School Absenteeism Isn’t Going Anywhere

After skyrocketing during the pandemic, absence levels still haven’t returned to normal.

By , and
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Happy Thursday! The Convention and Visitors Bureau in Lexington, Kentucky, is going above and beyond to attract new tourists to the city—extraterrestrial tourists, that is. The bureau laser beamed a welcome message into space toward potentially habitable planets, inviting any aliens interested in bluegrass, horse farms, or bourbon to stop on by.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Biden administration announced on Wednesday the redesignation of Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a specially designated global terrorist group amid their escalating attacks on international shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The Trump administration had previously applied the designation to the Iranian-backed group in addition to adding it to the foreign terrorist organization list, but President Joe Biden revoked both designations shortly after taking office in February 2021. “This designation seeks to promote accountability for the group’s terrorist activities,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement released Wednesday. “If the Houthis cease their attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the United States will reevaluate this designation.” Yet American and Houthi forces continued to trade fire throughout Wednesday: A U.S.-owned commercial vessel was hit by a drone in the Gulf of Aden, approximately 60 miles from the Yemeni coast, and the U.S. fired a fourth round of missile strikes at Houthi targets in Yemen.
  • Iran carried out missile and drone strikes in western Pakistan on Tuesday, striking Sunni militant group Jaish ul-Adl, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that has previously launched attacks on Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian claimed the strikes didn’t target Pakistani citizens, just “Iranian terrorists on the soil of Pakistan.” The Pakistani government condemned the strikes as an “unprovoked and blatant breach” of the country’s sovereignty, and recalled Pakistan’s ambassador to Iran after claiming the bombardment had killed two Pakistani children. This morning, Pakistan launched retaliatory air strikes against what it claimed were terrorist hideouts in southeastern Iran, reportedly killing seven people. Iran’s foreign ministry today summoned Pakistan’s charge d’affaires in Tehran to “offer explanations” for the attacks, according to Iranian state media.
  • A Maine judge on Wednesday suspended a decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot. Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy rejected an appeal from Trump’s legal team to stay the case and instead remanded the case back to Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, ordering her to await a decision by the Supreme Court in the Colorado disqualification case. “While it is impossible to know what the Supreme Court will decide, hopefully it will at least clarify what role, if any, state decision-makers, including secretaries of state and state judicial officers, play in adjudicating claims of disqualification,” Murphy wrote in her decision. 
  • Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, announced yesterday that he will not seek reelection. “At some point in a career, one needs to step aside and allow others to bring fresh ideas and abilities into the fight for liberty,” Duncan said in a statement. Nearly 40 lawmakers in the House have announced they will not seek reelection next November. Looking to return to Congress is former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who filed on Wednesday to run for his former seat in Ohio as an independent.

K-12 Education’s Absenteeism Problem

(via Getty Images)
(via Getty Images)

There are lots of ways to describe being absent from school: “playing hooky,” “cutting class,” “skipping,” this scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

Nearly four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the classic story of a bunch of Ferrises blowing off school to lead downtown Chicago in a rousing rendition of “Twist and Shout” seems insufficient to explain the U.S. public education system’s nationwide problem with student attendance. The causes of the current crisis—which in 2023 saw rates of chronic absenteeism 71 percent above their national pre-pandemic average—are many and complex, and researchers and policymakers are still struggling to understand why attendance hasn’t rebounded. And while some states and school districts have taken steps toward boosting attendance, the scale of the problem remains daunting. 

While all of us surely missed the odd day of school, chronic absenteeism typically refers to students who are absent at least 10 percent of the school year—or 18 days in the 180-day academic year. Unlike truancy, which relates only to unexcused absences, chronic absenteeism captures absences that are both excused—times when there’s a note explaining the student was sick or at the dentist, for example—and unexcused, where no reason is given.

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  1. Sr5452

    If a kid isn't at school I only blame the parents.

