Generating Momentum on Better Attendance
October 01, 2024
Appears in October 2024: School Administrator.
A national organization shares the takeaways drawn from school districts’ successful experiences tackling chronic absenteeism
Partnering with researchers at Columbia University, I found, as anticipated, that missing 10 percent or more of school for any reason (excused, unexcused or suspensions) in kindergarten predicted worse achievement in later grades. The impact was greatest on the children living in poverty with fewer resources to make up for lost opportunities to learn in the classroom.
It was stunning, however, to discover that no one was monitoring how many and which students missed too much school for any reason. School districts traditionally tracked only truancy (absence without permission) and average daily attendance, but these measures easily masked high levels of chronic absence.
Promising New Metric
Attendance Works was launched in 2010 to build awareness about this invaluable but largely unknown metric for K-12 education. We started by working with school districts around the country to show chronic absence could be reduced when educators partnered with communities and families. We also persuaded researchers to conduct studies documenting the adverse impact of chronic absence on student achievement.
To catalyze action, we shared free resources through our website (www.attendanceworks.org), launched an annual attendance awareness campaign and helped states adopt better attendance policies and practices.
Support grew quickly. By 2018, states were required to report chronic absence data to the U.S. Department of Education and most adopted it as a school accountability metric as part of state plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act. By 2019, we finally had consistent data to paint a clear picture of the size and scale of the nationwide challenge: an estimated eight million students (one in every six) were chronically absent from school.
COVID’s Impact
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools, it disrupted relationships. Students and families were urged to stay home for extended periods of time to avoid contracting a potentially deadly illness.
The impact has been devastating. During the first two years of the pandemic, chronic absence escalated to new heights, affecting 14.7 million students (nearly 1 of 3) in 2022. No state or district was left untouched. Chronic absence levels nearly doubled in every state, regardless of length of school closure during the pandemic, and in every type of community: urban, suburban and rural and across economic strata.
By 2022, in two-thirds of schools (versus a little over a quarter before the pandemic) at least 20 percent of students were chronically absent. When chronic absence reaches such high levels, it affects all students because the churn makes it more difficult for teachers to teach and students to learn. When lots of students are chronically absent, it makes it more likely their peers will start to miss school.
State data for 2023 suggests chronic absence decreased about 2 percent across the country. Emerging data for 2024 suggest levels remain much higher than before the pandemic despite modest decreases.
Improvement Avenues
District leadership is essential for tackling this urgent issue, which if left unchecked, undermines educators’ ability to help students recover from the pandemic and close achievement gaps.
Improvement is possible when school districts make improving attendance a sustained and strategic priority. During the White House Every Day Counts Summit, I moderated an impressive panel of school district representatives from Richmond, Va. Columbus, Ohio, Johnstown, N.Y., and Albuquerque, N. M. Representing rural as well as urban communities and ranging in size from less than less than 1,500 to nearly 70,000 students, each district has made significant strides in reducing chronic student absences in the past two years.
They demonstrate that student attendance gains are achievable especially when we apply lessons learned from their positive experiences. A few of their takeaways follow.
Take a team approach. Solving chronic absenteeism requires a cross-departmental team with the insights, skills and resources to understand what motivates students to show up or causes them to miss school, and to align resources to implement solutions.
District teams are needed to make sure systems exist to help school teams take action and tailor strategies. Rather than creating new teams, Columbus City Schools made addressing chronic absence a responsibility of its district-level whole child support department and school-based Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports teams.
Understand the scale and concentration of your chronic absence challenge. Is chronic absence a major challenge for all your schools or just a few? Examine patterns by grade and student population. Identify bright spots — schools, classrooms or particular programs with comparatively better attendance and any practices worth sharing.
Unpack the underlying causes of chronic absence. As the graphic created by Attendance Works shows (see below), reasons for absence typically fall into four broad categories: Barriers to attendance, aversion to school, disengagement from school and misconceptions about the impact of absences.
