Poor attendance may hurt academics before reaching the common threshold for chronic absenteeism of missing at least 10% of school days, according to a new study detailed in an Education Week article.
Absence rates of around 3% to 7% indicate a risk of below grade-level scores on future state, an analysis of 9,000 Boston public school students concluded. Researchers studied students who enrolled in district prekindergarten programs between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years, tracking year-over-year attendance and achievement information through 8th grade.
“We rarely stop to determine if we are measuring [chronic absenteeism] in a useful way,” says Tiffany Wu, a doctoral student in education and psychology at the University of Michigan and the report’s lead author. “There has been relatively little empirical evidence to justify that cutoff.”
The research comes as schools work to improve attendance that nosedived during the pandemic and as states hold districts accountable for reducing rates of chronic absenteeism.
Nationwide, 15% of students were chronically absent in 2018, according to the Return to Learn tracker maintained by the American Enterprise Institute. In the 2021-22 school year, the peak was reached when 28% of students were chronically absent. Of the 41 states that have reported data from 2024-25, 34 have shown declining rates of chronic absenteeism — none to pre-pandemic levels, according to the tracker.
The new study measured each student’s rate of absenteeism and whether they performed at grade level in math and reading on the next scheduled state test, and in tests administered in subsequent grades.
Wu says the statistical model is like programming a smoke detector so that it’s sensitive enough to predict a fire early enough to intervene but not so overly sensitive that it signals frequent false alarms.
Some of the study’s key findings:
- Unexcused absences are a stronger predictor of academic achievement in 3rd grade and beyond than they are in early elementary school. Younger students’ unexcused absences are more frequently caused by adult factors, like a family emergency, but students in older grades are more likely to skip school because they are disengaged, researchers speculated.
- The correlation between absences and below-grade-level performance increases as students get older.
- Unexcused absences are more predictive of failure in English language arts than overall absenteeism rates since unexcused absences are often linked to disengagement or disinterest.
- In math, total absences, rather than just unexcused ones, were most predictive of later performance on state tests. Math lessons build on each other sequentially, so even an engaged student who missed school for an excused reason like illness may struggle to catch up upon return.
The findings show that “no single absence cutoff is likely to serve as a strong standalone predictor of academic risk.” This reinforces the need to integrate attendance with early warning systems — strategies districts use to monitor student data and flag indicators that students may drop out of school or struggle academically so that educators can intervene early.
Wu hopes other researchers will validate the report’s findings by replicating them across additional districts.
It may not be practical to adopt measures of chronic absenteeism more strict or complex than the current 10% attendance threshold, Wu says. But early warning systems could be strengthened by understanding how smaller numbers of absences affect academic performance, she says. A better understanding of those connections could also help improve attendance messaging for parents, a key strategy for preventing problematic rates of absences, Wu says.
“Substantially lower thresholds would better identify students at risk of poor academic performance in a more timely way while balancing sensitivity and specificity,” the study concluded.
Education Week
