiple classes, with 10th graders who did not. That ruled out the possibility that observed changes between the two groups were caused by other factors. Absences among the older students saw a steep decline while the 10th graders’ rate held mostly steady.

Experts highlight the risk of chronic absenteeism and the 10% absence threshold because it can predict by third grade, failure to and later in life.

Now, with the American education system still reeling from the pandemic, many school leaders are concerned with the amount of instructional days their students are missing. Rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed nationwide, hitting , New York City and Los Angeles.

“We believe that chronic absences doubled across the country, maybe more” since COVID struck, said Hedy Chang, who closely follows the issue as executive director of Attendance Works. 

She estimates the issue affected 16% of students nationwide before the pandemic and now affects over 30%. Missing school has escalated into a “full-scale crisis,” a June from her organization said.

Those increases came partly because students were forced to miss class for quarantine. But also because of social factors, such as youth needing to pick up jobs to support their families, having spotty internet connections during remote learning or being fearful of catching the virus at school.

Those are underlying conditions the Norway rule can’t solve, Chang points out.

“The policy itself doesn’t address root causes,” she told ����Ӱ��. 

The Norwegian government supports unemployed families to a greater degree than the U.S., added Drange. If students were missing class because they had to pick up jobs to financially support loved ones, “I guess we wouldn’t see these huge effects” from the no-grade policy, she said.

Further, Chang worries that penalizing students who miss a higher share of school would disproportionately affect youth who already face severe disadvantages, putting them even further behind. 

“I’m concerned that … the grading approach will exacerbate existing inequalities,” she said.

The Gini index, which measures inequality on a scale of zero to 100, with 100 being most unequal, rates the United States a 41.5 and Norway a 27.7, indicating that students in the Scandinavian state may begin from a more level playing field than American youth. Furthermore, obtaining a doctor’s note to explain an absence due to illness, an exception to the no-grade rule in Norway, could pose a greater challenge in the U.S., where universal health insurance does not exist, the Attendance Works executive director pointed out. 

Through much of COVID, Norway suspended its no-grade policy, said Drange. Though the very youngest students in the country went back to in-person learning after less than a two-month shutdown, localities took for older students.

Even when the no-grade policy was in effect, Drange’s research indicates that the rule had a modest positive effect on teacher-awarded grades, but little impact on externally graded end-of-year assessments — a disappointment for those who hoped stronger attendance would automatically spell increases in achievement.

In the U.S., with poverty-related issues and mental health posing a key barrier to school attendance, Chang says education leaders should use the 10% absence threshold to identify which students might need extra support — not to punish them as truant.

“If you’re experiencing bullying, if you’re experiencing lack of access to health care, if you’re experiencing unreliable housing situations, those conditions are … affecting your learning, in addition to causing you to not show up to school,” she said.

“Could [schools] create options so kids have another way of making up the time?”

Students learning remotely missed the most days of school this year, according to from Connecticut. And students who were chronically absent in the fall were far more likely to keep missing school during the winter months.

The analysis, from the Connecticut Department of Education and advocacy group Attendance Works, shows that rates of chronic absence — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year — were highest among students in low-income communities, English learners and students with disabilities. And the rates of poor attendance among Black and Hispanic students were two to three times higher than those of their white peers.

“It’s very likely that the trends they are seeing are similar in other states,” said Hedy Chang, the director of Attendance Works. Whether other states see those trends in their data, however, depends on how they decided to count attendance for students learning at home.

Connecticut, which implemented a new process for tracking absenteeism across in-person, hybrid and remote settings, required students to attend school for at least half a day to be marked present. If they were at home, they were responsible for participating in at least half of the virtual class time and the other offline work scheduled for that day. New Jersey adopted the same definition, but many states left the decision up to local districts or allowed a mix of criteria, sometimes nothing more than daily check-in call or a simple log-into a remote class. As of January, 19 states weren’t even requiring districts to take attendance, according to the report.

