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Still playing catch up today from a busy clips landscape after vacation. Today’s pieces cover 7/25 – 7/30/24.
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Editor’s note: This essay won first 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.
The challenge of chronic absenteeism is incredibly complex. School, district, state, and other system leaders are taking steps to design more equitable solutions by naming and exploring the root causes of chronic absenteeism, engaging with those most proximate to the problem (including students, families and educators), and tailoring solutions to community, school, and family contexts. Still, this is not enough to solve the diverse and formidable issues keeping students from regularly attending school.
Dramatically reducing chronic absenteeism requires attention to “everything, everywhere, all at once” to understand and address the ecosystem of root causes identified by Attendance Works that include barriers to attendance, disengagement from school, aversion to school, and misconception about the impact of absences. We propose a three-pronged approach that includes re-engaging students, supporting families, and generating timely data. First, schools and districts need to re-engage students by addressing student engagement and sense of belonging in school. Second, schools and districts must support families by investing in programs, tools, and resources for asset-based family engagement. Finally, schools and districts need to generate timely data by integrating leading indicators of chronic absenteeism into data systems.
We need and want students in school now, but it will take time to accomplish the deeper changes that will bring students back and keep them in school. How do we develop “everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions without creating chaos in an already stretched system? Education Resource Strategies’ “Do Now, Build Toward” framework offers a strategy for addressing chronic absenteeism. At its heart, this approach consists of choosing a set of “doable starting points” for immediate implementation that are designed with “a longer-term vision in mind–a defined vision [that flows] through to clear strategies that are based on research and lessons learned from past experiences.”
1: Re-engaging students: Address student engagement and sense of belonging in school
Districts can build systems that listen to students to understand the barriers they face, particularly those related to instructional materials, sense of belonging, and learning conditions. Facilitating opportunities for schools and districts to collaborate with their communities can make schooling more relevant and engaging for students.
Research indicates that as students progress through school, they often become increasingly disengaged and bored. This disengagement is partly due to a lack of connection between the curriculum and their lived experiences, as well as a sense of not owning their learning process.[1] To counteract this, schools and districts are introducing culturally relevant curricula that reflect the diverse experiences of students and career-focused education that is directly related to life and work beyond school. Pedagogical approaches and school structures that center student voices also play a crucial role in boosting engagement. Listen to students and act on one student-defined solution to make school more relevant and interesting as districts implement culturally relevant curricula in the long term.
2: Supporting families: Invest in programs, tools, and resources for asset-based family engagement
Sustainable partnerships with families and community groups are vital to inform and re-educate them about the impacts of chronic absenteeism. Districts can consider a wide range of community and family engagement efforts, such as advocacy campaigns to change policies that exacerbate absenteeism, engaging community organizations to reinforce the importance of regular school attendance, and initiatives like libraries sharing information and healthcare organizations offering flexible hours for appointments.
Building stronger relationships with students and families takes considerable time and attention. In the short term, many schools and districts have implemented immediate solutions like messaging campaigns and direct texting to share positive messages, encourage attendance, and keep families informed about their children's attendance. This personalized attention helps address immediate attendance issues and lays the foundation for strong school-family partnerships.
Districts can support these short-term efforts by allocating resources to conduct effective family outreach. They can also provide technological solutions for easy communication in various languages. These efforts build toward deeper, long-term capacity-building for reciprocal relationships between families, schools, and communities, regaining trust necessary for sustained change.
3: Generating timely data: Integrate leading indicators of chronic absenteeism into data systems
Over the last decade, federal and state mandates have significantly improved attendance record keeping by states and districts, highlighting the growing issue of chronic absenteeism. Despite these advancements, gaps remain in early warning data systems, particularly in their ability to use collected data to implement effective solutions.
In the short term, districts can adopt practices around the proactive identification of at-risk students (e.g., after two absences). While many districts have early warning systems that track course grades, attendance, and behavior to identify at-risk students, these systems do not address the root causes of chronic absenteeism. Longer term, districts should expand their early warning systems to include elements such as students’ sense of belonging and the relevance of school to their lives.
4: “Everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions
We have identified several evidence-based efforts that are aligned with our proposed approach of “everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions that re-engage students, support families, and generate timely data:
In closing, chronic absenteeism is a critical challenge for our K–12 education system, and a complex problem to solve with root causes across multiple systems. However, based on research and the examples we highlight, we know that this “everything, everywhere, all at once” challenge can be met through opportunities for connecting and supporting an ecosystem of students, educators, families, community organizations, and policymakers, all focused on ensuring that barriers to attendance are lifted and students have what they need—in and out of school—to thrive. We can solve the problem of chronic absenteeism if we start now—designing solutions that cross a diverse set of root causes—and build toward a lasting and sustainable vision.
