A group of students seen walking in a hallway.

School attendance problems are complex, and our solutions need to be as well

causes of poor school attendance essay

Professor of Inclusive Education, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

causes of poor school attendance essay

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Over the past few years, the pandemic prompted school closures and remote learning that drew international attention to issues of students missing school — what researchers call “non-attendance.”

Millions of students across the world missing varying amounts of school raises concerns about students’ learning loss and mental health — and also about long-term implications, particularly for those already at-risk for poor educational outcomes.

But school non-attendance is not a new issue. Terms like “epidemic” have been used in relation to school attendance problems in many countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia for a long time. There have always been students who missed school.

School attendance problems are complex and often very challenging to address. And for responses to be effective in getting students to school more often, they need to reflect this .

Not a Hollywood picture

A teen watching television looking glum.

Popular culture is filled with examples of teenagers skipping classes — and in films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , this is framed by humour and a gleeful sense of freedom. But Ferris Bueller went back to school the next day without any major impact on his life. This isn’t the case for many.

Evidence shows worse outcomes for students who miss a lot of school, including lower academic achievement , lower graduation rates, higher rates of interaction with juvenile justice systems , mental and physical health issues and lower employment.

And certain life circumstances, such as poverty, increase the risk of chronic school attendance issues.

Chronic school attendance problems are usually defined as missing more than 10 per cent of school days.

School attendance in countries like Canada and Australia is mandatory until between 16 and 18 years of age, depending on the province or territory.

There are legal penalties for families whose children are chronically absent from school as well as for students themselves, and possible involvement of child protection services.

Many reasons students are absent, disengaged

There are many reasons why students miss school.

Some because they are disengaged, others because of significant anxiety or mental health and well-being concerns.

Some are absent because of frequent experiences of harassment, bullying and racism .

Others miss school because they have family responsibilities such as younger siblings, or because of disability-related needs that schools are struggling to support . Students may experience multiple types of school attendance problems, and these may vary over time.

Young students in a classroom working at desks; one is in a wheelchair.

Punishing attendance problems fails to address the issues students face, from family responsibilities to barriers related to racism or inadequate support for disabilities.

Complex, flexible approaches needed

There has been more evidence in recent years of the recognition of the complex, multilayered and flexible approaches necessary to improve school attendance. There have also been efforts to think about school attendance as more than just “present” or “absent.” Are students participating? Are they included? Are they engaged? Are they learning?

Many initiatives are still based on simplistic ideas of school attendance and punitive approaches that really don’t work well in the long run .

Read more: If I could change one thing in education: Community-school partnerships would be top priority

These fail to address the issues experienced by students that create the attendance problem in the first place. And these approaches often further punish students most at risk of school attendance problems.

There are four key points or “ABCDs” for schools, families and communities to consider:

1. Academics and well-being

Well-being supports, including mental health and addictions services, lunch programs, identity-based clubs, and opportunities for movement and physical activity are all important in promoting school attendance.

But if a child can’t read, or an adolescent is struggling to learn algebraic equations and falling behind their peers, well-being initiatives aren’t enough. An integrated approach to support academic success and well-being for students is essential.

2. Building relationships

A sense of belonging and connectedness is critical to engagement, learning and attendance for students. Students need to feel like they matter to someone at school — someone who notices when they’re not there but who also welcomes them when they are.

Teen students in a class, some with raised hands.

Relationships need to be purposefully fostered between and among students, staff, families and communities. Mentorship programs , peer buddies, leadership opportunities, community experiential projects or attendance counsellors are some examples of ways to support relationship building.

3. Climate of school

A supportive and positive school climate is key for students, staff, families and communities. Schools can provide opportunities for shared decision-making, autonomy, support and valuing of student and family identities and strengths.

Extra-curriculars and high expectations need to be in place alongside supports to meet these. Families can be welcomed in a range of ways that reflect the needs of communities. Bullying and harassment, including anti-racist, homophobic and anti-Indigenous abuse, needs to be addressed.

4. Data needed

Data is important for understanding attendance — who is at school, who is not. And if not, what are the reasons? In shifting responses to attendance, schools can consider also shifting the ways they collect, use and report on data. For example, an early flag system to identify student attendance patterns can help to proactively support students and families before chronic issues arise.

Considering traditional attendance counts alongside school climate data, student records, academic profiles and student well-being indicators can tell a fuller story, and lead to more effective ways of getting students to school — and keeping them there.

  • Mental health
  • Racism in schools
  • Family-school relationships
  • School absence
  • School attendance
  • Student mental health
  • Learning loss

causes of poor school attendance essay

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Why Is School Attendance Important? The Effects of Chronic Absenteeism

High school students walk into a school building.

Chronic absenteeism is pervasive: as many as one in six students in the United States miss enough school to be considered chronically absent, according to the US Department of Education. The negative effects of absenteeism on a student’s education can be profound, and they often carry into adulthood.

The harmful impact of chronic absenteeism threatens all students, but the risks are not borne equally. Students of color, students who live in poverty, and students with chronic health conditions or disabilities all experience disproportionately high absence rates.

Examining the causes of absenteeism and the effects it has on school performance, and ultimately life outcomes, provides a deeper understanding of why school attendance is so important.

Why Is School Attendance Important?

School attendance is a powerful predictor of student outcomes. In fact, irregular attendance can be a better predictor of whether students will drop out of school before graduation than test scores, according to the US Department of Education.

The correlation between attendance and dropout rates has important ramifications that go beyond the classroom. Compared to their peers who graduate, students who fail to complete their high school education are more likely to live in poverty, suffer poor health, and become involved in the criminal justice system.

Defining and Assessing Chronic Absenteeism in Schools

Chronic absenteeism is widely defined as missing 10 percent or more of a school year. Schools generally recognize three categories of absences:

  • Excused absences are those with a valid reason and that have been communicated to the school by a parent. Student illness or other medical conditions are the most common types of excused absence; other reasons include religious observances, medical appointments, and family emergencies.
  • Unexcused absences, or truancy , occur when students miss school without a valid reason. Examples include deliberately skipping school as well as missing school for reasons deemed invalid by the school, such as oversleeping or missing the bus.
  • Disciplinary absences are a result of school suspension.

