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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“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.

They included ninth graders who didn’t earn any credits in their first semester and those who should have been in 10th grade, but were out of school for a year.

“You don’t normally refer younger kids to dropout recovery,” Franco said. “Some of them are like, ‘What’s a credit?’” 

Those students who were held back are among the reasons Texas saw a 9% increase in its freshman class this year, more than four times the state’s annual growth rate prior to the pandemic. 

That pattern has been demonstrated in more than a dozen states, according to enrollment data compiled by Burbio, an information services company, and shared exclusively with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

The new data, from 35 states and the District of Columbia, adds to the complicated picture of students’ comings and goings during the COVID era. With many young children who delayed pre-K and kindergarten during school closures now flooding back into the education system, an enrollment surge in the early grades was expected. But 15 states and D.C. saw growth in ninth grade of at least 5% compared to 2020-21, and in a few states, including New Mexico and North Carolina, the increase in freshmen far outpaced that of kindergartners. 

While the return of families to public schools contributed to growth in ninth grade this year, retention rates have nearly doubled in some states and districts, and educators don’t expect next year to be much better. 

“We’re a generation that’s going to have people with two-year holes in their education,” said Jeffrey Cole, principal at Winston County High, a rural Alabama school about midway between Huntsville and Birmingham.

If freshmen only fail two quarters, Cole usually moves them on to 10th grade. But for the first time in his 19 years as principal, he has students failing all four quarters. He thinks they should have stayed in eighth grade. Across the state, enrollment in ninth grade has jumped at a much higher rate than before the pandemic.

Districts often see a “bulge” in freshman year when students don’t pass enough classes to move on, said Eric Wearne, director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, outside Atlanta. But he added it’s not a surprise COVID disruptions and remote learning made matters much worse.

“Students were in ninth grade,” he said, “and the COVID situation was so tough that more of them than usual didn’t earn enough credits to be considered 10^th graders yet.”

Retention data in some states and districts back that up. Figures from last fall show that 18% of ninth graders in the Houston Independent School District repeated the year, significantly higher than the district’s pre-pandemic rate of 10%. And in North Carolina, more than 16% of last year’s freshman class was retained — roughly double the rate of past years. District officials from rural Maryland to Albuquerque, New Mexico, also saw higher retention rates this year.

The majority of states where ninth grade enrollment surpassed 5% are concentrated in the South, where they have “well-defined promotion criteria” for freshmen, such as end-of-course exams, explained Robert Balfanz, who directs the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Such policies were widely implemented in the early 2000s at the start of the accountability-driven No Child Left Behind era, but have since been suspended in many states.

What hasn’t changed, he said, is that students still need to earn enough credits to graduate.

“It’s the long tail of the pandemic,” he said. “This will impact graduation rates three years from now.”

He added that during remote learning, high school students were more likely to have assignments without live instruction and had to “self-manage getting the work done.” With many high schools canceling orientation in the fall of 2020, he said rising ninth graders might not have fully understood the consequences of failing a class.

‘Fell off the radar’

The retention increase is one example of how the pandemic has altered existing patterns that enrollment forecasters use to help districts plan for the future. In his work with school districts, Jerry Oelerich, a senior analyst at the consulting company Flo-Analytics, accounts for the fact that 2007 — when most of this year’s ninth graders were born — was a for births. That alone, however, doesn’t fully explain the big increases some states are seeing in ninth grade, Oelerich said. 

Private school enrollment and also grew last year. But students often return to traditional high schools to play sports. And many parents decide they’re not cut out to teach high schoolers. 

“Their expertise kind of runs out,” said Kent Martin, a senior analyst at Flo-Analytics and a former teacher and administrator in Washington state. “You really need to be a content expert, like a teacher.”

Ronn Nozoe, CEO at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said it makes sense that with schools predominantly open this year, families who opted for private schools would return and “save their money.”

“There are a lot of kids who fell off the radar,” Nozoe said. “If you’re going to move back in, you want to start that in ninth — not 10th, 11th or 12th.”

That’s what Virginia mother Kate O’Harra decided after she pulled her son Jack Mulhall out of the Loudoun County district last year and enrolled him in Stride (formerly K12), a national network of virtual schools, for eighth grade. 

“He didn’t do terrible,” even though O’Harra, a pilates instructor, and her husband, an IT professional, weren’t always available to help him with schoolwork. When schools closed, Jack was on his way to overcoming some of the scatteredness that comes with his ADHD. But the district’s remote learning program, which O’Harra described as “a complete and utter failure,” interrupted that progress.

“We were in a good place pre-COVID. Now it’s all over the map.”

The affluent suburb has been at the center of several over the rights of transgender students and the use of so-called “critical race theory.” But Jack’s desire to return to school with his friends and her wish for a normal school structure convinced O’Harra to return to the district for ninth grade.

Still, the move hasn’t solved everything for Jack, now at Woodgrove High School. 

“We went into 9^th grade very unprepared,” said his mother, adding that after a year of remote learning, he struggles with some social cues, like not knowing how to take a joke. 

Jack said his only contact with friends during eighth grade was playing “Call of Duty,” and the one person he met virtually through Stride was his math teacher. He’s still missing some organizational skills and fell behind in Spanish and earth science. He’ll start next year with a tutor.

“I didn’t really have assignments for science [in eighth grade]. I was left drifting without any knowledge,” he said. But back in a traditional school, Jack plays football and lacrosse and said, “I can actually see and talk to my teachers in real life.” 

Nationwide in Stride dropped slightly this year — down to 187,000 from 189,400 last year, but still well above the pre-pandemic figure of about 123,000. 

Virtual programs are another reason some district’s ninth grade classes are swelling. The Mecklenburg County Public Schools in Virginia, a rural district not far from the North Carolina state line, offered a virtual option through Stride so parents still concerned about COVID wouldn’t withdraw their children to homeschool and the district wouldn’t lose funding. 

The virtual program boosted ninth grade enrollment from 337 in 2020-21 to 609 this year. But Superintendent Paul Nichols has regrets and suggested that remote instruction shares some of the blame for students veering off track.

“We will offer no virtual education options for students next year,” he said. “We are concerned that most of them have not completed much, if any, actual academic work.”