[1] Danks, A. (2019). Learning Ownership: A Framework to Enhance Educational Programs and Support Transference of Skills from K-12 to Postsecondary. Siegel Family Foundation.
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.
Millions of students are chronically absent in the United States, and many are asking the question: What can we do to improve chronic absenteeism rates? The truth is that the vast majority of resources to address this challenge are focused on just a small fraction of those students. From partnerships with over sixty school districts, interviews with over fifty attendance-focused staff members, and professional development sessions with hundreds of school and district team members, we at EveryDay Labs, where I’m Head of Research & Development, have observed that many staff spend their time supporting a handful of students experiencing the most severe absenteeism (missing over 20 percent of school days). While these students undoubtedly need support, this article posits that by focusing on a small minority of severely absent students, we are failing to reduce overall chronic absenteeism rates. The key to lowering chronic absenteeism is directing more efforts towards the majority: at-risk and moderately chronically absent students.
What does chronic absenteeism look like and why does it matter?
When most people think of chronic absenteeism, they are likely thinking of students who are rarely in school. However, most chronically absent students are easy to miss. Through our partnerships, we’ve gathered data on the attendance behavior of over 1.5 million students across the United States, representing districts large and small, urban, suburban, and rural. At the end of the 2023–24 school year, the majority of chronically absent students had absence rates between 10–20 percent. This amounts to just two to four days absent each month, on average.
Exhibit 1. Distribution of absence rates by tier for SY23–24
Exhibit 2. Overall distribution of absence rates for SY23–24
Missing just a few days per month adds up to a significant amount of lost learning time, contributing to adverse educational outcomes for students. A student missing 10 percent of school each year will miss over a year’s worth of learning during their educational career. We also see significant declines in both math and reading outcomes at that 10 percent threshold, as well as at the 5 percent threshold, showing us that getting students back into the classroom is critical for student academic success.
Exhibit 3. Attendance and NWEA MAP mid-year outcomes from a large, urban district
Note: math (N= 97,802), reading (N=79,043)
Changing absenteeism during the school year
Importantly, absenteeism is not constant throughout the year. Our data show that the average absence rate increases over the course of the year, demonstrating the necessity for early identification and intervention.
Exhibit 4. Average student absence rate from September 2023–June 2024
Of students who were considered extremely chronically absent at the end of October, just 1 percent ended the school year not chronically absent. This makes sense mathematically, as all it takes is two months of being extremely chronically absent to surpass the eighteen-day threshold for ending the year chronically absent. While it is important to support these extremely chronically absent students as their absences are likely an indicator of significant challenges, this will not meaningfully shift the overall chronic absence rates given the small fraction of the student population that they represent.
Conversely, there is a large proportion of students who have a much better chance of ending the year not chronically absent. Of students who were moderately chronically absent in October (missing 10–20 percent), half were still moderately chronically absent at the end of the year, and about 17 percent became severely or extremely chronically absent. With additional intervention, they might have been able to end the year not chronically absent. Additionally, of students who were at risk of chronic absenteeism (missing 5–9 percent) in October, about 27 percent ended the year chronically absent. With more intervention, they might have stayed under the threshold for chronic absenteeism. Successfully working with these students to end the year not chronically absent could shift overall chronic absence rates by approximately 15 percentage points. We’ve seen with our own district partners that sending strategic mail and text nudges to these student populations can either move them to a better attendance tier or prevent their attendance from worsening.
Why districts focus on more extreme absenteeism
In short, the more absences a student has, the easier they are to identify. Schools have limited tools to identify absenteeism. Often, they rely primarily on two sources: (1) daily absence lists and (2) teacher referrals. With both sources, attendance staff come to recognize “frequent flyers,” students whose names they see often or consecutively. These top-of-mind students then become the focus of intervention efforts.
Meanwhile, students who are moderately chronically absent are missing just two to four days of school each month, and these students often fly under the radar.
There is no single solution to address chronic absenteeism
When it comes to absenteeism, the solutions needed are varied. Last year, we provided resources to over 60,000 families to help them overcome barriers to attendance such as transportation, wellness, and food, while others had more niche needs. This is consistent with what we’ve heard anecdotally from staff, who often mention transportation needs as well as challenges like inappropriately timed family vacations. In a survey of almost 400 families, families reported facing five attendance barriers on average, with the most common barrier being their child’s physical and mental health.