While these categories of absences are relatively consistent from one institution to another, school attendance policies and practices vary. For example, some school policies make little or no distinction between excused and unexcused absences. Similarly, school suspensions may be counted as absences by some school districts but not by others.

Such discrepancies speak to the challenge of collecting accurate and consistent attendance data, which is critical for education researchers and policymakers. Two sources of US public school attendance data––the Civil Rights Data Collection and attendance reporting under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015––merit closer examination.

Civil Rights Data Collection

Arguably the most important study of absenteeism data collected in the US was the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a biennial report from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) division. The first CRDC study to collect absenteeism data was conducted during the 2013-2014 school year and released in 2016. It marked the first national study of chronic absences and provided hard evidence of the negative effects of chronic absenteeism.

Chronic absenteeism data is no longer collected by OCR (the Education Department continues to collect absence data through its EdFacts Division), but information collected about absences as part of the 2018 CRDC (2015-2016 school year data) continues to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers studying absenteeism.

The shift from OCR-collected data to EdFacts also marked an important change to attendance data: the definition of chronic absenteeism went from missing at least 15 days of school in a year to missing 10 percent or more of a school year. This change helps to standardize the metric used by federal, state, and local education authorities.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, a reauthorization of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, included important requirements for school absenteeism reporting. The law requires all states to include chronic absence data in their school report cards.

It also requires states to select five metrics by which to measure performance in their schools; four of the performance indicators must be focused on academic achievement, but the fifth is a nonacademic metric. Chronic absenteeism was chosen as the nonacademic indicator by 36 states and the District of Columbia.

Such a broad adoption of absenteeism as a performance indicator reflects growing recognition of the importance of attendance. It also lays the groundwork for addressing the problem. ESSA state plans include strategies for using federal funds to improve attendance through such measures as improved health services, greater family engagement, and teacher training.

School Attendance Facts

Even a cursory look at national attendance data reveals that the problem is widespread. The following attendance facts come from the CRDC that was released in 2018:

  • More than seven million students in the US––16 percent of the student population––missed 15 or more days of school.
  • Approximately 800 school districts reported more than 30 percent of their students missed at least three weeks of school.
  • Chronic absenteeism rates are highest in high schools, where about one in five students is chronically absent.
  • More than 20 percent of students were chronically absent in six states (Alaska, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington) and the District of Columbia.
  • Every state had schools that reported 10 percent or more of students as chronically absent.

Attendance Inequalities

A survey of national absenteeism data also highlights inequalities across school districts and among students. Many of the factors that are known to contribute to chronic absenteeism––limited transportation, poor health, lack of safety––are more prevalent in marginalized communities and areas of poverty.

The 2018 CRDC shows significant differences in the rates of absenteeism experienced by different races and ethnicities. Students of color generally have higher absenteeism than their white counterparts:

  • White students, 14.5 percent
  • Black students, 20.5 percent
  • Hispanic students, 17 percent
  • American Indian students, 26 percent

Asian students are the only nonwhite student population with an absenteeism rate, 8.6 percent, that is lower than that of white students.

While a clear correlation between poverty and absenteeism exists on average, not all high-poverty schools have high chronic absence rates. Some have been successful in helping families overcome attendance challenges by using prevention-oriented approaches, according to Attendance Works, an initiative that advocates for improved absence data collection and policy.

One prevention-oriented program that has proven effective is the formation of “attendance teams,” cross-functional groups that work to improve school attendance by monitoring attendance data, identifying causes for absenteeism, and coordinating prevention and support strategies. Typically led by a principal, an attendance team can include teachers, school nurses, guidance counselors, social workers, parent representatives, and other stakeholders.

The success of such strategies, particularly within schools that are at high risk for chronic absenteeism, underscores the importance of identifying schools at risk for high absence rates and taking steps to address the problem.

Causes of Poor School Attendance

Many factors are associated with poor school attendance:

  • Physical health issues . Health conditions such as asthma, influenza, diabetes, tooth decay, and obesity are all associated with higher rates of student absenteeism. Nearly 10 percent of children aged four to14 are diagnosed with asthma, a leading cause of school absenteeism. Asthma accounts for a third of all days of missed instruction, according to Attendance Works.
  • Bullying . Approximately 20 percent of students in the US aged 12 to 18 experience bullying. Bullying can include emotional abuse (name-calling, insults, teasing), the threat of harm or actual physical abuse (being pushed, tripped, or beaten), destruction of property, and ostracization (exclusion, being made the subject of rumors or lies). In the US, low socioeconomic status is a common factor in bullying, and immigrant youth are more likely to be bullied than locally born youth, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Socioeconomic hardship . Socioeconomic hardship can lead to unstable housing or homelessness, as well as limited transportation resources. One child in six lives in poverty in the US, according to Children International.

Academic struggles can also cause students to become disengaged with school, which is one of the reasons that students with learning differences struggle with absenteeism.

Developmental Delays, Learning Disabilities, and Related Disorders

A study conducted by the National Center on Educational Outcomes found that elementary school students with disabilities served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) were 1.5 times as likely to be chronically absent as their peers without disabilities. High school students with disabilities served by IDEA were 1.4 times as likely to be chronically absent. (IDEA addresses a broad range of mental and physical impairments, including developmental delays, learning disabilities, and related disorders.) Students with learning disabilities drop out of school at nearly three times the rate for all students, according to the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD).

NCLD notes that students with learning and attention issues commonly experience bullying, struggle with feelings of failure, and often find it difficult to gain acceptance among their peers. All of these factors can put them at high risk for missing school.