Various
strategies, focus groups, surveys, phone banks and home visits can be used to unpack causes. Many school districts see students with heightened levels of anxiety combined with a lack of meaningful relationships to peers and adults.
Too often, families and staff believe students must stay home for any symptom of illness even though health guidance has changed. Availability of online learning as well as a lack of a full understanding of how much their children have fallen behind academically likely contributes to families undervaluing the need to show up in person for children’s social as well as academic development. In the communities hardest hit by pandemic where there are barriers such as poor transportation, unstable housing and lack of access to health care, chronic absences have gotten worse.
Align solutions to reasons for absence. Solutions to attendance must address the challenges in your district and schools. In Richmond, Va., families shared that stable housing was a major barrier, which led to a district partnership with a local housing agency and the hiring of a resource person to help secure housing. In many schools, clear health guidance combined with the ability to consult with a school nurse have become essential resources.
Engage community partners. Enlisting help from community partners is essential to addressing needs that fall beyond the ability of schools alone to address. In Albuquerque, N.M., information gleaned from students about transportation challenges helps guide the district’s requests for support from community partners.
Ensure relationship building. Regardless of the specific barriers, one solution is relationship building. Relationships encourage students to show up even when it isn’t easy and ensure families feel comfortable sharing what gets in the way of attendance.
Invest in a tiered approach. Attendance improves when schools and districts adopt a tiered approach that emphasizes prevention and is built upon a strong foundation of the positive conditions for learning that motivate students to show up in the first place.
Everyone in a school shares responsibility for putting in place these positive conditions for learning: physical and emotional health and safety; belonging, connectedness and support; academic challenge and engagement; and adult and student social and emotional competence, with strong relationships at the center.
Tier 1 attendance strategies (i.e., routines and celebrations related to attendance or caring messages sent when a student misses school) are available to all students and aimed at preventing too many absences from happening in the first place. When this is not sufficient, Tier 2 supports use more personalized attention and outreach to address and remove barriers to attendance for individuals or groups of students. For students with the most absences, Tier 3 interventions offer intensive support and often entail interagency case management with health, housing and social services.
Districts should encourage every school to map out what exists and is missing at each tier and across all relevant departments. Districts can facilitate sharing of promising and proven strategies across sites and use their resources to address common gaps.
Start with positive conditions for learning. When chronic absence levels are high, schools must re-establish the positive conditions for learning with the support of all staff, especially teachers. Laying a strong foundation first is essential because messages about showing up to school fall flat if students feel alienated or unsafe.
In Johnston, N.Y., the district first invested in universal strategies and attendance teams. Once in place, the middle school and the high school added success mentoring (where a caring adult engages a chronically absent student multiple times a week) as a Tier 2 early intervention strategy to address the increasing number of students with moderate chronic absence.
Shift away from ineffective punitive practices. Most students are not willfully skipping school but reacting to personal challenges relating to their community surroundings (such as a lack of access to health care, unreliable transportation, unstable housing or a lack of safe passage to school) or relating to school (such as bullying or academic struggles). When absences occur for such reasons, punishing students is ineffective because it doesn’t address why a student is missing school and can cause the student or family to feel even more alienated from school.
School districts can halt such practices by changing how they communicate with families about unexcused absences. Prior to the pandemic, our organization partnered with Harvard University and the Los Angeles Unified School District to demonstrate that positive and caring truancy letters were much more likely to improve attendance than threatening notices filled with legal jargon.
Another problematic practice, suspending students for truancy, also doesn’t help with identifying and addressing the root causes of missing school. Students who face school suspensions are more likely to experience academic setbacks, repeat grades or drop out.
Build capacity of school sites. As schools are where the rubber hits the road, equipping site leaders and teams to adopt best practices is essential. It makes a difference when districts do the following: Make chronic absence data easy to obtain and interpret; offer easy-to-use guidance and resources to help school teams take action; establish communities of practice that allow teams to learn and apply new attendance strategies. These could include yearlong plans of action and districtwide messaging campaigns that convey the value of showing up every day.