A student facing health challenges needs very different support than a student without reliable transportation or a student who goes on multiple family vacations, just as a student missing 40 percent of school days needs different support than a student missing 11 percent of days.
What can be done
Educators need evidence-based, effective solutions, but how these solutions are applied is even more critical. Unlike many other education outcomes, attendance is something we can measure and act on in real time. Unfortunately, too many staff lack access to tools that can help them do that.
As discussed earlier, students with moderate absenteeism (missing 10–20 percent of days) and those at risk (missing 5–9 percent) are the largest groups among chronically absent students. To effectively reduce overall absenteeism rates, we need to focus on these groups with strategic interventions.
1. Mix of low to high touch strategies:
High-touch interventions like home visits are time-consuming and best reserved for students with the most severe absenteeism. Our survey of over 900 attendance staff revealed that they typically work with about five students and/or seven families each week. At this rate, applying high-touch strategies to all students would be impractical and ineffective. Therefore, we must pair these intensive solutions with school-wide strategies and lower-touch options, such as chronic absence nudges and incentive programs, which can be implemented for the majority of students with moderate absenteeism. These lower-touch interventions can help prevent students from escalating to more severe levels of absenteeism.
2. Data tools to enable strategic intervention:
To ensure that interventions are effectively targeted, schools need robust data tools that allow staff to:
Such tools enable staff to recognize and address absenteeism patterns early. For example, data showing that students with moderate absenteeism (10–20 percent) often remain chronically absent without intervention suggest that timely and targeted support could help these students improve their attendance.
By focusing on students who are moderately chronically absent and at risk of becoming chronically absent, and by equipping staff with the right data tools, we can shift our focus to a larger population of students who have a better chance of improving their attendance with timely and appropriate interventions. Additionally, chronic absenteeism doesn’t just affect the students who miss class, but even those who attend every day. When teachers spend more time catching students up and less time moving forward, everyone suffers. This strategic approach is essential for achieving a meaningful reduction in overall chronic absenteeism rates that supports all students.
Being data-driven works
For the last few years, we have provided these kinds of data-driven tools and services to numerous districts. In turn, they have been able to successfully lower their chronic absence rates.
Arizona, a state that has struggled with some of the worst chronic absenteeism, saw success with our partner, Tempe Elementary School District, reducing chronic absence rates by 11 percentage points (from 40 percent to 29 percent) in the last year. They achieved this through the work of strong school attendance teams who use actionable data to implement strategies that impact students across all absence rates. This holistic approach to attendance results in improvement across all student groups. This didn’t stop in Arizona: Other partners have reduced chronic absenteeism by seven percentage points over the last year. Longer-standing partners have seen rates drop by up to half in some cases. For example, over the last two years, chronic absenteeism in one California district dropped from 42 percent to 20 percent, and in a Georgia district, it went from 33 percent to 17 percent. This demonstrates that significant change is possible, but it requires strategies and tools that provide the right interventions to the right students at the right time.
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.
A strong signal that schools are not serving the needs of kids and families is the “chronic absenteeism crisis” in our country today. We need to stop putting the blame at the foot of kids and families, and instead, look to the school system that fails to educate and engage our children.
Many are deeply concerned about chronic absenteeism because it cuts across racial and socioeconomic divides. Absenteeism is up across the board from 15 percent in the 2018–19 school year to 26 percent in the 2022–23 school year, according to a report from American Enterprise Institute earlier this year. It was even covered in The New York Times. They report, “Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school. And a rotating cast of absent classmates can negatively affect the achievement of even students who do show up because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track.” This argument is more indicative of a deeper issue of our school system that policymakers can solve with creative partnerships and by empowering families and entrepreneurs alike.
First, they need the buy-in of a key partner in solving the problem: parents. According to Brookings, parents are not aware (or overly concerned about) their kids’ absences from school. Parents are aware, however, that it takes extra work for a kid to catch up after absences; of those surveyed by Brookings, 22 percent noticed their child struggled after missing six or more days of school in the first half of the 2023–2024 school year. Meanwhile, other parents think the ability to make up coursework online or from home is a viable option, while still preferring in-person interactions for their child. So what is best here? Empower parents. Brookings concludes equipping parents with longitudinal data about their kids to understand that their kid is missing X more days than they used to, or Y more days compared to peers could be useful information for parents to change behavior. There’s some preliminary evidence this works from a Philadelphia experiment: When parents are seen as a partner and key stakeholder in the educational journey, then opportunities abound.
