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 ����Ӱ��, “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 ����Ӱ��.

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.” 

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 ����Ӱ��. 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.”

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 ����Ӱ��. 

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 ����Ӱ��.

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 ����Ӱ�� 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.”

The analysis, from and the at Johns Hopkins University, looked at that found more than 14 million chronically absent students during the 2021-22 academic year — an increase of nearly seven million students compared to 2017-18.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said an “all hands on deck” approach is needed to address widespread absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“If you can imagine a rising tide, students who were a little underwater are now underwater more and those that weren’t underwater before now are,” Balfanz told ����Ӱ��.

This analysis served as a second look into the attendance trend which previously showed how across the country were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism — more than twice the rate compared to the 2017-18 academic year.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least , or roughly 18 days.

Although the attendance trend affected students of all ethnic backgrounds, Latino students took the brunt of the declines — increasing from nearly 2.4 million in 2017-18 to five million in 2021-22, a 53 percent jump.

Pacific Islander students saw the second biggest jump of 46 percent, white students by 39 percent, Black students by 36 percent and Native American students by 29 percent.

Balfanz said pandemic-era challenges for low-income and immigrant families pulled students away from school and contributed to the widening attendance gaps.

“Many kids got jobs because their parents lost theirs and became a lot more restricted,” Balfanz said, adding how Latino students often faced this burden compared to other ethnic groups.

He added how “caregiving” also played a major factor in declining Latino student attendance — often coming from multigenerational families with stronger cultural expectations to look after younger siblings.

The attendance trend was also observed geographically, particularly impacting students in both suburban and rural areas.

Chronic absenteeism in suburban and rural school districts jumped to 5.1 million and 2.5 million students respectively in 2021-22 — a 46 percent and 47 percent increase compared to 2.8 million and 1.4 million in 2017-18.

Schools in cities experienced an increase of 44 percent and districts in towns jumped by 42 percent.

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said “inequitable access to needed [healthcare] services and poor transportation” during the pandemic contributed to the attendance gaps in rural areas.

The greatest increases in chronic absenteeism occurred among schools serving larger numbers of students living in poverty, the analysis found.

Among schools with 75 percent or more students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, chronic absence nearly tripled — from 25 percent to 69 percent. 

Chang said poverty was the driving force behind student chronic absenteeism nationwide.

“Kids who are living in poverty are much more likely to have all of these barriers when it comes to aversion and disengagement,” Chang told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s hard for students to keep going when they feel like nobody knows them or nobody cares,” Balfanz added. “Solving that disconnect they have is a great first step.”

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent. 

In addition, the researchers released an at 2022-23 figures from . The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.  

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked. 

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said. 

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down. 

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school has further complicated daily commutes. And in , she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture. 

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message. 

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member. 

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism. 

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday. 

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem. 

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones. 

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said. 

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties. 

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

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.

Students won’t have to quarantine or take a COVID test to attend school if they were exposed to someone who tested positive, according to  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday. The guidance is in line with a version leaked last week.

Students also won’t have to stay in groups, called cohorting, which was intended to limit transmission and make contact tracing easier. And schools are no longer urged to conduct screening tests of students participating in “high-risk” activities, such as contact sports, band or theater. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the new recommendations allow families and educators to “head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism.” 

But Leah Perkinson, director of research translation and evaluation at Brown University School of Public Health, said it’s important not to forget lessons learned over the past two years. 

“A lot of schools [and] districts might be relieved to turn the screening testing corner if it means that teachers, leaders and staff focus more on the social, emotional and learning needs of students,” she said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t take time to look in the rearview mirror and document what worked [and] what didn’t … when we need to stand up school-based testing again.”

Quarantine rules last school year may have prevented COVID from spreading, but they also contributed to high absenteeism, with some students sent home multiple times because they were a “close contact” of someone who tested positive.

Students missed an average of 15 days between September and January alone due to quarantines, according to But now, after more than two years of disrupted learning, new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could keep more students in the classroom.

