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��.

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��.

“Even before the pandemic we were seeing serious challenges for communities of color and students from low income communities when it came to educational equity,” said interim chief executive officer Denise Forte.

“So while no one was really too surprised by the numbers, it just tells us we have so much more to do,” Forte said about the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.

Often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” eighth and fourth grade math scores dropped by eight and five points respectively – the largest decline ever recorded on the test. In addition, eighth and fourth grade reading scores dropped by three points.

From high-dosage tutoring to family-school engagement, advocates and experts weigh in on solutions:

1. Family-school partnerships

Yvonne Johnson, president-elect, said teachers need to build relationships with families to improve student outcomes.

“Families might not be 100% aware that it’s their responsibility too,” Johnson told ����Ӱ��. “So it’s incumbent upon us to bring them into the schools and have family reading nights and math nights and other things that make learning fun for kids.”

A solution Johnson proposed is funding .

“The goal would be to have these family engagement centers where schools have a centralized area to provide resources, wraparound services and other things families need to help their children succeed in school,” Johnson said. “If we had one in every single state, perhaps we would have been more prepared to help families navigate remote learning.”

2. High-dosage tutoring

Forte said programs such as high-dosage tutoring will expand learning time and target students with the greatest need.

“We need to give kids more time on task and it doesn’t have to be fully about academics,” Forte told ����Ӱ��. “You can build out really fun learning programs that include other activities that make sure kids feel included and have a sense of belonging.”

But, Robin Lake, director of the , said parents aren’t pushing for tutoring because they don’t understand how much pandemic learning loss damage affected their child.

“We’ve seen in a couple big national surveys that they’re not interested in tutoring and other interventions for their child,” Lake told ����Ӱ��. “My biggest concern is how do we help parents understand that they need to ask hard questions about their child’s mastery of core subjects.”

Lake recommends training parents to become tutors for not just their own children, but other kids in their communities.

“One of the barriers that districts are running into is that they’re trying to hire more teachers or more office aides to provide tutoring or counseling services in schools – but let’s open that up,” Lake said. “Parents want to know how to help their kids and they’d like to be able to help other kids as well…so let’s get creative about who our after school providers can be.”

3. Technology access for remote learning

Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, , said that pandemic virtual learning further deepened the digital divide for students nationwide.

“Millions of kids did not have the technology to receive an online education and that was reflected in these test scores,” Domenech told ����Ӱ��. “The lowest performing schools had the greatest loss because those were primarily the kids that didn’t have a laptop at home – or even if they did, their home didn’t have internet access.”

Domenech believes the priority for the needs to be put into quality instructional material.

“Students are in facilities that don’t have, for example, the technology and all of these other factors that wealthier communities have,” Domenech said. “So if we want equity and if we want to do away with that achievement gap, then we have to do away with the inequity of technology access.”

4. School climate and student mental health

Ronn Nozoe, the chief executive officer, said schools need to pay attention to the role social media plays on student mental health.

“Kids were troubled by social media even before the pandemic, especially girls feeling the pressure that their peers…in school put them in,” Nozoe told ����Ӱ��. “We need to create safe spaces for kids to talk about these issues who don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents.”

He also noted the challenges teachers face, oftentimes serving as secondary sources of support for their students’ mental health needs.

“If we know teachers are the most powerful and most impactful variable in the development of a child, then why would we make teaching the most difficult profession on the face of the earth?” Nozoe said.

5. Teacher shortages

Richard Carranza, chief of strategy and global development, said the shortage of qualified teachers contributed to test score disparities.

“Is it concerning that teachers are leaving the profession? Absolutely it’s concerning,” Carranza told ����Ӱ��. “It’s a herculean job that teachers have in front of them to make up for lost ground and continue to accelerate students, and it’s an even heavier lift if you don’t have credentialed teachers readily available in schools.”

The mental health needs of teachers need to be addressed, Carranza added. 

“If we pay attention to the social emotional needs of students and teachers in schools,” Carranza said, “they’re going to create an environment in which they’re able to do their best work – which will be reflected in better test scores.”