Chronic Absenteeism Is the Real Problem

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When the state published last year’s batch of post-pandemic school data, alarm bells went off. It was our first glimpse into where kids stood after years of virtual learning, and it was bleak. The data showed that student performance on metrics like state standardized test scores had worsened significantly. In districts like San Diego Unified, the sudden declines erased years of improvements.

But less attention was paid to another interconnected and arguably even more distressing issue: chronic absenteeism. That’s when a student misses at least 10 percent of instructional days in a school year. Rates exploded to never-before-seen levels.

Just three years earlier, before the pandemic, countywide rates of chronic absenteeism stood at about 11 percent. By last year, they’d nearly tripled, to about 28 percent. That means that in three years almost 80,000 new students countywide were chronically absent.

The effects of kids missing that much school can be dramatic. Not only do schools, which receive funding based on their students’ attendance rates, lose money, kids also lose valuable instructional time.

Research has shown that lost instructional time can not only harm academic performance, it can also lead to higher dropout rates. And researchers link those dropout rates to a slew of negative long-term outcomes.

To counter the precipitous rise, local education agencies have implemented a battery of interventions. Those included home visit programs, attendance challenges with awards like pizza parties and more parent education on the effects of chronic absenteeism.

But even after those interventions, it was difficult to tell if they’d actually worked. Then, in October, the latest batch post-pandemic schools data was released. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of what we learned.

The Good: Chronic Absenteeism Has Decreased

Between 2021 and 2022, chronic absenteeism dropped. Countywide, the rate decreased by five percentage points, from about 28 to 23 percent. That means the number of chronically absent students in the county decreased by about 25,000 from last year to this year. Some of the biggest drops were among the student demographics with the highest rates like Black, Latino and Pacific Islander students.

Todd Langager leads the San Diego County Office of Education’s Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network. The network partners with schools in districts across the county to implement evidence-based strategies to combat chronic absenteeism.

“We are trending in the right direction across the state, as well as here in San Diego County,” Langager said. “I think that’s something to be celebrated.”

Usually, San Diego County fares slightly better than the rest of the state in many educational metrics. That’s generally true when it comes to chronic absenteeism. The county’s overall rate, for example, is nearly two percentage points lower than California’s as a whole.

These drops didn’t come easily. Many schools, some with the help of Langager’s network, have implemented creative strategies. They include giving out backpacks, sending letters home to parents and consistent activities meant to get kids excited about attending.

Strategies like these generally break down into three tiers. The first tier includes broad strategies meant to improve campus culture and impact all students. The second tier is more precise and aimed at students falling into chronic absenteeism. The third tier is the most specialized and involves finding customized solutions for the most chronically absent students.

According to experts those tiers are vital, because finding the right fix is key to having an impact. After all, you wouldn’t give someone crutches for a broken arm.

The Bad: Rates Are Still Distressingly High

Even given the modest decreases to the county’s overall chronic absenteeism rate, they’re still slightly more than double what they were before the pandemic. That’s a problem, said Langager.

“All of us would wholeheartedly say that having almost one out of every four students in San Diego County being chronically absent is still way too high,” Langager said.

Heather Hough, the executive director of the research group Policy Analysis for California Education, agreed. California lawmakers tasked her group, which includes Stanford University and University of California faculty, to investigate the factors behind the skyrocketing rates of chronic absenteeism.

When schools opened in-person after years of virtual learning, students missed significant amounts of class because of Covid infections and quarantines. Hough said some thought once schools were out of the morass of Covid absences, the picture could change for the better.

“The fact that we had this marginal improvement points to this level of absenteeism being something that is going to stick around without serious intervention,” she said.

Serious intervention is difficult, though, because every family’s story is different. Hough called the reasons for student absences a “complex tapestry.” For some, absences may be related to basic needs like a lack of transportation or clean clothes, while for others they may be due to a lack of a sense of belonging. There’s also the possibility that parents may be less willing to send their kids to school if they have a fever than they were before the pandemic.

Hough also thinks a cultural shift occurred during the pandemic. Whereas attending school used to be a given, some families may now ask themselves if school is really what their child needs that day, or if they’d be better off with a mental health day or vacation, for example. While some challenges may be out of the control of school districts, others aren’t, like creating compelling curriculum or a sense of belonging that makes kids want to come to school.

“This is an urgent problem, and the recovery is not going to be fast, it’s going to be very slow. So, we have to keep the pressure on all of us to really make sure we’re working on the root causes,” Hough said.

The Ugly: Familiar Disparities Exist in Chronic Absenteeism Rates

When it comes to educational data, disparities are no surprise. Poverty correlates incredibly closely with academic performance. The same is true with chronic absenteeism. Even before the pandemic, kids from less affluent communities and students of color were more likely to miss class. After the pandemic, their rates of absences were off the charts. There’s been improvement over the past year, but rates are still worryingly high.

Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, an organization focused on fighting educational inequities by addressing chronic absence, said those elevated levels of absences may compound existing inequities.

“We’ve always known that kids who are more affluent have more resources to make up for lost learning opportunities in the classroom,” Chang said. Research shows that students from less affluent backgrounds suffer more acute impacts from chronic absenteeism.

But another striking disparity in which students are chronically absent is more surprising. For years, kindergarteners have missed more school than some other grades. The post-pandemic increase in chronic absenteeism put that into overdrive. While the countywide chronic absenteeism average is still just more than double what it was pre-pandemic, the kindergarten rate is triple what it was. That’s bad news.

Falling behind in early grades can snowball and lead to missing key academic milestones associated with future academic success, like reading by third grade. Since being chronically absent is the No. 1 indicator of being chronically absent in the future, we may not yet know the full impact.

“What I do worry about with this data is I actually think there may be cohorts of kids who were in key transition grades during the pandemic that we have to pay attention special attention,” Chang said.

“We haven’t seen the fallout yet.”