Schools’ efforts to address chronic absenteeism have hit a significant hurdle: Parents are more relaxed about attendance than before the pandemic.
District leaders described that “cultural shift” in a new study, which found that, while rates of chronic absenteeism remained high during the 2023-24 school year, they fell below peak levels seen in 2021-22.
Researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research center at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, combined weighted survey data from 190 superintendents of districts of varying sizes and locales with state data from previous years and interviews with a focus group of 12 superintendents.
“District leaders are saying this wasn’t merely a transitory COVID phenomenon,” said Heather Schwartz, the director of the Pre-K to 12 Educational Systems Program at RAND. “It may be fading, but it’s still around, and there’s a feeling that [parents] are not putting their foot on the gas.”
Students are generally considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10 percent of school days in a year. Nine percent of surveyed districts reported “extreme” levels, where at least 30 percent of their districts met that definition in the 2023-24 school year.
That’s down from 39 percent of districts with extreme absenteeism rates in 2021-22, a figure drawn from a previous analysis of state data by Attendance Works, an organization that advocates for data-driven attendance solutions.
However, a majority of districts surveyed still struggle with significant or high levels of absenteeism, as seen in the chart below.
In interviews, 11 of the 12 district leaders reported “a shift in student and parental attitudes away from viewing school as compulsory” across family income levels. In addition to persistent barriers to attendance—like poverty, a lack of transportation, and chronic health issues—parents now allow children to miss school for family trips, less severe illnesses, and general disengagement, they said.
“We have a large community apathy issue where [parents are not committed] to their students needing to be at school on a regular basis,” a suburban superintendent said, according to the study.
The findings align with previous research that suggests parents don’t understand the severity of the absenteeism crisis and may underestimate how much missed school days affect student learning. A June 6 poll by NPR/Ipsos found that 58 percent of parents saw chronic absenteeism as a “major problem,” but most could not correctly define it. Thirty-two percent of parent respondents identified the correct definition, while 51 percent set the bar much higher, defining chronic absenteeism as missing 20 percent of school days.
Parents often underestimate how often their own children miss class, Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, told Education Week at the time. Researchers have stressed the importance of frequent communication with parents about the importance of attendance which includes specific details about their own children’s absences.
“There often is no easily accessible or continually provided supply of information to parents on students’ cumulative absences to date,” Balfanz said. “It is hard to remember in April how many days of school your child missed in October and November.”
Superintendents conceded that systemic problems in schools—like long-term substitute teachers, struggles engaging students, and unclear messaging during the pandemic—may have contributed to parents’ shifting attitudes.
Some said stricter rules about staying home for illness during the height of the pandemic had confused parents about how to handle more minor illnesses that wouldn’t typically require a sick day. Others speculated that families grew accustomed to new remote learning technology that makes it easier for students to make up for missed days.
Ninety-three percent of districts reported efforts to combat chronic absenteeism in the previous year. Asked about a menu of options, the most commonly adopted was the use of early warning systems, in use at 70 percent of districts. Those systems track a range of indicators to predict which students are at risk of absenteeism and disengagement.
Twenty-three percent of districts said none of the methods they’d tried had been “particularly effective” at addressing absenteeism, and no single intervention saw broad support. That may suggest that interventions aren’t effective, or it may suggest that their effectiveness varies greatly depending on school and family context, Schwartz said.
Schools may also need to tailor their approaches and messages to families, focusing on “carrots,” like positive student relationships at school, more than “sticks,” like truancy laws, she said.
“The reasons for absenteeism are diffuse, and the blunt, one-size-fits-all approach will be limited in its effectiveness,” Schwartz said.
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