A report from the US Department of Health and Human Services also links chronic school absenteeism and selected developmental disabilities. Children aged five to 17 with an intellectual disability had the highest prevalence of chronic school absenteeism at 14 percent, followed by children with autism spectrum disorder at 9 percent, those with other developmental delays at 7.2 percent, and those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at 5.2 percent.

Mental Health and School Attendance

Mental health issues are among the factors that contribute to chronic absences, according to Attendance Works. Diagnoses of anxiety disorder and depression are not uncommon in children, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), which reports that as many as 2.8 million children aged 12 to 17 in the US have at least one major depressive episode in a year. Approximately 80 percent of children with an anxiety order and 60 percent with depression are not treated, according to ADAA.

Chronic absenteeism has also been linked to trauma, which can include experiences ranging from abuse and neglect to the loss of a loved one. More than half of students will experience a traumatic event by the time they reach adulthood, according to Waterford.org.

Effects of Poor School Attendance

When children are absent from school, they miss out on consistent instruction that is needed to develop basic skills. Children in early grades are particularly susceptible to falling behind in fundamental reading skills, which can have a snowball effect that impacts future learning.

Children who have learning and thinking differences can be especially vulnerable to the impact of absenteeism because missing school reduces opportunities for any interventions that might be necessary. If teachers fail to realize that they need an intervention, they are more likely to attribute a learning difficulty to absenteeism, essentially confusing the symptom for the cause.

Students who fail to read at grade level by the end of third grade are four times more likely than students who achieve proficiency to drop out of high school, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, citing a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Adults without a high school education generally earn lower incomes and experience higher unemployment than their peers who do earn a high school diploma, putting them at greater risk for poverty.

Poor attendance can also have a negative effect on social and emotional development. For example, students who are chronically absent in the early years of their education may not learn crucial school readiness skills (abilities such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creative thinking), and can fall behind their peers in social-emotional development. Excessive absences are also associated with lower scores on standardized tests, which typically assess primary skills and concepts.

While students pay the highest cost if they miss too much school, high absence rates also put a burden on teachers. Making up for lost instruction adds to their workload, and the valuable classroom time it takes up is a detriment to all students.

Addressing Chronic Absenteeism

Just as chronic absenteeism has no single cause, it has no simple solution either. Parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers can all play a role in addressing high absence rates and improving children’s chances of receiving complete and effective education.

Strategies for Parents

Parents who are concerned that their child has a problem with school attendance can employ several strategies:

  • Talk with the child . Conversations are the first step to understanding root causes and working toward a solution.
  • Contact the school . Teachers, counselors, and administrators may be able to provide additional information that helps determine what is causing a child to miss school. Contacting the school also starts a conversation that can be mutually beneficial, and it demonstrates engagement.
  • Consider an evaluation for an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 Plan . Both programs can provide special accommodations and support for students who are struggling with disabilities.
  • Set attendance goals with the child . Creating a plan and tracking progress can encourage better attendance and provide opportunities for conversations and support. Simple steps such as making sure a child gets enough sleep and taking steps to prepare for school the day or night before can also be effective.

Strategies for Educators

Teachers, administrators, and policymakers can work together to address chronic absenteeism. Such efforts begin with gaining a better understanding of the importance of attendance:

  • Raise awareness . Training programs can help educators and administrators understand the importance of attendance and the long-term effects of chronic absenteeism.
  • Report and study absenteeism data . Identifying students at high risk and the most prevalent causes of absenteeism helps create evidence-based solutions to attendance problems. Identifying problems early is crucial for success.
  • Develop trauma-informed practices . Schools equipped to provide emotional support and resources to students who have suffered trauma can address a major cause of absenteeism.
  • Set clear expectations . Both students and their parents need clear guidelines about attendance rules and the consequences for missing school.
  • Schedule a meeting or visit with family . Reaching out to families personally (in person or using technology that allows social distancing) can be used to develop an individualized attendance plan for families.
  • Recognize good attendance . Celebrating students with good attendance and demonstrating concern (rather than frustration or dismissiveness) when students struggle with attendance creates a positive environment that encourages students.
  • Implement intervention programs . Some students may require counseling, mentorship, or behavioral interventions.
  • Engage with specialists for case management . Specialists who can offer assistance might include child welfare agency staff, mental health professionals, or other social support system employees.

Turning Negatives Into Positives

Parents and educators who do the difficult work of improving student attendance have powerful motivation. Every negative impact associated with chronic absenteeism has a positive corollary for high attendance. Students who regularly attend school and graduate from high school build a foundation for more positive life outcomes:

  • Better academic performance
  • More work options and earning potential
  • Greater opportunities for higher education
  • Higher civic engagement
  • More developed life skills that positively influence health and economic decisions

However great the challenge, improving attendance directly contributes to more equitable education and better student outcomes.

Empowering More Effective and Equitable Education

Chronic absenteeism is one of the most critical challenges facing educators. Addressing such a prevalent and significant barrier to education requires administrators with exceptional leadership and policy expertise.

American University’s School of Education prepares educators to create equitable learning environments and effect positive change. It promotes modern education that addresses more than just what students learn––it provides students with opportunities to reach their full potential and lead positive social change.

Suited for education leaders who believe in progressive change in education, American University’s Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership (EdD) program develops students in four primary domains: systems change, personal leadership, social justice and antiracism, and policy and research.

Discover how the Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership at American University enhances practical experience and theoretical knowledge, advances education careers, and develops professionals who transform education.

Education Policy Issues in 2020 and Beyond

Path to Becoming a School District Administrator

What’s the Difference Between Educational Equity and Equality?