Chronic absenteeism also highlights how the classroom is designed for the “average” student and that “achievement” is the end-all be-all of the school system. As parents and academics alike already know, there is no such thing as an average student. When classrooms design for “average,” they are designed for no one. This is one way our school system continually fails to engage kids on both ends of a learning spectrum: struggling or excelling. In an Education Week conversation between Rick Hess and Jal Mehta, it was acknowledged that the absenteeism conversation does overly focus on the kids as the problem, rather than the schools, and asks a key question: Could we make school a place where kids want to go? Mehta shares an example from Salem, Massachusetts, where students were involved in a human-centered design process to inform school leaders as they redesigned their middle school with a flexible curriculum, increased community engagement, and more hands-on, project-based learning. In this small example, absenteeism decreased by more than 50 percent.
Additionally, the overemphasis on achievement and grades brings with it excessive and unnecessary pressure for kids. Brookings found the reason with the strongest relationship for missing school to reported absences was, “a child’s anxiety about peers, tests, or in general.” It is bad enough that kids are not engaged in school, but what may be worse is that their current engagement is driven by a fear of failure, leaving them too anxious to attend classes and contributing to the chronic absenteeism problem.
With all of this in mind, chronic absenteeism is the symptom of a larger problem with our education system: Attendance is serving an outdated purpose, and student progress is being measured in outdated units of time. Meanwhile, there is a vast marketplace of education alternatives (some that actually only require two hours of academic instruction) that has exploded post-pandemic. Education entrepreneurs are serving educational needs in local communities across the country. Pair this with historic enrollment declines, and it’s clear parents and kids alike can be a part of the solutions because they are already voting with their feet.
So what does all of this mean for policymakers?
1. Policymakers can ensure parents and families are empowered with choices for their kid’s education and ensure those parents and families are aware of the variety of options available to them. This could take shape in the form of a Learn Everywhere program, like in New Hampshire, or in the form of an Education Savings Accounts, like in Arizona and Utah (among others).
2. Possibly more importantly, policymakers can unleash entrepreneurship by promoting policies that ensure entrepreneurs are free to solve the problem inside and outside of the public system. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who are getting creative with education alternatives, but regulatory barriers abound and are stifling solutions.
Chronic absenteeism is an indication kids want something different for their education, and their parents are listening. Policymakers are in a prime position to encourage participation from a variety of stakeholders from parents, to kids, to community leaders, to entrepreneurs who can shape and redesign schools with the potential to increase student engagement, improve parent satisfaction, and radically reduce absenteeism.
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.
The fact that chronic absenteeism rates—defined as missing 10 percent of a school year—continue to rise, especially after the pandemic has been well established (Mervosh & Paris, 2024; Appendix I). That these increases cut across students’ achievement levels, district sizes, modes of instruction (in-person versus online), poverty, and households is equally well-documented (Mervosh & Paris, 2024; Appendix II). Nevertheless, there are sustainable, and promising, interventions that have been shown to noticeably reduce chronic absenteeism. I will briefly discuss some of these effective approaches below.
Woodbridge Elementary in Catonsville, Maryland, reduced its chronic absenteeism rate from 28 percent in 2021–22 to just over 9 percent in 2022–23. According to the report by Linda Jacobson in The 74, the school accomplished this, first and foremost, by recognizing and prioritizing student attendance. As a result, the school understood the patterns that increased absences, such as early-release days, and addressed that by offering an after-school program and wavering the $10 fee for students who have demonstrated absenteeism. This was followed by sustained monitoring and the result speaks for itself.
In the 2015–2016 school year, prior to Covid-19, 50,000 public school students in Connecticut public schools (9.6 percent of the student population) were chronically absent. Predictably, this was further exacerbated by the pandemic in the 2019–2020 school year. The Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP) was inaugurated in April 2021 to address this pressing chronic absenteeism problem, which was now worsened by the pandemic. The program essentially involved conducting well-coordinated, meaningful home visits with students identified as chronically absent in fifteen districts in the state of Connecticut. In the spring of 2022, LEAP was evaluated by researchers from Wesleyan University, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Connecticut using mixed-methods analyses. Results indicated statistically significant findings in increases in attendance rates directly related to the LEAP intervention. Specifically, there was an initial 4-point increase during the first month of this intervention for students exposed to it. The increase persisted steadily to an average of about a 7 percentage point increase by the summer of 2021, rising to about a 15 percentage point average increase “in the 6 months or more after treatment” (CCERC, 2022, p. 8). Even more noticeable were the remarkable gains by Hartford Public Schools where the attendance rates improved by almost 30 percentage points (ibid.).
