Attending school is not as important as it used to be for some families. So say most district leaders surveyed for yet another report tracking chronic absenteeism.
A “cultural shift” has occurred in which school is increasingly seen as optional, according to the administrators contacted for the latest research brief from the RAND Corporation, a public policy think tank.
“These district leaders hypothesized that chronic absenteeism will not improve without new approaches to make school more engaging,” the report’s authors warn.
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Attendance has improved “modestly” since the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, about one in 10 districts in the survey experienced chronic absenteeism levels of 30% or more while two in 10 districts reported rates between 20% and 30% in the 2023–2024 school year. Leaders most commonly responded with early-warning attendance systems to spot students on the verge of becoming chronically absent.
Only a few districts took no specific approach to combat chronic absenteeism. A quarter of the leaders noted that “none of the approaches they have tried to reduce chronic absenteeism have been particularly effective,” the report continues.
“Surveys of parents have found that students’ top reasons for missing multiple days of school include such things as oversleeping and not wanting to attend because of anxiety, which suggests that there is room to further impress on parents the importance of daily attendance,” the authors note.
The researchers recommend that school leaders:
- Fine-tune established approaches—such as calling and visiting students’ homes and hiring dedicated attendance staff—to work better in a post-pandemic context.
- Track how and when these interventions are most effective and for which student populations.
- Increase families’ understanding that school attendance is critical to their child’s academic success.
- Build students’ social connectedness at school.