As officials debate whether they’ll allow some remote learning this fall, the Connecticut data shows chronic absenteeism among remote learners was at its worst in kindergarten and ninth grade — key transition points when in-person learning for students might be especially critical. The findings, Chang said, point to the need for leaders to track daily attendance, set consistent definitions for when a student is counted absent and build stronger connections with families so educators can intervene if a student misses too many days of school. With leaders beginning to craft plans for using federal relief funds, the report also highlights the ways Connecticut is spending last year’s federal money to target districts serving high-need students.

The state was among the first to ensure all students had devices and an , when U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was still commissioner. But stories of families’ remote school experiences have shown that digital access doesn’t always translate into real learning.

“You’re at home. You have three kids all online and there’s one room,” Chang said. “That’s not a solution.”

‘Re-establishing relationships’

The Connecticut report adds to the findings of of attendance trends from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. Summarizing data from five unnamed districts serving roughly 450,000 students, the report concluded that severe absenteeism has worsened during the pandemic. In one district, 7 percent of students missed as much as half of the school year, compared to none who were absent that often before school closures.

The report draws on data from , a company that works with districts to improve attendance. The company noticed an increase in perfect attendance rates across the five districts, which points to the lower bar that some states and districts set for students.

Phyllis Jordan, editorial director at FutureEd and author of the report, said it’s clear that students missing half the school year need a lot of support. But if a student who just logs in briefly is counted present, that “makes it hard to figure out who’s in trouble,” she said.

To improve attendance among those most at risk of disconnecting from school, Connecticut spent almost $11 million from last year’s relief packages to create the — or LEAP — which includes home visits, summer learning programs, housing assistance and mental health support in 15 districts. State leaders also meet weekly with district representatives to discuss attendance issues among homeless students, English learners and other groups of students with higher than average absenteeism.

“We know the reasons for chronic absence are as many as there are kids,” said John Frassinelli, director of the department’s division of school health, nutrition, family services and adult education. “It’s really about establishing and re-establishing relationships with families.”

The East Haven Public Schools, south of Hartford, isn’t part of LEAP, but educators still routinely tracked attendance data to identify which students needed additional support. And when the district held standardized testing, Chris Brown, principal of Tuttle School, invited remote students to sit at desks outside the building to take the assessment. The practice spread to other schools.

“It was how we could draw parents in and get them on campus just to talk to them a little bit,” said Superintendent Erica Forti.

In a FutureEd webinar Tuesday, Charlene Russell-Tucker, Connecticut’s acting education commissioner , discussed the importance of working with health, child welfare and other state agencies when addressing attendance challenges.

“We all have responsibility for the same group of children, so why not collaborate and share resources?” she asked, adding that this approach has been especially helpful when families are hard to reach. “Somebody knows where they are, so it’s really important for us to connect.”

‘All over the map’

Connecticut began capturing attendance for students learning in-person, in a hybrid model and fully remote and then reported it monthly — instead of at the end of the school year, which is more common. The change allowed district officials to respond more quickly when they saw patterns of poor attendance or participation in remote learning.

Chang added that if states or districts have outdated software programs that don’t allow them to track and report attendance for both in-person and remote students, they should consider using relief funds for an upgrade.

Connecticut’s process allowed educators to notice which students struggled the most with attendance and identify trends they might not have seen otherwise.

While districts nationally saw sharp declines in kindergarten enrollment, for example, the Connecticut data shows that those who did enroll still missed a lot of school. The data suggests “kids are going to be all over the map of where they are with learning” this fall, Chang said.

In ninth grade, there was a spike in chronic absence rates to almost 30 percent for students learning remotely, which Chang said likely points to the challenges students faced starting high school without in-person interaction with teachers and peers.

“All the things we typically would have done to ensure a smooth transition to high school did not happen for these kids,” Chang said. “If you start missing a lot of ninth grade and getting D’s and F’s, you are not on track for graduation.”

Another trend at the high school level was more positive. In both fall and winter, there was little difference in chronic absence rates for students learning in person and in hybrid models.

To Chang, that suggests the flexibility of a hybrid schedule could benefit older students, especially those who need to work. “There are some things that we were forced to do by COVID that we might not want to give up,” she said.