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  2. Smittydandk

    My kid probably qualified as chronically absent during the year in question due to specialized therapies and appointments for multiple rare conditions. He rarely missed full days, but he had many partial absences. It did not adversely affect his schoolwork.

    It might help for researchers to identify the at risk kids and chill about the ones that aren’t. Let’s catch those kids up, not create a widening gap or spread more illness by sending sick kids to school—the ones vulnerable to excessive absence are probably vulnerable to parents’ lost wages when ill and poorer outcomes from Covid. Those kids are the ones that disproportionately lost parents to Covid during the worst of the pandemic. We know all of this and just don’t want to be real about it.

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  3. Stephen.Fenwick

    Great article, such a major concern for the USA n lost in the silliness of primaries and US politics …. Covid and the unknown consequences aren’t finished with us by a long shot

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  4. Sheiladstout

    My five kids are ages 21-35 and I now get a front row seat to watch them navigate school with my grandchildren. There are, I think, several things at play here. When my kids were young, the schools were utterly ridiculous about coercing attendance at all costs. I was reported for truancy during my son's 5th grade year. At the beginning of the year he had some stomach issues that we were trying to get to the bottom of, but you can't send a kid to school vomiting. He missed a lot of school, but the school didn't care why, or that they were excused absences, or that his sisters were all in school. Another year the guidance counselor held an assembly at the beginning of the year to tell the parents that if we thought our child might be too sick to attend school, send them anyway and they would call us if it turned out they were actually too sick. He said we should be allowing them to make that decision. So the "perfect attendance" was really kind of a perverse thing. Post covid? Today's parents 1) Don't trust the schools to make decisions for their kids, 2) Are more likely to work remote, and therefore have a little more flexibility in their schedules and ability to keep kids home when they're ill, and 3) Had young kids during a global pandemic and are more sensitive to how easily illnesses spread and serious covid/flu/rsv can actually be, and so they're more likely to err on the side of caution and keep the kids home. Honestly, I don't know that any of those are bad things. We all complained about the schools having too much power. They gave it away during the pandemic. Right on. Time to think outside the box on how to restructure school for our modern culture and family dynamic.

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      EmmyCab

      I don't have kids myself, but I think you make several excellent points here. I had to chuckle during the unfolding of the Covid pandemic to watch the narrative on the right (my own tribe, btw) shift from "Schools are indoctrinating kids!" to "Kids are going to be stunted for life by not being in school every day!" SMH. I thought it was a (largely missed) golden opportunity to experiment with new and more flexible models for education.

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      Stephen Maturin

      Your point about remote work is a good one and one I hadn't considered. Certainly there are many more people working at home for a larger portion of their work week than before the pandemic. That give parents the flexibility to have little Johnny stay home if he's a little under the weather.

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    Matmos

    My daughter is one of those now chronically absent. It started in 2021-2022, when she became sick one week out of every 3. Lots of testing later, there is a biological cause but it was significantly exacerbated by stress from the pandemic circumstances. Having missed school made it harder to go to school because she felt behind and disengaged. In 2022-2023 she was beginning to recover but that year one virus after another swept through the school. It was normal to have half the kids be out in December or January and the teachers were going down like flies too. This year things are more normal but my daughter still is down and out a week every time some illness is going through the classroom. My kid repeated a grade and is now flourishing in school, but it was not straightforward.

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    Will Bates

    Education in this country is broken. There. I said it.

    The Teachers’ Unions are a monstrosity that sabotage any hope of progress.

    The expectations on K through even advanced ed are now dumbed down for No Child Left Behind reasons coupled with the psychology of “every child should feel like a winner” gone too far.

    Parents are checked out, and expect teachers to be babysitter, psychiatrist, law enforcement, and physician. I feel for teachers, they can’t kick a kid out of school anymore unless they are physically assaulted…and even then, only maybe.

    So it is no surprise to me that there are other repercussions like chronic absenteeism. But I think the root cause runs deeper.

