Editor’s note: This essay won second place in Fordham’s 2024 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can policymakers and practitioners radically reduce chronic absenteeism—at least below pre-pandemic levels and preferably much further?” Learn more.
America’s children are missing. The chronic absenteeism rate doubled from 15 percent in 2019 to a staggering 29.7 percent in 2022, meaning more than 14 million students are missing too much school. Absences have worsened across every demographic group and in every state with available data—small, large, urban, rural, everywhere.
The post-pandemic attendance crisis has been linked to a host of contributing factors—mental health issues and social safety net weaknesses that make it difficult for students to focus on schoolwork or even make it to school, smartphones and social media that make leaving the house unnecessary for young people, lax grading policies that reinforce school as optional.
Yet coverage of the crisis often fails to ask the most important question underpinning attendance numbers: why don’t kids want to go to school? Too often, it’s because their school experiences feel irrelevant, alienating, and disconnected from their personal interests. Educators, caregivers, and students continue to work within a century-old model of school design, pinned on uniformity and compliance, that doesn't reward innovation and leaves many learners behind.
How might attendance improve if the school day was something that students would genuinely hate to miss?
If we hope to rekindle disengaged students' joy of learning and dramatically reduce absenteeism, we must improve their day-to-day experience of school. This requires us to rethink traditional ideas about where, how, and with whom students learn. It will also require us to actually listen to students and design learning with their interests in mind.
Look no further than Salem Public Schools in Massachusetts for an instructive example of what this could look like. There, a pilot to improve student experiences at Collins Middle School cut chronic absenteeism in half, from 28 percent to 12 percent. The absenteeism rate among the pilot cohort continued to fall this year to less than 10 percent. Why? Because students don’t want to miss what’s offered at school.
In “studio” sessions, for example, students brainstorm and prototype solutions to real-world problems. Instead of spending every day inside the school building, students restore habitats on the Ipswich River, participate in exhibit design with the Peabody Essex Museum, and see cutting-edge robotics at UMass Lowell’s NERVE Center. Instead of interacting only with the same group of grade-level peers and teachers, students interview local business owners, visit lawmakers at the State House, and collaborate on civic action projects with Salem State University undergrads. Back in the classroom, learning centers on their experiences off campus.
In 2022, when Salem PS leaders saw the pandemic trends of low engagement, staggering learning loss and mental health challenges in their district, they asked the community how to better meet the needs of students. What did they learn? That only one-third of students enjoyed and wanted to be at school, and parents yearned for their children to have access to different modes of learning.
To reverse the trends, Salem PS launched the Middle School Learning Pilot for Collins eighth graders. In partnership with the WPS Institute, a nonprofit that works in education innovation, leadership at Salem PS—including superintendent Dr. Stephen Zrike and dean of innovation, Chelsea Banks—used the community’s feedback to co-design and pilot new learning experiences with buy-in from community members, staff, parents, and most importantly, students.
Salem developed a learning vision that aimed to make students feel connected, empowered, and growing through learning experiences that were personal, hands-on, and community-involved. By giving students more control over their schedules and the pace of their work, they helped students drive their own education and connect what they were learning to the real world.
Early on, the team identified that continuous learning would be crucial to the pilot’s success. WPS and Salem PS partnered with Transcend to understand how students experienced the pilot using the Leaps Student Voice Survey—a validated tool that measured the success of the pilot throughout and at the end of the year through the eyes of the students themselves. Banks and educators within the pilot convened regularly to look at the Leaps Survey data and discover areas to innovate or reinforce what was working.
Between September 2023 and April 2024, 27 percent more students agreed with the statement “Overall, most of the time I love school.” This fall, the district plans to scale the pilot to encompass all 8th graders in the district.
More than 100,000 responses to the Leaps Survey from students across the country show us that Salem is not an anomaly, and student perceptions of their learning experiences can serve as powerful leading indicators or “on-track” predictors of more traditional outcomes such as attendance, GPA, math test results and disciplinary incidents. In one analysis of 5,000 high school students, we found that when students report positive experiences in school, they are 25 percent less likely to be chronically absent than students who dislike their school experiences.
There are additional benefits to redesigning schools for greater student learning and happiness—perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that greater family and teacher satisfaction follows. One hundred percent of families participating in Salem’s pilot said they would recommend the pilot to another family, and 100 percent of teachers agreed with the statement “Since joining the pilot, I feel I am more likely to continue teaching at CMS.”
Practitioners will lead the way in designing the learning environments where young people want to be, but advocates and policymakers can accelerate this work by investing in school design efforts, supporting the adoption of innovative school models, and facilitating knowledge-sharing among schools, districts, and CMOs that want to reimagine school for young people.
The answer to the question “How do we dramatically reduce absenteeism” is complex because it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution—it requires nothing short of reimagining schools as we have known and run them for generations. It is also deceptively simple, if we think about deeply listening to students as the first step to creating more relevant and rigorous learning experiences for them. The good news is that Salem’s community-based design pilot is just one case study for absenteeism reduction to learn from, with similar school transformation efforts underway across the country.