The agency is expected to update its recommendations to say that those who are unvaccinated can continue to attend school if they wear a mask and test negative five days later, according to multiple news outlets, including and . recommends that those not up-to-date on vaccinations stay home for five days after coming in contact with someone who tested positive. 

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, [messaging] has mostly focused on encouraging students to stay home as a strategy for keeping healthy,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization. “We think a more balanced approach would be to emphasize that showing up to school matters for health, well-being and learning.”

The guidance would reflect the direction that many states and districts were already moving toward, noted John Bailey, a strategic adviser at the Walton Family Foundation who has monitored COVID policy since the beginning of the pandemic. In July, for example, said students exposed to the disease don’t need to quarantine if they lack symptoms. Many districts aren’t requiring masks this fall, and recently backed off last year’s strict protocols involving daily health declarations and weekly testing. By next week, of the nation’s students will be back in school, according to Burbio, a data company.

“The CDC should have released updated guidance in June or July to give schools time to adjust their plans and preparations,” Bailey said. “Releasing it this late creates needless frustration and confusion, which just further erodes confidence in both the CDC and administration.” 

Critics have pointed to multiple lapses at the agency since the beginning of the pandemic, such as allowing teachers unions to heavily influence guidance for schools and fumbling updates to mask recommendations for early-childhood programs.

Some experts think it would have been difficult to start the new school year enforcing the same protocols school districts implemented before — like masking and frequent testing. That’s despite a highly contagious BA.5 variant, being in the high transmission range, and among young children and .

“The problem is that these comprehensive efforts are meeting two powerful forces — exhaustion and apathy from the American people, and the clash of politics and public health in ways I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said John Bridgeland, founder and CEO of COVID Collaborative, a team of experts that has provided recommendations throughout the pandemic. 

Quarantine policies also contributed to a lack of academic progress last year even at a time when students were back in school, researchers with NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, said when they released their latest results in July.

Parents complained about inconsistent rules. Some also violated them. In California’s , last year, parents knowingly sent a child who had tested positive to school. And three with zip ties threatened a citizen’s arrest on a principal last fall when the administrator told one of them his child had been identified as a close contact and would need to quarantine. They were charged with criminal trespassing. 

“I think that school will be much more ‘normal’ than it was even last year,” said Annette Anderson, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools. 

‘Seem appropriate’

District leaders certainly hope so.

“Attendance rates had never been lower, and certainly impacted student learning,” said Tony Sanders, superintendent of School District U-46, outside Chicago. “The significant drops in attendance always correlated with spikes in COVID cases, mostly following periods when students were on break.”

The week after winter break, when the Omicron variant was prevalent, attendance fell to 72% in the district.

As the new school year begins, some districts are dropping all COVID protocols, according to .

Some parents, however, still want reassurances that schools will take precautions to limit exposure. Alexis Rochlin, a Los Angeles parent, said her preschooler was quarantined multiple times last year, “which was a huge pain.”  But she’s comfortable with the county’s . Close contacts are required to mask for 10 days after exposure and test three-to-five days later. Those who test positive can stop quarantining on the sixth day as long as their symptoms improve and they test negative.

“These policies seem appropriate to keep kids safe and limit learning loss. Anything less would be concerning to me,” said Rochlin, who also has a son entering second grade. “But we are in a post-COVID world, I guess, where everyone wants to live with it by ignoring it.”

Disclosures: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story.

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?”

Some educators and therapists have signaled their approval, arguing that the freedom to stay home from classes could allow kids to restore their energies and come back ready to learn. But other experts warn that, in itself, absence from an academic setting may not be a useful tool to address the issues facing troubled young people. The prospect of time off might also prod some students to miss class who otherwise wouldn’t.

“It seems perfectly reasonable, and nothing new, for parents to decide their kids can stay home from school for a day because they’re tired or don’t feel well,” said Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington Bothell. “But I just don’t see a reason to make it some official category, or give kids a number of days they can tap into. All that does is encourage absenteeism.” 

Barbara Solish, director of youth and young adult initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, countered that mental health days offered students “the opportunity to pause, check in, and recharge physically and emotionally.”