Although many schools and school districts utilize home visits as a strategy to moderate student attendance issues, the remarkable results of the LEAP should warrant deeper understanding. Therefore, the question then becomes: How were home visits done differently in the LEAP case? The study identifies the following specific attributes of this strategy:
(ibid.)
The district leaders in LEAP identified the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other districts and the flexibility of implementation, particularly the use of funds afforded by the state of Connecticut to schools as the main reasons for its success.
The home visitors and the families reported the following benefits:
(ibid.)
It is noteworthy to point out that, according to the study report, home visits in this program could be at a student’s home or over Zoom or phone. Unsurprisingly, significantly larger impacts were reported for true home visits (i.e., where the visitor physically went to the student’s home) as opposed to the “visits” done via Zoom or phone. It is reasonable to assume that the six characteristics listed above are more likely to be attained when a visitor physically visits a student’s home. There is a level of personalization that this affords that is difficult to replicate with Zoom or phone. Equally noteworthy is the fact that effects of the LEAP treatment on English language learners (ELL students) in the targeted schools were significantly below—only about half as large as non-ELL students. This may be worth further research.
Regarding challenges, one is funding. Specifically, the late arrival of funding delayed the project to a degree. Staffing, including but not limited to hiring and training the right personnel for the work, was also a challenge. Sustainability must be addressed because the leaders believe that a two- to three-year commitment will be more helpful overall for all stakeholders. Other challenges included teacher resistance, family resistance, and fearful families (as a result of immigration status).
In conclusion, it is important to highlight the key ingredients of effective interventions that have been empirically shown to substantially reduce chronic absenteeism. Research shows that when these components are integrated with fidelity into attendance-improving interventions in schools and school systems, chronic absenteeism can be drastically curtailed. Early identification and intervention that can immediately address and prevent chronic absenteeism from snowballing; mentoring programs, family engagement initiatives, and personalized support strategies; collaborative efforts involving schools, families, and communities; targeted interventions based on individual student needs and circumstances; and prioritizing and creating a supportive and inclusive environment that encourages regular attendance and student engagement. Finally, continuous monitoring and evaluation of intervention programs are necessary to assess their impact and make necessary adjustments for long-term success. (Eklund et al., 2020.)
Appendix I
Adapted from: Mervosh, S. and Paris, F. (2024, March). “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere,” The New York Times.
Appendix II
Adapted from: Mervosh, S. and Paris, F. (2024, March). “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere,” The New York Times.
References
Center for Connecticut Education Research Collaboration (CCERC), (2022). An evaluation of the effectiveness of home visits for re-engaging students who were chronically absent in the era of covid-19. Retrieved from: https://www.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/CCERC-Report-LEAP_01_24_2023_FINAL.pdf
Connecticut State Department of Education (2017, April). Reducing chronic absence in Connecticut’s schools: A prevention and Inter vention Guide for Schools and Districts. https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/SDE/Chronic-Absence/Prevention_and_In tervention_Guide.pdf?la=en
Eklund, K., Burns, M. K., Oyen, K. A., DeMarchena, S. L., and McCollom, E. M. (2020). Addressing chronic absenteeism in schools: A meta-analysis of evidence-based interventions. School Psychology Review, pp 1-17. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345485326_Addressing_Chronic_Absenteeism_in_Schools_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Evidence-Based_Interventions
Jacobson, L. (2024). Report: Schools won’t recover from COVID absenteeism crisis until at least 2030. The 74. Retrieved from: https://www.the74million.org/article/report-schools-wont-recover-from-covid-absenteeism-crisis-until-at-least-2030/
Mervosh, S. and Paris, F. (2024, March). Why school absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere: The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: “Our relationship with school became optional.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap
Editor’s note: This essay won third 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.
School attendance is a critical factor influencing students’ academic success and long-term outcomes. In Rhode Island, chronic absenteeism has been identified as a significant barrier to educational achievement and high school graduation. In response, Governor McKee and state leaders launched the Learn365RI initiative and the AttendanceMattersRI program to address and improve school attendance. This essay explores the importance of school attendance, the strategies implemented through a collective impact approach across Rhode Island leaders to combat absenteeism, and the outcomes and future recommendations for sustaining this critical effort. Central to this effort has been Governor McKee and his office, the Rhode Island Department of Education, and the nonprofits The Partnership for Rhode Island and Always Learning Rhode Island.
