As schools continue to recover from the pandemic, there’s one troubling COVID symptom they can’t seem to shake: record-setting absenteeism, according to an article in The 74.
Troubling data are beginning to emerge:
- In Oakland, Calif., district officials said 61% of students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year;
- In Providence, R.I., the district in September said fully half of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
- In suburban Montgomery County, Md., near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent.
Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six reasons why chronic absenteeism rates remain high:
1) Mental health is getting worse
In a recent survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.
And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported record-high suicide deaths during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people.
Kids are literally refusing to go [to school], according to parents. Parents say, “I can’t get my kid up. He does not want to go.’”
For many students, school has lost its value. It could be because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home.
2) Thousands of caregivers have died
As many as 283,000 young people in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.
Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, says Robert Balfanz, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he says. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.
3) Teacher absences have increased
During the pandemic teachers and other school staff pushed to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.
The result: an explosion in teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In one suburban district west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.
A May 2022 federal survey found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”
At the same time, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.
This makes school less valuable for students. During COVID many kids received little instruction. It’s very hard as a parent to make the argument, “No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,” when their child is sitting and watching a movie because subs are teaching again and again and again.
4) Remote learning negates in-person schooling
The pandemic revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. It gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to work from home like their parents.
Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory.
“Kids don’t see why they can’t work from home,” says Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm EdNavigator. Daly notes that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”
Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he says, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he says, “is for suckers.”
Students in focus groups tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he says. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”
5) A higher minimum wage can be an attractive alternative to schooling
Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have raised their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.
While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
States offering $15 an hour have likely made the absentee problem worse.
That kind of money offers a 17-year-old a bit of personal independence and the opportunity to help their families. Jobs that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense at $15.
6) Record-keeping is more accurate
One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.
Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods.
A decade ago, few schools kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made chronic absenteeism an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.
Before that, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could mask high chronic absenteeism. It’s possible to have an average daily attendance of 92% and still have a fifth of all students missing a month of school. Different kids on different days make up that 92%.
When the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking chronic absenteeism for a few years and had few good strategies to address it.
Solutions
- A 2018 study found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more. These alerts corrected parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate lost learning time by nearly 50%.
- Schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.
- Transparency increases the urgency and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.
- For parents to understand the gravity of the situation, schools needed to show them the data — here is where it was, here is where it is, and where it is for certain groups. Schools need the help of parents to fix chronic absenteeism.
The 74