“If a kid was feeling physically crummy, we wouldn’t hesitate to give that kid a day to rest and recover. The same goes for emotional wellbeing,” Solish said. “This time can be helpful for children who struggle with anxiety or depression, or even kids who’ve just had a rough week.”

Abundant evidence shows that the havoc inflicted by two years of COVID-related learning disruptions has left an ugly mark on students’ emotional wellbeing. In President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he specifically referred to the setbacks afflicting schoolchildren, noting that their “lives and education have been turned upside-down.”

Curbing truancy

The push for student mental health days began in 2019, when Oregon Gov. Kate Brown expanding the state’s category of excused absences to include those related to mental as well as physical health. The reform was drafted by a group of high schoolers known as Students for a Healthy Oregon, which recommended it as a salve for the long-running deterioration in teen mental health that has become undeniable in school districts around the country. 

The advocacy effort was the first of several led by , stressed by both world events and the everyday cares of childhood and adolescence. Hailey Hardcastle, one of the leaders of Students for a Healthy Oregon, said in a TED Talk that she suffered from clinical depression herself and that her mother informally allowed her to skip school up to three days per semester to cope. The new policy would essentially codify that option in state law and provide relief to hundreds of Oregon students she’d met who dealt with psychological crises of their own. 

“This not only will start teaching kids to take care of themselves and practice self-care and stress management, but it could also literally help save lives,” Hardcastle said.

States could benefit from approaching mental health absences in the same way that Hardcastle’s mother did, according to researcher Michael Gottfried. An economist studying absenteeism at the University of Pennsylvania, Gottfried said it was likely that some families are already keeping their children home multiple days each year as a result of emotional issues they experience at school. Adopting an Oregon-style policy — a few states have specified the number of absences students can take, whether two, three or five, while others simply direct districts to accept mental health as a valid reason to be absent — wouldn’t necessarily change the behavior of those families, but it could prevent them from being thrust into state truancy systems. 

“With this policy, what’s so great is that previously unexcused absences could now be coded as excused,” Gottfried said. “That’s important because unexcused absences lead to truancy, they get kids into trouble, they get parents into trouble, and they can lead to juvenile justice outcomes.”

Some evidence that at-risk youth often suffer from a range of psychological challenges that make them more likely to become truant. One South Carolina study found that children worsen in the aftermath of court oversight and other truancy sanctions. Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of the advocacy group , said that when it comes to students dealing with adversity, “it’s just not been shown that the hammer gets kids to show up to school.”

“What improves attendance is when you identify why kids aren’t showing up to school and then resolve those barriers. Often, a legal threat doesn’t allow you to engage and form a trusting relationship with a family so that you find out what’s going on and improve it.”

‘Not really doing anything for those kids’

Millions of students have reported experiencing more negative emotions during the pandemic, when their in-person contacts with peers and teachers have been continuously unsettled. A in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, examining 36 studies in 11 countries, pointed to a strong connection between school closures and emotional distress among children. A released by the Centers for Disease Control in February found that among adolescent girls, the proportion of emergency room visits related to eating disorders doubled during the pandemic, while the proportion related to motor or vocal tics tripled. 

The evidence of COVID’s harmful effects on child well-being is clear. But if those harms are related to the disruption of school, some experts wonder, why would the answer be to offer students more time away?

Various methods for tackling mental health in schools have been validated , with some of the most successful organized that aim to make schools more welcoming and connected settings for kids. School climate can be improved by training teachers and staff to identify students under strain, or by emphasizing social and emotional learning that prepares students to communicate their own emotions more fluently. Even changes enacted by state legislatures, such as anti-bullying laws, have been linked to significant declines in self-harm.

But by definition, when students are absent from school, they can’t access the resources available there. Gottfried said that schools would need to keep careful track of students who took repeated mental health days, reintegrating them into their classes and offering support where necessary.