The importance of school attendance
Regular school attendance is foundational for student success. Missing even a few days of school each month can severely impact a student’s academic performance and their likelihood of graduating high school. According to data from the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) and the SAT results, there is about a 20-point gap in performance between students who attend school regularly and those who are chronically absent. This gap underscores the critical need to address absenteeism to ensure that all students reach their full potential.
The Learn365RI Initiative
In April 2023, Governor McKee launched the Learn365RI initiative, emphasizing the importance of improving attendance, reading, and math skills, and ensuring that students graduate high school with a clear plan for their future. The big idea is that learning does not just happen in school, but after school, on the weekends and on school-year and summer vacations; learning is a 365-day activity that we need to embrace and invest in. The AttendanceMattersRI campaign, a core component of Learn365RI, aims to tackle chronic absenteeism through a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach involving community engagement, public awareness, and data-driven strategies.
Strategies and milestones
The AttendanceMattersRI initiative has implemented several key strategies and achieved significant milestones over the past year:
Community and leadership engagement
Effective engagement of local leadership has been a cornerstone of the AttendanceMattersRI initiative. Schools alone cannot solve the attendance crisis; it requires the support and involvement of the entire community. Mayors, business leaders, church leaders, and medical professionals have all played vital roles in conveying the importance of school attendance and encouraging families to prioritize education.
Challenges and data dissonance
Despite the progress made, challenges remain. Data from various schools indicate that some schools have an inverse relationship between student beliefs about the importance of attendance and actual attendance rates. For instance, some schools with higher reported attendance rates often have lower student belief in the importance of attendance, suggesting a need for deeper analysis and targeted interventions to address underlying issues and misconceptions.
Outcomes and future recommendations
The initial outcomes of the AttendanceMattersRI initiative are promising, with improvements in awareness and some attendance metrics. Through 167 days of the 2023–2024 school year, Rhode Island schools reported nearly 300,000 fewer days absent than at the same point in time in the previous year and nearly every school in the state on-track to improve attendance rates and reduce chronic absenteeism rates. However, sustaining and building on this progress requires ongoing effort and innovation. Future recommendations include:
Conclusion
Improving school attendance is essential for the academic success and future well-being of Rhode Island’s students. The Learn365RI and AttendanceMattersRI initiatives have made significant strides in addressing chronic absenteeism through a comprehensive, community-driven approach. Continued focus, innovation, and collaboration will be crucial in sustaining this progress and ensuring that all students have the opportunity to succeed academically and beyond. By prioritizing attendance and engaging the entire community, Rhode Island can create a culture that values education and sets its students on the path to success.
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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.
Three decades ago, the College Board “recentered” the SAT. Now it’s “recalibrating” Advanced Placement. Though both adjustments in these enormously influential testing programs can be justified by psychometricians, both are also probable examples of what the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan famously termed “defining deviancy down.”
Citing Durkheim, Moynihan was referring mostly to crime that was rising across much of the country when he wrote in 1993, but his seminal essay addressed education, too. He observed that America was growing accustomed to low achievement and failing schools—this just ten years after A Nation at Risk—as educators rationalized and justified shoddy performance rather than resolving to rectify it. Sometimes they excused faltering scores by blaming parents, home situations, and poverty. Rarely did they mention the extra funding that often followed weak achievement. (“There is good money to be made out of bad schools,” Moynihan noted.) Whatever the rationale, the key point was acceptance of mediocrity, not resolution to alter the situation.
One year later, the College Board set about to deal with SAT scores, which had been slipping since the mid-1960’s. Here, too, many explanations were given for the slippage, some of them based on actual evidence, such as the fact that many more students from more diverse backgrounds were taking the test. Yet all those explanations also radiated acceptance of the depressing status quo.
Yes, one can certainly contend that the College Board and ETS, which administers, scores, and analyzes the tests, are psychometric organizations charged with accurate measurement of what is, not zealous ed-reformers or wishful thinkers about what should be. But it didn’t smell quite right when they said all they were doing was making sure that the center of the score distribution returned to 500 (on the 200–800 scale) rather than the 424 it had fallen to. The reason the center had slipped was that overall student performance on the SAT had been declining for thirty years.