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      Kmregan7

      Expectations for kindergarten (teaching to the test and what not) is ridiculous- what they expect kindergarteners to learn and know is developmentally inappropriate and they have to do it in a way that is also developmentally inappropriate. There’s a reason they call kindie the “new first grade”
      And it’s not because it’s “dumbed down”

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        Will Bates

        I wasn’t necessarily thinking of K, so that is a good clarification.

        K should be about reading, social skills, and “learning how to learn.”

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  7. Pattidellpritch

    I don’t have school aged children. But, my husband and I try to go to Maui the first two weeks of November every year. This timeframe is well before Thanksgiving week so that would not explain the massive uptick we’ve seen in the past couple of years of families clearly on vacation with school-aged children. We never used to encounter families with children on vacation, except during the summer, Christmas break, and spring break. These people clearly have money as they can afford expensive accommodations and airfare for the entire family.

    I don’t know how to explain it, but my guess is that the attitude of these well-off parents is that “life is short” and they’re going to do what they want to do, where they want to do it, and when they want to do it, regardless of whether it means taking their children out of school or not.

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    1. Smittydandk

      Much of the increase in kids on vacation at odd times is probably due to the huge increase in homeschooling since the pandemic. We homeschooled for many years, and one perk is being able to choose a different week for spring break and avoid the crowds!

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      Rebecca

      I never hesitated to take ours out of school for vacations until high school. Once they start rigorous coursework, it becomes a hardship to miss even a couple days. But, it was never a problem for us in elementary or middle school, and nobody minded. The state of CT passed a law that schools had to send strongly worded letters home after a student missed x number of days. The principal told me to toss the letters in the trash and not give it a second thought.

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    3. Stuart.W

      I do have school age kids, spanning 7th to 12th grade and my wife is a public school Spanish teacher employed in the same districts my kids have attended. Both school districts we’ve been in are suburban with a high concentration of affluent households.

      My wife and I think the emphasis shifted during the pandemic in many households to put the family’s agenda first and to prioritize enrichment through experiences (travel, club sports) on whatever schedule vs. being constrained to the school calendar. It’s an extension of the return to work battles between employers and workers. Families loved the flexibility they had with distance learning to up and go wherever whenever, and they haven’t wanted to turn loose of that freedom.

      My wife has been amazed at the reasons kids miss school and has endured the frustration as an educator imposed by all the make up work, retesting and whatnot that go with students being off schedule from the class. (To say nothing of the entitled expectation that those needs will be catered to, and what’s the big deal…)

      You hear Jonah talk a lot about loss of trust in institutions and I think this is related. I would describe it as a loss of respect for institutions. It’s not that these “affluent truant” families don’t entrust their kids to the school when they are attending…it’s the best district to be in after all. But they don’t respect the constraints of the calendar or see value in committing to full participation in school or the community.

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      1. Pattidellpritch

        Must be so frustrating to be a teacher under such circumstances! I hope it’s not a permanent thing…

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  8. Brilliantly Oblivious

    With kids we did know (although I would like to find a study that showed the other health problems, if any, that kids who died of COVID had).
    The number of under 18s who died of COVID is similar to the numbers who died in auto accidents and drowning in the same period of time. All are tragedies but we don’t stop normal lives.

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  9. Corey Hegger

    Vast majority of work is assigned and completed on chromebooks. If a student stays home, they can still complete an assignment as easily as if they were in school. That disincentivizes attendance.

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    Citizen60

    Nana here. The elementary school rules where my darlings go require any COVID-like symptoms to keep the kids home for 3 days even with a negative COVID test. Cough and runny nose is enough to miss 3 days of school.

    Between COVID school closures--prolonged here in California--and the post-COVID protocols, there's been so many days out of school for the last 2 years that we're paying for a tutoring program in reading and math for our 2nd grader. And we're grateful to get her into the expensive program, given the demand.

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