“Putting them right back in the classroom after they’ve had a mental health departure from school is not really doing anything for those kids,” he said. “You just let them deal with their mental health off-site. If you really want to address mental health, maybe what we should do is think of school more as a community and provide services there, rather than simply giving students another way to not be at school.”

State policymakers have raised some of the same concerns. When Connecticut last year to allow students to be absent from school up to four days each year for mental health reasons — on top of the 10 days already allowed for physical illness — state education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said that simply excusing absences would​​ “not necessarily achieve the outcome of improving the student’s well-being.”

“We are concerned that the extent of a student’s mental state may not be known if they are not in school, and there may be adverse outcomes if the child is allowed to remain out of school,” Russell-Tucker wrote in public testimony.

The policy was later adopted, though the number of excused mental health absences was reduced to two nonconsecutive “Mental Health Wellness Days.” A spokesman for the Connecticut State Department of Education said that the office has not yet begun collecting data on student use of the sanctioned days away from school, though it had issued to school districts encouraging them to consider ways to communicate with families and screen students for additional aid.

“We know our students are best served when they are present in school and have access to the supports provided there — including as well as academic supports,” the spokesman said in an email.

Chang, of Attendance Works, called the argument in favor of mental health days debatable, adding that being absent could potentially worsen the apprehension of a student already avoiding school for other reasons. While the proposal could work as a strategy for taking the problem of absenteeism out of truancy hearings, she argued, it might not actually improve students’ wellbeing.  

“The danger is that we think we’ve solved the problem when we haven’t,” Chang said. “What you’ve solved is making sure it doesn’t lead to courts. What you haven’t solved is making sure kids have the resources to address their anxiety.”

Effects on learning

With several large states already implementing K-12 mental health days, experts will be able to gather data on their effectiveness at reducing academic and interpersonal stress. But we will also learn more about their impact on school attendance — and whether they induce more students to miss time in school.

In the years before COVID fundamentally reshuffled their priorities, education leaders at the state and district levels were increasingly relying on attendance rates as a proxy for school quality. This focus resulted partly from the 2015 passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which charged states with developing a “non-academic indicator” in their accountability frameworks. chronic absenteeism, generally defined as students missing 15 or more days in one school year.

The pandemic-era switch to online learning has proven a disaster for efforts to improve attendance, particularly among disadvantaged or low-performing students. Data from states like Connecticut and California, as well as big urban districts like Cleveland, show chronic absenteeism surging as much as 200 percent. Black and Hispanic students, disabled students, and English learners have all been disproportionately more likely to miss school over the last year.

Gottfried, whose research has closely examined the academic consequences of student attendance, theorized that excusing mental health absences might not alter the behavior of kids who already missed a great deal of school each year, or who missed none at all. But for those somewhere in the middle, being offered a free mental health day — or five, — could encourage them to take it, whether or not it’s actually needed.

Regardless of whether an individual absence is truly warranted, its effect on learning can be harmful. Gottfried considered the case of two students: one suffering from severe emotional problems, the other simply undermotivated to attend class. Each could be tempted to use their mental health day, particularly during periods on the calendar marked by unusual stress.

“They’re both missing school, and the pace of instruction is just going to continue moving forward without them,” Gottfried said. “And I’m guessing that a lot of this might happen at a time of year when it’s high-pressure — a lot of exams or finals coming up. That’s when we would be likely to find these opportunity gaps widening.”

If that’s the case, days spent outside of class could be felt in measurements of student achievement. In examining the specific timing of student absences, Gottfried discovered that missed school days in the spring (especially those that fell within 30 days of the administration of state exams) were more closely tied to test performance than those coming earlier in the year.

The National Alliance on Mental Health’s Solish rejected the idea of a tradeoff between academic participation and self-care, calling it a “false choice”; if we accept that children need to take time away due to physical illness, the same principle should apply to ailments of the mind.

“If a child had the flu and was coughing and sneezing and feeling terrible, they’re not absorbing what’s going on in the classroom. The same is true for a mental health issue: If a child is overcome by anxiety, or is so depressed that they can’t function, they’re not absorbing their lesson.”

“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.”

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.