American Academy of Pediatrics, School Attendance, Truancy & Chronic Absenteeism: What Parents Need to Know

Anxiety and Depression Association of America, Anxiety and Depression in Children

Attendance Works, 10 Facts About School Attendance

Attendance Works, “Data Matters: Using Chronic Absence to Accelerate Action for Student Success”

Children International, Child Poverty in the U.S. Attendance Works, “Mapping the Early Attendance Gap”

The Classroom, “The Effects of Excessive Absenteeism in Schools”

Economic Policy Institute, “Student Absenteeism: Who Misses School and How Missing School Matters for Performance”

National Center for Learning Disabilities, “The State of LD: Introduction”

National Center on Educational Outcomes, “Students With Disabilities & Chronic Absenteeism”

National Conference of State Legislatures, “Pre-Kindergarten-Third Grade Literacy”

PACER Center, “School Attendance Makes a Difference”

Stopbullying.gov, Facts About Bullying

Understood, “Chronic Absenteeism: What You Need to Know”

US Department of Education, 2017–18 Civil Rights Data Collection: General Overview, Changes, and List of Data Elements

US Department of Education, “Chronic Absenteeism in the Nation’s Schools”

US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Protecting Students With Disabilities

US Department of Health and Human Services, National Health Statistics Reports, “Chronic School Absenteeism Among Children With Selected Developmental Disabilities: National Health Interview Survey, 2014–2016”

Waterford.org, “What Your School Needs to Know About Trauma-Informed Practices”

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Statement of the Problem

What is chronic absenteeism, why does chronic absenteeism matter, causes of school absenteeism, evidence for physical and mental health interventions to improve school attendance, infection prevention, school nurses, school-based health centers, mental health care, school policies and programs, parent interventions, coordinated school health, recommendations, additional resources, organizations addressing school attendance, links to resources to share with patients and parents, lead authors, council on school health executive committee, 2017–2018, former executive committee members, consultants, former liaisons, the link between school attendance and good health.

POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: The authors have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.

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Mandy A. Allison , Elliott Attisha , COUNCIL ON SCHOOL HEALTH , Marc Lerner , Cheryl Duncan De Pinto , Nathaniel Savio Beers , Erica J. Gibson , Peter Gorski , Chris Kjolhede , Sonja C. O’Leary , Heidi Schumacher , Adrienne Weiss-Harrison; The Link Between School Attendance and Good Health. Pediatrics February 2019; 143 (2): e20183648. 10.1542/peds.2018-3648

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More than 6.5 million children in the United States, approximately 13% of all students, miss 15 or more days of school each year. The rates of chronic absenteeism vary between states, communities, and schools, with significant disparities based on income, race, and ethnicity. Chronic school absenteeism, starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, puts students at risk for poor school performance and school dropout, which in turn, put them at risk for unhealthy behaviors as adolescents and young adults as well as poor long-term health outcomes. Pediatricians and their colleagues caring for children in the medical setting have opportunities at the individual patient and/or family, practice, and population levels to promote school attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism and resulting health disparities. Although this policy statement is primarily focused on absenteeism related to students’ physical and mental health, pediatricians may play a role in addressing absenteeism attributable to a wide range of factors through individual interactions with patients and their parents and through community-, state-, and federal-level advocacy.

Chronic absenteeism broadly refers to missing too much school for any reason, including excused and unexcused absences as well as suspensions. The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has used a definition of missing 15 or more days over the course of a school year. 1 Most researchers and a growing number of states have defined chronic absenteeism as missing 10% (or around 18 days) of the entire school year. Some organizations suggest using 10%, because it promotes earlier identification of poor attendance throughout the school year. For example, identifying students who have missed just 2 days in the first month of school predicts chronic absence throughout the year. 2  

Chronic absence is different than truancy. The definition of truancy also varies but usually refers to when a student willfully misses school, and the absence is “unexcused.” 3 Although students who are truant may be chronically absent, focusing solely on truancy may miss those students who miss excessive amounts of school for “excused” reasons. Regardless of whether absences are unexcused or excused, chronic absenteeism typically results in poor academic outcomes and is linked to poor health outcomes.

Factors such as poverty, unstable housing conditions, poor parental health, and racial or ethnic minority status are associated with poor child health outcomes and are known in the medical and public health communities as social determinants of health. 4 , – 6 Students living in poverty are more likely than students from higher-income families to be chronically absent from school. 7 , 8 Factors associated with chronic absenteeism include poorer overall health, 9 , 10 unstable housing conditions, 11 transportation difficulties, and exposure to violence. 12 Students who change schools within the school year are also more likely to experience absenteeism. 13 In addition, youth may be called on to care for sick family members or stay home with younger siblings when a parent or primary caregiver is sick or cannot take time off work, and this is more likely to occur among low-income families. 14 Finally, authors of some studies have found that students from racial and ethnic minority groups and those who are English language learners are more likely to be chronically absent than students who are not in these groups. 1  

Children with a history of maltreatment or exposure to major trauma, such as witnessing domestic violence or experiencing a natural disaster, are more likely than those without these exposures to experience absenteeism, truancy, school suspension, and school dropout. 15 , – 17 These children are also more likely to experience other risk factors for chronic absenteeism, including poor mental and behavioral health, poverty, homelessness, and frequent school changes. 15 , 16 , 18 Children who are living in foster care are more likely to transfer schools within a year compared with the general school population; however, this effect is mitigated among children with more stable (3 months or longer) foster care placements. 16 Although reliable data are lacking regarding the effect of immigrant or refugee status on school attendance, immigrant and refugee children are likely to have 1 or more risk factors for poor school outcomes, including poverty, racial or ethnic minority status, and exposure to major trauma. 17 , 19  

Chronic absenteeism can occur as early as preschool and kindergarten and has been shown to be related to future chronic absenteeism, grade retention, and poor academic achievement, particularly for social skills and reading. 3 , 8 , 20 , 21 Among elementary school students, absenteeism is highest in kindergarten and first grade, then decreases until middle school. At least 10% of kindergarten and first-grade students miss a month or more of the school year. 21 Absenteeism tends to increase again in middle school and high school, with an estimated 19% of all high school students being chronically absent. 1 A national map of chronic absenteeism based on the US Department of Education’s 2013–2014 Civil Rights Data Collection reveals wide geographic variation in chronic absenteeism and describes variations on the basis of race and ethnicity, with African American, Hispanic, American Indian, and Pacific Islander students experiencing higher rates of chronic absenteeism than their white and Asian American peers. 22  