Here’s how Michael Winerip wrote about recentering in the New York Times in June 1994 in a piece titled “S.A.T. Increases the Average Score, by Fiat”:
The S.A.T. score of the average American high school student will soon be going up 100 points. However, that doesn’t mean that anyone is getting smarter.... The bottom score will still be 200 and the top 800, but it will be easier for everyone to get higher scores.
A 430 score on the verbal section of the S.A.T. will suddenly become a 510 under the new scoring method. A 730 verbal score will become an 800.
College Board officials know they are inviting potshots on this one. They know they are going to be accused of instantly turning a generation of Roger Marises into Babe Ruths.
He was surely right about potshots. Newsweek’s editorial about the SAT recentering was headlined “Merchants of Mediocrity.”
Fast forward to 2024, and the College Board is revising the scoring process for a gradually increasing portion of its principal revenue source, the Advanced Placement Program.
I’ve long been an ardent fan of AP, dating back to the days when it enabled me to skip my freshman year of college by obtaining credit for college-level work done in high school. (Thousands of others did likewise.) With Andrew Scanlan, I wrote a book lauding the AP program. Its “gold star” designation coming from many places, including my Fordham colleagues, makes it the gold standard for demonstrating academic excellence. It’s the best thing going for high school students who are capable of high-powered learning and acceleration. (IB is great, too, as are some “honors” and “dual credit” courses, but the latter categories have nothing akin to the uniform standards and external quality control of AP.) That’s why Andrew’s and my book is titled Learning in the Fast Lane.
Though College Board insiders and attendees at the AP program’s big annual confab have known about “recalibration” for several years, to date there’s been no public announcement or explanation for the changes. (I understand they’re working on one.) It fell to test-prep superstar John Moscatiello to break the news. Here’s a bit of his lengthy revelation:
The Advanced Placement program is undergoing a radical transformation. Over the last three years, the College Board has “recalibrated” seven of its most popular AP Exams so that approximately 500,000 more AP exams will earn a 3+ score this year than they would have without recalibration. If this process continues in other exams in the coming years (as we expect it will), approximately 1,000,000 more AP Exams every year will earn a 3+ score. The end result will be a win for AP students everywhere: millions of high school students will save millions of dollars in college credits in the coming years.
Note that he calls the change “a win” for students. That’s because high scores on AP exams do bring tangible benefits in college—and in getting into college: skipping introductory courses, getting into smaller seminar-type classes, often earning actual credit toward diplomas and thus potentially speeding up graduation, and saving some tuition dollars, not to mention wowing admissions committees with what one has accomplished during high school. Thus the more 3+ scores earned by more students, the bigger the “win.”
By contrast, Ira Stoll of The Editors sees the “recalibration”
...as part of an overall trend of confusing mediocrity with excellence, and of trying to address persistent racial and economic inequality by eliminating standardized testing and merit-based distinctions rather than by improving education and expanding opportunity. It’s less complicated to just give a student a higher grade on a test than it is to do the hard work needed to make sure the student can master the material. But at some point, when tasks that really matter are on the line—a patient on an operating table, an airplane being engineered, a presidential vote being cast in a swing state—the person doing the job needs to really know how to do it.
When asked—it’s not yet on the record—College Board leaders proffer a two-part explanation for recalibrating. First, while asserting that it’s not driven by collegiate grade inflation, they also contend that it’s unfair to kids for their AP scores to be significantly lower than their grades would be in the college courses that AP is supposed to be equivalent to. (It’s that equivalence that justifies colleges awarding credit or course-skipping in response to “qualifying” AP scores.) Why ding a student with a 2 on his AP exam when the same performance in a similar course in an actual college would net him a B+ or A? The “fairness” problem is obvious—but it’s impossible not to see inflated college grades tugging AP scores in the same direction.
Note, too, how the marketplace is changing. If that same student can be sure of obtaining college credit just by passing a “dual credit” course—which probably costs him nothing, compared with $98 to sit for an AP exam—isn’t the College Board destined to lose customers over time when credit earned via AP is both pricier and iffier than available alternatives? (It’s true, AP participation has steadily risen to date—but so has dual credit.)
The second explanation AP leaders offer for recalibrating is complex, starting with how best to set standards for what sort of performance deserves what score on an AP test and how to keep those standards consistent over time. Traditionally, AP sought consistency via “common item equating,” whereby some of the same multiple choice questions would be recycled from one year to the next, and results on those items could be analyzed in ways that yielded stable criteria for judging student work.
