Two-thirds of American students attended schools that had high or extreme levels of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-2022 school year, a recent analysis of federal data suggested.
Students are deemed chronically absent when they miss 10 percent of school days or more. Absenteeism numbers are separate from students who stopped attending school and never re-enrolled.
Overall, the 2021-2022 school year saw two-thirds of enrolled students, or 32.25 million, attending a school where at least 20 percent of students were chronically absent. This is a dramatic increase from the pre-COVID 2017-18 school year when only a quarter (25 percent) of all enrolled students attended a school with such high levels of chronic absenteeism.
Early state data for the most recent 2022-2023 school year shows very little improvement since then, the group said in their Nov. 17 report.
The chronic absence data for the past school year was aggregated across 11 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, and Virginia. These states had a combined chronic absenteeism rate of 27.8 percent, marking a 2.2 percent decrease when compared to that of the 2021-2022 school year.
Among those states, Massachusetts had the most significant improvement, with the chronic absenteeism rate dropping from 27.7 percent to 22.2 percent, according to the analysis. Virginia saw the smallest decrease in absenteeism—although its overall rate was already lower, down from 20.1 percent in 2021-2022 to 19.5 percent in 2022-2023.
Even students who have strong attendance suffer when a large portion of their classmates consistently fail to show up, researchers at Attendance Works said.
“When chronic absence reaches high levels, the educational experience of peers, not just those frequently missing school, is also affected,” they wrote in the report, pointing to the national assessment data popularly known as the Nation’s Report Card.
The 2023 Nation’s Report Card, published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and reflects testing in the fall of 2022, shows a connection between major declines in math and reading scores among 8th-grade students and the number of students who indicated they chronically failed to show up for school.
For example, in California, the percentage of students who reported missing five or more days last month doubled from 5 percent in 2020 to 10 percent in 2023. At the same time, the average scores for California’s 8th-graders declined four points in reading and nine points in mathematics compared to the previous assessment administered during the 2019–20 school year.
When it comes to demographics, the widespread chronic absenteeism affects students of all backgrounds, according to Attendance Works.
While approximately 5.3 million chronically absent students are found in cities, another 5.1 million are in suburbs, with nearly 2.6 million live in rural areas and 1.5 million live in towns, the report suggested.
In the 2021-22 school year, the largest number of chronically absent students were white (5.2 million), followed by Latino (5 million) and African American (2.9 million), according to the analysis. Chronic absence also affected large numbers of students with disabilities (2.7 million) and English learners (1.9 million).
Chronic absence in schools is deepening the existing gaps in educational outcomes, the researchers said, noting that students from populations that have historically had less access to educational opportunities are much more likely to be enrolled in schools with extreme levels of chronic absence.
“Between the 2017-18 and 2021-22 school years, the greatest increases in chronic absence occurred among schools serving higher portions of students experiencing poverty,” they wrote. Using state-sponsored universal free meal programs as an indicator of poverty, they found that extreme chronic absence levels nearly tripled, from 25 percent to 69 percent, among schools with 75 percent or more of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL).
Among schools where 50 percent to 75 percent of students are on FRPL, the extreme chronic absence levels increased from 14 percent to 50 percent, according to the authors of the report.
“Our analysis shows that a wave of high levels of chronic absenteeism has spread to many more schools and districts across the U.S.,” said Robert Balfanz, a leading author and an education professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Such high numbers of chronically absent students are beyond the capacity of a single school social worker or counselor to address.”
In a call to action, the professor urged school districts to employ a variety of strategies that have been proven to work, including home visits, mentoring, and helping students build stronger peer relationships.
“The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch, we can build upon what has been learned about effective responses to chronic absenteeism over the past decade or more,” he said.