Students with poor attendance score lower than their peers who attend school regularly on national skills assessments, regardless of race or ethnicity. 3 Chronic absenteeism can be a better predictor of school failure than test scores. In 1 study, students with high test scores who missed at least 2 weeks of school during the semester were more likely to have failing grades than students with low test scores who regularly attended school. 23 Chronic absenteeism as early as sixth grade is predictive of dropping out of school. 3  

The literature reveals that poor school performance is associated with poor adult health outcomes. Compared with adults with higher educational attainment, those with low educational attainment are more likely to be unemployed or work at a part-time or lower-paying job. 24 Those with lower educational attainment are less likely to report having a fulfilling job, feeling that they have control over their lives, and feeling that they have high levels of social support. 24 , 25 This lack of control and social support is thought to be associated with poor health attributable to difficulty adhering to healthy behaviors, psychological processes such as depression, and biological processes such as increased inflammation and reduced immune system function. 26 Adults with lower educational attainment are also more likely to smoke and less likely to exercise, which are directly linked to poor health outcomes. 24 , 25 Not earning a high school diploma is associated with increased mortality risk or lower life expectancy. 27 Conversely, obtaining advanced degrees and additional years of education are associated with a reduced mortality risk. 27 Over the past 20 years, disparities in mortality rates based on educational attainment are worsening for preventable causes of death. 28  

Chronic absenteeism is associated with engaging in health risk behaviors, including smoking cigarettes or marijuana, alcohol and other drug use, and risky sexual behavior, such as having 4 or more sexual partners. 29 For every year a student delays alcohol or drug use, his or her odds of regular school attendance in subsequent quarters increase. 30 Students’ experiences of teenage pregnancy, violence, unintentional injury, and suicide attempts are associated with chronic absenteeism. 31 , – 33 Roughly 30% to 40% of female teenage dropouts are mothers, with teenage pregnancy being the number 1 cause of high school dropout for adolescent female students. 34 Poor school attendance is also associated with juvenile delinquency; in 1 study of youth in Mississippi from 2003 to 2013, authors found that those with chronic absenteeism had 3.5-times higher odds of being arrested or referred to the juvenile justice system. 35  

Students may be frequently absent from school for a wide variety of reasons. In the publication, “The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools,” Balfanz and Byrnes 36 describe 3 broad categories of causes: “(1) students who cannot attend school due to illness, family responsibilities, housing instability, the need to work or involvement with the juvenile justice system; (2) students who will not attend school to avoid bullying, unsafe conditions, harassment and embarrassment; and (3) students who do not attend school because they, or their parents, do not see the value in attending school, they have something else they would rather do, or nothing stops them from skipping school.” 36 An additional category (ie, “myths”) is also thought to cause problem absenteeism. Myths include when students and their families do not realize that missing just 2 days a month can be a problem, think that it is a problem only if absences are unexcused, or do not think absences are a problem for younger children in preschool through grade school. 14 Finally, school suspension and expulsion, as early as preschool, have increasingly been identified as causes of chronic absenteeism that disproportionately affect African American students and students with emotional and behavioral disorders and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. 37 , – 42  

Most studies of health-related causes of school absence have been conducted by authors focusing on a specific health condition and determining whether that condition is associated with missing school. Common health conditions that have been associated with school absenteeism include influenza infection, 43 , 44 group A streptococcal pharyngitis, 45 gastroenteritis, 46 fractures, 47 , – 49 poorly controlled asthma, 50 , – 54 type 1 diabetes mellitus, 55 chronic fatigue, 56 , 57 chronic pain 58 , – 62 (including headaches and abdominal pain), seizures, 63 poor oral health, 64 , – 67 dental pain, 68 , 69 and obesity. 70 , – 73 Experienced clinicians know that mental health conditions may present with physical health complaints, including some of those listed above that have been associated with frequent absences. Few studies have been conducted to identify groups of children with higher absenteeism and lower absenteeism and determine which health conditions are most prevalent among those with higher absenteeism. 74 Therefore, it is a challenge to clearly define which health conditions cause more absenteeism than others. In addition, although more data are needed, the data that exist and the authors’ clinical knowledge suggest that the most common health-related causes of school absenteeism likely vary among communities.

Although occasional absences attributable to health conditions can be expected, absences can quickly add up and lead to chronic absenteeism if a child experiences multiple health conditions, unrecognized or undertreated conditions, or lack of access to care. Absenteeism attributable to physical health conditions can be compounded by the presence of mental or behavioral health conditions and socioeconomic factors.

Children with disabilities are more likely to be chronically absent than children without disabilities. 1 Similarly, children and youth with special health care needs tend to have more school absences than children without. 75 , – 77 School performance, including absenteeism, of children and youth with special health care needs has been shown to be affected by risk and protective factors at the child, family, and system levels (eg, socioeconomic factors, the presence or absence of care coordination, and school climate and accommodations). 75 , 76 , 78 , – 80 Children with moderate-to-severe autism spectrum disorder may be at particular risk for disruptive behaviors that affect their own and other students’ learning. Students with autism spectrum disorder who display disruptive behaviors at school may be more likely to be excluded or absent from school. 81 , 82  

School absenteeism has been associated with mental health conditions and substance use disorders. 83 , – 86 Longitudinal cohort studies have revealed that conduct disorder and depressive symptoms can lead to frequent absenteeism and, conversely, that frequent absenteeism can lead to conduct disturbances and depressive symptoms. 87 Youth who are truant, defined as willfully refusing to attend school, are more likely than youth who attend school regularly to be diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, depression, and tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana abuse.

