“Pandemic learning loss is a gigantic, and still unfinished, problem,” said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, which hosted a forum in July to launch the initiative. “The reason I think chronic absenteeism is the most urgent and top priority is that I don’t see any route to pandemic learning loss being fixed that doesn’t go through fixing this chronic absenteeism rate.”
The research is clear — students who miss 10 percent or more of school days experience serious, negative consequences, including lower levels of reading proficiency, lower achievement in middle school and being less likely to graduate from high school. Equally important, chronic absenteeism is associated with lower levels of educational engagement, social-emotional development and executive functioning.
“The only way we can work on this issue is when we have a nonpartisan approach where everyone sees this as a priority,” said Hedy Chang, Attendance Works founder and executive director. “We can’t risk our children’s future by being divided on this one. If we don’t want this to become the new normal, we have to get these rates down — and that’s going to take a real, concerted effort.”
Education Trust President Denise Forte called the goal “ambitious, but achievable.”
In Virgina and Rhode Island, getting initial buy-in from their governors and other state officials was key to starting the process of combatting chronic absenteeism.
This data was presented to Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who took it to heart and launched an attendance initiative statewide with a press conference before the start of the 2022–23 school year. He also spearheaded forming a taskforce to study the issue and built a statewide awareness campaign.
Angélica Infante-Green, commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Rhode Island Department of Education, also used data to drive the point home that missing school has consequences — quite literally as they shared with parents the data showing the effects of chronic absenteeism. The state saw an overall decline in assessment scores of 20 percent overall and 25 percent in upper grades.
Topeka Public Schools Superintendent Tiffany Anderson shared that her district’s journey to begin improving chronic absence rates is all about investing in families. Anderson noted that in a district where 70 percent of the district’s students are low income, chronic absenteeism was reduced by half, to below 10 percent, in the most recent school year.
Missing just two days of school with unexcused absences will trigger a home visit from a district employee or liaison. “You cannot serve needs you don’t know,” she said. “The key is understanding what those needs are and then providing wraparound services. When we began wrapping services around families in 2017, we not only decreased chronic absenteeism, but we also have had six consecutive years with no student suicides, the third leading cause of death for teens. It is all connected.”
Topeka has worked on addressing other barriers to attendance as well, including through a welcome center to help immigrant and refugee families and proving social services, like mobile food pantries and a school-based clinic at Topeka High.
Attendance Works’ Chang concluded the event by sharing a new resource, a six-step state road map (bit.ly/3LUvyoz) to improve engagement and attendance:
- Organize your team
- Review your data, identify trends and set goals (agree upon your destination)
- Prioritize “routes,” which are strategies around improving family engagement; student connectedness; relevant and engaging learning; health, well-being and safety; and access to learning
- Build capacity and local partnerships
- Share your road map with the community
- Implement, monitor and adapt your plan as needed
“This is really a call for collective action — we need governors, state and district leaders, school and health officials — to help with the myriad reasons why kids miss school,” Chang said. “You have to think about all the people in your communities and in your state who can make a difference on changing those situations. We have to have policies, supports and reasonable responses so we can have an all-hand-on-deck approach of re-establishing the routine of showing up to school every day and making sure we have the resources — and the targeted application of resources — to remove barriers to getting to school.”