Set ambitious goals and monitor progress. Recognizing the importance of persistence over time, district leaders can establish ambitious but realistic multiyear goals that call for overall improvement and better outcomes for the populations most affected by chronic absence.
Aiming High
Attendance Works is collaborating with the American Enterprise Institute and Education Trust to challenge states and school districts to adopt this ambitious target: Cut chronic absence by 50 percent over five years.
Such a goal commits leaders to ensuring that the current high levels of chronic absence do not become the new normal. It also promotes monitoring progress over time to prioritize what works and revise what isn’t effective. A focus on continuous improvement will become even more essential as school districts determine what to sustain as COVID-19 relief funds disappear.
Hedy Chang is the founder and executive director of Attendance Works in San Francisco, Calif.
BY THOMAS S. DEE
The
post-pandemic growth in chronic absenteeism has been sharp, broad and stubbornly persistent. These striking increases are a sobering indicator that, more than four years after the pandemic started, the serious challenges of academic recovery remain.
Reduced school attendance is a barrier to student success that also vexes other prominent in-school efforts to support pandemic recovery such as tutoring and other forms of extended instructional time and student supports.
As researchers, we know chronic absenteeism has a diverse variety of underlying causes such as illness, housing insecurity, safety, social anxiety and a lack of engaging instruction. The different factors that are uniquely contributing to the persistent increases in chronic absenteeism we now face are not yet as well understood. However, one specific hypothesis that has captured public attention is that the experience of the pandemic — especially, the extended periods many students spent in remote instruction — reduced parents’ and students’ recognition of the importance of regular school attendance.
Various Causes
While we do not have definitive evidence for such “norm erosion,” two factors suggest its empirical relevance. One is that higher rates of chronic absenteeism largely have persisted even as the apparent salience of other pandemic-related explanations such as health risks have abated.
Second, my research shows the recent increases in chronic absenteeism were not clearly related to measured changes in youth mental health or COVID-19 infection risk. However, this growth in chronic absenteeism was substantially higher in the states where remote instruction was widely adopted during the 2020-21 school year.
A better understanding of this and other causes behind the disturbing rise in chronic absenteeism can usefully guide the design and targeting of relevant supports, particularly at the student and community levels. At the same time, I believe much of the national public discourse about causes such as norm erosion has become unproductive. In particular, the thinly veiled subtext to many of these discussions is a highly politicized and contentious relitigating of the decision to close some schools to in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year.
Of course, constructively critical reflection on past policy decisions is both valuable and appropriate. However, remaining mired in finger-pointing and assigning blame also can become a distraction from addressing the serious challenges at hand. Improving our students’ school attendance during this school year should be a national imperative and a foundational component of our academic recovery from the pandemic.
Tactics Await
Encouragingly, reasonably strong evidence exists on the tactics schools can adopt to meet this challenge. However, many schools seeking to use this evidence also face several serious headwinds.
One is the immediate need for grounded, local data on the most relevant school-attendance barriers within each community and reflection on how this can align with evidence-based solutions. Second, in many schools, the current challenges to implementing promising strategies well can seem prohibitive, particularly during an unprecedented period of unique organizational stress.
Perhaps the most serious barrier to adopting and implementing promising solutions is cost. Schools are currently facing exceptional fiscal strain due to the confluence of enduring enrollment loss and the expiration of federal pandemic aid. These factors suggest schools should privilege attendance strategies that are locally appropriate and evidence-based. Interventions that are also low-cost and comparatively easy to scale (e.g., engaging families with real-time, well-designed messaging about their child’s attendance) are uniquely well-suited to meet the current crisis.
Thomas Dee is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education in Stanford, Calif.
BY BRAD A. HUNT
Our school district’s four core values — authentic relationships, redefining success, collective engagement and great teaching — can be fully realized only when our students are present. It matters that students are in our classrooms.
For that reason, the 13,400-student Coppell Independent School District, located just north of Dallas, has been educating our community through the campaign we call Attendance Matters … You Matter!