Studies have been used to examine school absenteeism by using a socioecologic model considering individual-, family-, and school-level factors. Authors of these studies have found that individual factors (such as hyperactivity, conduct problems, and poor perceived health), family factors (such as low maternal education and high levels of unemployment), and school factors (such as not feeling safe or not feeling treated with respect at school) all contributed to students’ poor attendance. 88 Issues that are likely to be brought up during a visit to a health care provider include bullying, gender identity and sexuality, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In-person and electronic bullying have been shown to be associated with school absenteeism. 89 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth have been shown to be at risk for poor school connectedness, and poor school connectedness is a risk for poor attendance. 90 Finally, students with higher numbers of ACEs are more likely to have chronic absenteeism than students with fewer ACEs. 91  

Many organizations are making multidisciplinary efforts to promote school attendance at community, state, and national levels. Although the body of evidence about effective interventions to improve school attendance is growing, high-quality evaluation has been limited by the lack of routine measurement of chronic absenteeism and differences in how schools and local educational agencies measure and define absenteeism and attendance. 36 Several national organizations and collaborations are working to promote school attendance by bringing together stakeholders from diverse sectors, including education, law enforcement, juvenile justice, public health, and health care. Summaries of additional evidence and information about strategies to promote school attendance and address chronic absenteeism are available from these organizations and are listed in the Additional Resources section below.

Interventions used to improve hand hygiene practices in schools include increased frequency of hand-washing and use of hand sanitizers. It is suggested in a 2016 review of 18 randomized controlled trials that hand hygiene interventions can be used to promote good hand hygiene practices among children and school staff and can be used to reduce the incidence of respiratory tract illness symptoms, symptoms attributable to influenza, and school absenteeism. 92 Evidence was mixed for hand hygiene interventions to reduce absenteeism attributable to gastrointestinal tract illness. 92 The effects of school-based infection prevention measures have been best studied for influenza. In addition to studies of hand hygiene interventions, 93 school-located influenza vaccination programs have been shown to reduce school absenteeism during influenza season. 94 Finally, school immunization requirements have been shown to increase immunization coverage in the community, and high levels of coverage are necessary for the prevention of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases that could lead to school absenteeism. 95  

School nurses play a significant role in student success and attendance. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Association of School Nurses recommend a minimum of 1 full-time professional school nurse in every school, recognizing that the ideal nurse-to-student ratio varies depending on the needs of the student population. 96 , 97 Healthy People 2020 includes goals to have a school nurse-to-student ratio of 1:750 in elementary and secondary schools. 98 School nurses have the expertise to identify and intervene on health issues that may affect the learning environment and are critical team members for ensuring that students’ individualized education programs, 504 plans, or health care plans are appropriately designed and implemented. 96 , 97 , 99 Given the complexity of studying nursing services in the school setting and the paucity of research funding and researchers studying school nursing services, data regarding the effect of school nurses on school attendance are limited. One study revealed that 95% of students seen by a school nurse for illness or injury are able to return to class compared with 82% of students seen by an unlicensed school employee. 100 Studies have also revealed that the addition of full-time school nurses reduces illness-related absenteeism among children with asthma compared with children with asthma in schools with part-time school nurses. 101 , 102 One literature review revealed that school nurses can improve attendance among students with chronic absenteeism and that lower nurse-to-student ratios were associated with improved school-level attendance rates. 103 Many schools have nurse coverage only part-time, and some schools do not have nurse coverage at all 104 ; therefore, a health aide or other school personnel may provide some school health services. The services provided by health aides or other school personnel are essential when a nurse is not available, but these other providers typically do not have nursing training.

School-based health centers (SBHCs) have been shown to improve education outcomes, including grade point average and high school graduation, 105 and have been recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force to improve both education and health outcomes in low-income communities. 106 SBHCs provide health services to students who otherwise may have been sent home or missed school because of illnesses and injuries or attending medical appointments for management of chronic health problems. School-based health services can include preventive services, dental services, and mental or behavioral health services. 107 Research has shown SBHCs can reduce absenteeism. Authors of a study of SBHC users in Seattle found that those who used the clinic for medical purposes had a significant increase in attendance over nonusers. 108 , 109 African American male SBHC users were 3 times more likely to stay in school than their peers who did not use the SBHC. Authors of 2 studies in New York found that students enrolled in SBHCs had more time in class, better attendance, and fewer hospitalizations attributable to asthma. 110 , 111 Authors of another study found a 50% decrease in absenteeism and 25% decrease in tardiness for high school students who received school-based mental health services. 112 Overall, SBHCs have been shown to improve school attendance for students who use SBHCs for physical and mental health care, with greater improvement for those using SBHCs for physical health. 108 , 110 , 113  

Authors of a recent review of children’s mental health services provided in schools or in other community-based or clinic settings found that educational outcomes, including school attendance, are infrequently measured. 114 The authors of this review did suggest that mental health treatment was associated with improved overall educational outcomes for children. Investigators found that providing cognitive behavioral therapy for students identified with “school refusing” can improve attendance as well as anxiety and depressive symptoms. 115 , 116 “Trauma-informed schools” are schools in which the adults in the school community are prepared to recognize and respond to those who have been affected by trauma. 117 These schools are focused on the life experiences of a student and how the experiences may affect the student’s behavior and performance at school. In addition, these schools provide individual mental health interventions for students and/or link students and families to services in the community. Although research in this area is new and ongoing, a trauma-informed approach at schools appears to reduce school suspensions and expulsions and improve attendance and school performance. 117 Overall, more evidence is needed, specifically regarding the effectiveness of school-based mental health services and trauma-informed approaches for improving school attendance. 118 , 119  