As the AP program has overhauled a number of its course frameworks in recent years, however, it can no longer recycle old test questions. And some of the new exams don’t even have multiple choice items, which led to the deployment of panels of educators to try to reach consensus on what level of student performance warrants what scores. But the standards generated by these panels fluctuate, sometimes quite a lot, such that the criteria applied to students weren’t consistent from year to year. This is both unfair to the students and psychometrically hard to justify—maybe even vulnerable to litigation—which launched the College Board on a quest for a stabler and more scientific process.
What they settled on—termed an “evidence-based” method—is hard to wrap one’s brain around if one isn’t a bona fide psychometrician. I’m just partway there myself (maybe you’ll fare better). Here’s how the AP Program describes it:
We use the following steps to define the knowledge and skills required to earn scores of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 on an AP Exam.
1. Gather data. First, we survey college and university faculty to gather data on performance of college students in comparable introductory courses. Higher ed faculty review AP Exams and provide information about exam difficulty based on a comparison to their grade-level expectations.
2. Conduct college comparability studies. In subject areas with high consistency in content across college classrooms, higher ed faculty teaching the comparable AP college course administer the AP Exam to students in their related college course. Student AP scores are correlated to their final exam and course grades.
3. Conduct standard-setting studies. During a standard-setting study, a body of data and evidence is assembled, including:
-data and evidence of AP student performance and qualifications
-higher ed faculty expectations for comparable course performance
-college student grades and academic similarities and differences between the population of students taking the subject in college and the AP population
Psychometricians utilize this assembled information to identify appropriate standards for setting AP scores that will be valid in predicting success when students are placed ahead into subsequent courses in the same discipline at a range of colleges and universities. These processes ensure that AP Exam scores achieve the “predictive validity” that has been a hallmark of the AP Program for decades. As a result of these processes, annual studies of AP student performance in college consistently find that AP students with scores of 3 or higher outperform in subsequent college coursework the comparison groups of college students who took the colleges’ own AP-equivalent course.
Because this is opaque for non-specialists, and because specialists, too, can make mistakes, any change in standard-setting and scoring methods on a high-stakes test like AP inevitably invites skepticism, especially when its practical effect seems to have been a big expansion in the number and percentage of “qualifying” scores.
Hence the storm of commentary, criticism, and curiosity that is falling on “recalibration” today—more so because everyone knows that AP is a huge revenue source for the Board, that competition is mounting, and that Advanced Placement has also been faulted on equity grounds for encouraging tens of thousands more students from all sorts of backgrounds to enter its classrooms who turn out to get 1’s and 2’s on its end-of-year exams. According to this logic, justice requires some sort of adjustment so that AP students from poor and marginalized groups and weak high schools can reap the same benefits as others who have been garnering more 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s on those end-of-year assessments. Such an adjustment implies a recalibration of scoring rather than beefing up the preparation and within-AP instruction of kids from disadvantaged circumstances.
I’m not saying the College Board is monkeying with AP scores for non-psychometric reasons. I’m saying I understand why one might suspect that they are. And until they produce a transparent explanation of why they’re making these changes, along with clear evidence of why we should have greater confidence in the new system and the resultant higher scores than in the old, we must expect allegations that they’re defining educational deviancy down.
Consider, too, what will eventually happen as colleges face hundreds of thousands more “qualifying” scores. Despite what will surely be valiant efforts by College Board lobbyists to forestall this, colleges and universities will raise the ante on what actually gets credit and become more jaundiced about what AP scores signify maximum performance in high school. The “win” enjoyed by students will gradually lose value, as it has been doing gradually since my day, especially when it comes to bona fide graduation credit. It’s no secret that colleges resist losing tuition dollars—and the more students who seek credit upon arrival, the more loath they’ll be to confer it.
One can’t exit this topic without adding that the College Board has assembled massive data on collegiate grade inflation—which parallels what we at Fordham and others have found at the high school level. American students, both secondary and postsecondary, keep getting higher grades without actually learning more. One can’t be too surprised if the Advanced Placement program—arguably our noblest effort to encourage and reward “college-level” work during high school—is forced into a similar pattern.
“Passing” an Advanced Placement test still brings benefits today, and the AP program does not deserve to have “gold standard” replaced by “fool’s gold.” But is that gold standard a solid 24 karats or more like 18? Might it be headed toward 12 karats, like the lackluster grades given by our colleges and high schools? What I’m pretty sure of is that Moynihan’s oft-cited diagnosis of what’s weakening America is gaining another 24-karat example.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