The campaign, launched this past March, has a clear objective: to underscore the significance of attendance in shaping our students’ educational journeys. As we navigate our current budget challenges, we are reinvigorating this campaign. Why? Because student attendance matters for school funding, and every student’s presence makes a tangible difference.
Consider this: A mere 1 percent increase in our attendance rate could translate to a substantial $1 million boost in state funding for our schools. To achieve a 97 percent attendance rate, every student showing up in school for just two additional days can contribute to securing vital resources for our educational programs. That piece of data is significant to our parents as well as our staff. Again, Attendance Matters.
Social Gains
Our commitment to attendance extends beyond financial implications. It speaks to our dedication to providing an outstanding learning experience for every student. We want the community to understand that regular attendance facilitates engagement with exceptional educators, supports collaborative learning and ensures access to the diverse curricular and extracurricular opportunities available in the Coppell schools.
Attending school also provides students with emotional support. Associating with peers and interacting with staff members who care about their well-being is an important factor in a student’s social development and emotional health.
However, we recognize the complexities families face in balancing academic priorities with concerns for their children’s health and well-being. Our campaign reassures parents that we prioritize the health and safety of our students above all else. When a child is sick, they should stay home until they have fully recovered, safeguarding their health and that of their peers and teachers.
Moreover, we understand the pressures that students may experience, whether academic or emotional. Our counselors are readily available to provide support and guidance to students and families navigating these challenges.
Money Incentive
The stark reality is that absenteeism can quickly snowball into a significant barrier to academic progress. Missing just two days of school per month may seem inconsequential, but over time, it accumulates to a staggering loss of instructional time. Every missed day represents lost opportunities for growth, exploration and discovery.
Based on input from our campus principals and district administrators, the Coppell district launched a new incentive program at the start of this school year for our schools to improve overall attendance rates. The top four campuses that improve attendance over the same six-week period of time in the prior year will earn a financial incentive from the district to be spent on their staff or campus.
The size of the monetary incentive is based on enrollment and grade level. Elementary schools could earn as much as $1,750. Middle schools could earn $3,000, and high schools could receive a maximum of $7,500. The baseline for the incentive will be the 2023-24 six-week attendance data. Cumulative district attendance must increase by at least 0.25 percent to fund the program, and campus attendance must increase by at least 0.5 percent to qualify.
Incentive Uses
Campus principals received information about the campus attendance incentive from the district during the Back-to-School Administrative Academy. Each principal received a toolkit from the district’s communications department that included sample letters to parents, information for staff and specific data to help the community understand the importance of good daily attendance.
We shared guidance with principals regarding what items could be purchased with the incentive funds. Possibilities include staff luncheons, snacks, updates to the teacher’s lounge and special events for students.
The Attendance Matters. You Matter! campaign promotes an important message throughout our school community: We want students in school, and we need students in school. The potential to save money is an added bonus. We know our students learn and develop best as people when they are present every day.
Brad Hunt is superintendent of Coppell Independent School District in Coppell, Texas.
Additional Resources
Hedy Chang of Attendance Works suggests these practical resources for educators eager to address chronic absenteeism of students.
Guidance on forming and using district- and school-level teams produced by Attendance Works.
From Absent to Engaged. The July 2024 issue of Educational Leadership explores strategies to address student absenteeism and disconnection.
The Digital Backpack, “Resources to Address Chronic Absenteeism in Your Community” from the National Partnership for Student Success Support Hub at the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, includes a curated set of publicly available resources.
“Coming Together on Chronic Absenteeism Top Priority for this Year” provides practical ideas and insights of four expert panelists including Tiffany Anderson, superintendent of Topeka, Kan., Public Schools and Lisa Koons, superintendent of public instruction, Virginia Department of Education.
The Attendance Playbook: Smart Strategies for Reducing Student Absenteeism Post Pandemic by Future Ed and Attendance Works. This resource includes two dozen readily scalable approaches ranging from family engagement to the value of attendance incentives, as well as students’ social and emotional well-being.
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