More Than One in Four Students Attend Schools with High or Extreme Levels of Chronic Absence

 Data Matters Using Chronic Absence to Accelerate Action for Student Success

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was a watershed moment that made this metric an integral component of efforts to help students succeed in school and later in life.   

Signed into law in December 2015, ESSA requires all states to include in their school report cards how many students are chronically absent. It also mandates that states choose five indicators to measure school performance – four academic measures of achievement and a fifth measure of school quality or school success. In response, 36 states and the District of Columbia chose chronic absence as a metric for school accountability in their implementation plans. 

Increasingly available, chronic absence data offer a unique tool for spotlighting where we as a country have failed to provide all students with an equal opportunity to receive a quality education. It sheds light on how our nation has not recognized that barriers to getting to school cause students to miss so much class that they fall academically behind. Pinpointing where chronic absence levels are high offers educators and policymakers an unprecedented opportunity to anticipate which schools and students will need additional support in order to ensure an equal opportunity to learn. 

Chronic absence can have adverse consequences for academic achievement throughout a child’s life. Starting as early as pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, absenteeism can affect a child’s ability to read well by the end of third grade. Missing valuable instruction time can lead a student to fail courses in middle school, drop out from high school and show less persistence in college. Especially hard hit are children who live in poverty, have chronic health conditions or disabilities, or experience homelessness or frequent moves. 

The most current national data released by the U. S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) shows that nearly 8 million students in the United States were chronically absent in the 2015-16 school year. Our analysis of this data from 94,549 schools shows an increase of over 800,000 chronically-absent students since the data was first collected in the 2013-14 school year. 

Rather than representing a jump in absenteeism, improved reporting accuracy by school districts and states appears to explain a significant portion of this growth.  Over that same two-year period, the percentage of schools with high or extreme levels of chronic absence rose from 20 to 24 percent of all schools. This means that over half of the nation’s chronically-absent students are found in less than a quarter of the nation’s schools. 

Chronic absence is a pervasive challenge in every state. The analysis shows that across the country, 15 percent of students, or one out of seven, are chronically absent. But the percentage of students who miss too many days is much higher in some states than in others. In eight states and the District of Columbia, for example, more than 20 percent of all students were chronically absent during the 2015-16 school year.  When chronic absence reaches high levels in a school or classroom, it can affect every child’s opportunity to learn, because the resulting classroom churn can make it more difficult for teachers to meet their students’ diverse learning needs. 

The study, released in connection with  Attendance Awareness Month  in September, compares  the first -ever release of chronic absence data in the U.S. Department of Education’s  2013 -14  Civil Rights Data Collection  to the most recent 2015 -16 school year  CRDC release.   

Other key  findings include:
  
• While nationwide, 15 percent of all students , or at least  one out of seven,  are  chronically absent, the rates vary widely by state and within states. Chronic absence is found in every type of locale  – rural, town, suburban, and urban. 
 • The number of  schools with at least 20 percent or more students chronically absent increased between the 2013 -14 and 2015- 16 school years.   
• Just over half ( nearly  52 percent) of all chronically absent students are concentrated in  schools with high  (20- 29 percent) or extreme  (30 percent or higher) levels of chronic  absence .  
 • While nearly half (44 percent) of high schools have high and extreme levels of chronic  absence , elementary schools should not be overlooked.  Slightly more elementary  schools than high schools have high and extreme levels of chronic absence .  
 • Schools serving children in special education, alternative education and vocational  education, as well as schools with higher levels of poverty, are much more likely to have  extreme levels of chronic absence.  
• Chronic absence disproportionately affects particular student populations, with higher  rates evident for Native American, Hispanic, African- American, Hawaiian and Pacific  Islander students .   

This analysis shows that absenteeism is found in every locale, whether rural, town, suburban or city. Yet this pattern varies significantly by state. The analysis also found that greater poverty can predict higher levels of absenteeism. But this is not always the case.  It is equally important to note that some high-poverty schools have low chronic absence because they have adopted effective, prevention-oriented approaches to motivate daily attendance and help students and their families overcome challenges to getting to class. As states begin to make chronic absence data available, some have not yet made the data easy for districts or schools to find or use.   

This brief, the accompanying interactive datamap developed by The Hamilton Project, and the state chronic absence reports produced by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, seek to highlight the value of making data transparent and available to families, community partners and other stakeholders, outside school systems