Policies that promote a positive school climate can promote attendance. 120 As defined by the National School Climate Center, “School climate refers to the quality and character of school life. School climate is based on patterns of students’, parents’ and school personnel’s experience of school life and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures.” 121 The concepts of school climate and school connectedness are closely related, and research reveals that students who feel a connection with their school are more likely to attend and less likely to engage in risky behaviors. 32 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified specific strategies to improve school connectedness. 122 The CDC also provides technical guidance regarding prevention of youth violence, including bullying, for schools and communities. This guidance suggests strategies including universal school-based programs for strengthening youth skills, connecting youth to caring adults and activities through mentoring and after-school programs, and creating protective community environments including a positive school climate. It is suggested in evidence that these strategies can be used to reduce youth violence and, in turn, improve school connectedness, attendance, and academic success. 123 Although many of these strategies are directed toward education professionals in the schools, they include engaging with community partners such as health care professionals. Some researchers suggest rewarding students for good attendance with parties, gift certificates, or other types of special recognition results in higher attendance rates. 124  

Schools that communicate effectively with all parents, regardless of language or culture, provide parents with a specific school contact person who can address their questions and concerns, and provide workshops about school attendance for parents have higher attendance rates. 124 , 125 Strong parental monitoring and parental involvement (eg, when a parent knows whether his or her child is attending school) are related to lower levels of delinquency, which is associated to better school attendance. 126 In 1 study conducted in 2014–2015 among students in kindergarten through 11th grade in Philadelphia, authors indicated that simply informing parents of their children’s absences from school can help reduce subsequent absenteeism; this may be partly because parents have misbeliefs about how much their child has been absent. 14 , 127 Schools that build strong partnerships with families and the community have shown improved student attendance. 125 In addition to school nurses and other members of the school health team, school counselors can play a key role in developing these partnerships. 128 , 129  

The CDC’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model provides a framework for health and educational professionals to promote students’ health and academic achievement. 130 , 131 The components of this model are health education; physical education and physical activity; nutrition environment and services; health services; counseling, psychological, and social services; social and emotional climate; physical environment; employee wellness; family engagement; and community involvement. Although not all of these components have been studied in relation to school attendance, authors of a recent comprehensive summary of the literature indicate that each component plays a role in improving children’s academic performance. 132 Aspects of nutrition services (breakfast at school); health services (nursing services); counseling, psychological, and social services (school-based mental health care); social and emotional school climate (school connectedness); physical environment (full-spectrum lighting, reduction of physical threats, indoor air quality); family engagement; and community involvement have all been associated with improved school attendance. 132  

Pediatricians could address school attendance in their office-based practices and communities and/or states or nationally as advocates using a tiered approach. The office-based approaches could include members of the health care team, such as front office staff, medical assistants, nurses, or care coordinators, to reduce the burden on the pediatrician.

These office-based and advocacy approaches promote school attendance for all youth.

Office-Based

Routinely ask at preventive care visits and sick visits about the number of absences a student has experienced. Consider adding questions about the number of missed school days in the previous month and the name of the school each patient is currently attending in templates in the paper or electronic medical record;

Encourage parents to bring copies of their child’s report card or share data available from their child’s online school information system during preventive visits. These data sources usually include information about school absences and tardiness;

Praise patients and caregivers when patients are regularly attending school, meaning they miss no more than a day per month on average;

Talk about the effects of school absences on school performance and future wellness. Talk about how absences can add up. Stress the value of developing strong attendance habits as early as preschool;

Support parents in addressing barriers to attendance;

Ask families of children with chronic health issues, such as asthma, allergies, and seizures, if they have an action plan at school. Help complete school action plans so that families feel secure sending their children to school. When needed, work with the school nurse to adjust the action plan when there is a change in a patient’s condition. Some states and national organizations or foundations have developed standardized forms for asthma, 133 allergy, 134 and seizure action plans 135 ;

Encourage families to share their concerns about their children’s health with their school nurse;

Assist families in documenting and interpreting their children’s medical needs or disability for an individualized education program or 504 plan to help them establish services to optimize learning opportunities 99 , 136 ;

Promote school attendance by using handouts, posters, or videos in your waiting area (see links to resources below), working with community partners (eg, during September Attendance Awareness Month campaigns: http://awareness.attendanceworks.org/ ), and communicating via your practice Web site or social media;

Educate yourself and your office staff about the appropriate and inappropriate reasons to exclude a child from school. Additional information about appropriate school inclusion and exclusion criteria can be found in the following publications from the AAP: Managing Infectious Disease in Child Care and Schools: A Quick Reference Guide 137 and the chapter on school health in the Red Book: 2015 Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases 138 ;

Provide firm guidance on when a child should stay home if sick and how to avoid absences from minor illness or anxiety (links to resource below);

Learn about resources in the community and connect families with resources that can improve the well-being of the entire family (eg, family counseling, food pantries, housing assistance) as described in more detail in the “Poverty and Child Health in the United States” policy statement 139 ; and

Routinely ask about whether your patients have experienced out-of-school suspension or expulsion and assist patients and families affected by suspension and expulsion (more detail in the “Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion” policy statement). 42  

Population-Based

Pediatricians are encouraged to be advocates and supporters of children’s health. Available opportunities may include the following:

Work with AAP chapter leaders to advocate at the school, school district, state school board, and state legislative levels for policies and interventions known to promote school attendance. These interventions can include policies and approaches that promote a positive school climate and avoid suspension and expulsion. 42 , 121 Advocate for funding to ensure adequate numbers of school support personnel, including school nurses and school counselors, and for school-based medical, oral, and behavioral health services 96 , 140 ;

Encourage and collaborate with community leaders (faith leaders, public officials, businesses) to develop and deliver consistent and coordinated community-specific and culturally salient messages that inform the public about the importance of regular school attendance at all ages, starting in early childhood;

Educate and collaborate with school professionals about appropriate and inappropriate reasons for exclusion (eg, some schools continue to exclude children with head lice from school despite a strong, evidence-based recommendation to avoid exclusion from school for head lice). 141 AAP chapter leaders and the Council on School Health can provide assistance in these efforts;

Support school districts’ efforts to improve children’s and families’ access to health insurance and medical services;

Serve as a school physician or on a school board, school or school district health services advisory committee, or wellness committee to develop policies and practices that promote school attendance 142 ;

Work with your state school board, department of education, or school districts (local educational agencies) to encourage schools to consistently collect and share data with public health and health care providers on chronic absence by grade, school, and neighborhood, because chronic absence is often an indicator that children and families are struggling with health-related issues. Develop and promote strategies that encourage data sharing and are compliant with existing privacy laws;

Work with schools to identify physical and mental health conditions that are significantly contributing to school absenteeism among their students and help identify interventions to address these conditions; and

Encourage public health departments to compare chronic absence data and available health metrics to identify where collaborative action would be helpful.

