Editor’s note: This essay is an entry 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.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of students in the United States were chronically absent from school (i.e., missing 10 percent or more school days). The pandemic only exacerbated the issue, and while there has been some progress over the last few years, chronic absenteeism rates remain far above pre-pandemic levels. We have been studying the causes and consequences of chronic absenteeism in Detroit—and the district and community-based efforts to reduce it—for nearly a decade.
Our research in Detroit, alongside other evidence on attendance interventions, has led us to a simple conclusion: Schools cannot radically reduce chronic absenteeism alone. Chronic absenteeism is an “ecological” issue, meaning that a complex combination of factors can lead to attendance problems. Those factors will vary between students and families and may even differ for the same students over time. But broadly speaking, the barriers to regular attendance that many students face are due to a combination of family, school, and contextual factors, often resulting from or exacerbated by social and economic inequalities. Deep social inequality creates extremely challenging conditions for student attendance in places like Detroit. Districts and schools only have certain tools and resources available to them, which are not necessarily aligned with or adequate for alleviating the barriers to attendance that many families face. This is especially the case in high-absenteeism districts, given the magnitude of chronic absenteeism; but it is also true in other school districts more broadly, where supplemental resources and services are often necessary to meet families’ needs.
There are absolutely things that schools can and should do to improve student attendance. But because high rates of chronic absenteeism are driven by social and economic inequalities that are outside the scope of schools or districts to address alone, focusing only on school-based efforts will not lead to dramatic increases in attendance. Indeed, we know from existing research that the practices most within schools’ grasp are unlikely to have a large impact:
- Effective communication has a small, positive impact at most.
- Non-lenient academic expectations may have a small a positive impact.
- Incentives have little supportive evidence and may even have negative impacts.
- Positive school climate is associated with better attendance, but the causal relationship is unclear, and positive effects are likely small.
- Court-based action (both truancy prosecution and truancy diversion) has been ineffective.
- Intensive casework and community schools can make a bigger difference, but these are personnel- and resource-intensive practices.
To solve the problem of chronic absenteeism, we need to address it as a societal problem rather than an educational one. Policymakers and community leaders must commit to improving the conditions for student attendance outside of school, just as schools are committed to improving conditions inside schools.
This means policymakers must allocate additional resources and facilitate collaboration across multiple sectors (e.g., healthcare, housing, transportation, social services) to meet student and family needs. There is no getting around the fact that deep social and economic inequalities are the fundamental cause of high chronic absenteeism rates in Detroit and similar districts. Cross-sector coordination is a necessary condition for connecting families with resources and services that can remove barriers to student attendance, but better coordination alone will be insufficient in many contexts. Thus, to truly address chronic absenteeism, policymakers must make substantial investments to reduce material inequalities—for example by increasing families’ economic security, housing affordability and stability, access to healthcare and healthy environments, and access to transportation. This can be done through a combination of new resources and services provided directly to families, investments to improve existing systems and programs, and more coordination between school systems and other policy sectors.
In the meantime, schools and districts should address factors within their locus of control. First, they should focus on improving the things that are already core to their school improvement efforts: effectively communicating with families about attendance in informative and supportive (but not punitive) ways; strengthening relationships between educators, students, and families; and creating an overall positive culture and climate. They can also work with families to better understand local barriers to attendance and either provide resources directly or connect them with available external resources and services. They should avoid counterproductive practices, such as an over-reliance on attendance incentives and punishments. In addition, to the extent that they employ any attendance-specific personnel, they should consider positioning these personnel as “navigators” who help families access resources that can help alleviate barriers, rather than generalists who focus on a variety of different school-based attendance-related tasks.
Any proposal to radically reduce chronic absenteeism that focuses solely on schools is not radical at all. For more than a century, we have known that poverty and out-of-school inequalities are the primary drivers of chronic absenteeism. Yet, for the past decade (both before the Covid-19 pandemic and after it), we have narrowed our focus to inside-of-school solutions. No matter how creative or “out of the box,” such school-based efforts will amount to tinkering on the margin, especially in the highest-absenteeism districts. Rather, we need the political will to invest in the resources, services, and institutions that can address the root causes of absenteeism directly.
Note: The authors' forthcoming book on this subject, Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve It Alone, will be published by Harvard Education Press in 2025.