In addition to the approaches described in tier 1, pediatricians can use the following office-based interventions for patients who are missing 2 or 3 days of school per month (∼10% of total school time):

Prevent, identify, and treat physical and mental health conditions that are contributing to school absences. Collaboration with school and mental health professionals is essential in the treatment of youth with psychosomatic symptoms that result in poor school attendance;

When possible, identify psychosocial risk factors and health factors among a patient’s caregivers that may be contributing to the patient’s school absenteeism and refer the caregiver to appropriate resources in the community;

Avoid writing excuses for school absences when the absence was not appropriate and avoid backdating to justify absences;

Strongly encourage patients who are well enough to attend school to return to school immediately after their medical appointments, so they do not miss the entire day;

Avoid contributing to school absences. In concordance with the medical home concepts of providing accessible, continuous, and family-centered care, consider offering extended office hours and encourage families to make preventive care appointments and follow-up appointments for times outside of regular school hours 143 ;

Communicate and collaborate with school professionals and community partners to manage the health conditions of your patients with chronic absenteeism. The school nurse is usually the best first contact. 96 The AAP publication Managing Chronic Health Needs in Child Care and Schools 136 is a reference that may be particularly useful in the child care or preschool settings, where a school nurse or child care health consultant may not be readily available; and

Encourage parents of students with excessive absences to seek a formal school team meeting (often termed a school study team) to discuss how the school and family can cooperate to address the issue. Specifically, parents can request that their student be considered for participation in their school’s behavioral intervention system. 144  

In addition to the approaches described in tiers 1 and 2, pediatricians can use the following office-based interventions for patients who have severe chronic absenteeism and are missing 4 or more days of school per month (∼15% of total school time):

Encourage the school or school district to provide services such as intensive case management and mentorship, communicate and collaborate with professionals providing support services in school, and serve as your patient’s advocate and medical expert; and

Children are eligible for home or hospital educational services from the public schools if they have a legitimate medical reason for absences. The use of these services should be clearly justified on the basis of the patient’s medical presentation. The goal should be for these services to be time limited. Communicate and collaborate with school professionals to decide whether out-of-school instruction is appropriate, develop a time line for out-of-school instruction, develop a reentry plan, and identify whether an alternative to out-of-school instruction is appropriate.

America’s Promise Alliance, Grad Nation ( http://www.americaspromise.org/program/gradnation );

Attendance Works ( http://www.attendanceworks.org/ );

Everyone Graduates Center ( http://www.every1graduates.org/ );

Healthy Schools Campaign ( https://healthyschoolscampaign.org/ );

National Center for Education Statistics, Every School Day Counts ( https://nces.ed.gov/ ); and

National Center for School Engagement ( http://schoolengagement.org/ ).

Handouts to give to parents ( http://www.attendanceworks.org/resources/handouts-for-families/ );

Video to show in waiting room ( http://www.attendanceworks.org/tools/for-parents/bringing-attendance-home-video/ ); and

Mobile-friendly Web site geared to preteenagers, teenagers, and their parents ( https://getschooled.com/dashboard ).

FUNDING: No external funding.

This document is copyrighted and is property of the American Academy of Pediatrics and its Board of Directors. All authors have filed conflict of interest statements with the American Academy of Pediatrics. Any conflicts have been resolved through a process approved by the Board of Directors. The American Academy of Pediatrics has neither solicited nor accepted any commercial involvement in the development of the content of this publication.

Policy statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics benefit from expertise and resources of liaisons and internal (AAP) and external reviewers. However, policy statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics may not reflect the views of the liaisons or the organizations or government agencies that they represent.

The guidance in this statement does not indicate an exclusive course of treatment or serve as a standard of medical care. Variations, taking into account individual circumstances, may be appropriate.

All policy statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics automatically expire 5 years after publication unless reaffirmed, revised, or retired at or before that time.

American Academy of Pediatrics

adverse childhood experience

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

school-based health center

Mandy Allison, MD, MSPH, FAAP

Elliott Attisha, DO, FAAP

Marc Lerner, MD, FAAP, Chairperson

Cheryl Duncan De Pinto, MD, MPH, FAAP, Chairperson Elect

Nathaniel Savio Beers, MD, MPA, FAAP

Erica J. Gibson, MD, FAAP

Peter Gorski, MD, MPA, FAAP

Chris Kjolhede, MD, MPH, FAAP

Sonja C. O’Leary, MD, FAAP

Heidi Schumacher, MD, FAAP

Adrienne Weiss-Harrison, MD, FAAP

Richard Ancona, MD, FAAP

Breena Welch Holmes, MD, FAAP, Immediate Past Chairperson

Jeffrey Okamoto, MD, FAAP, FAAP, Past Chairperson

Thomas Young, MD, FAAP

Hedy Chang – Attendance Works

Ken Seeley – National Center for School Engagement

Susan Hocevar Adkins, MD, FAAP

Laurie Combe, MN, RN, NCSN

Veda Charmaine Johnson, MD, FAAP

Shashank Joshi, MD

Nina Fekaris, MS, BSN, RN, NCSN

Linda Grant, MD, MPH

Sheryl Kataoka, MD, MSHS

Sandra Leonard, DNP, RN, FNP

Madra Guinn-Jones, MPH

Stephanie Domain, MS

Competing Interests

Re:the link between school attendance and good health.

As a Paediatrician who fully ascribes to the dictum that school non attendance is linked to long term life failure I acknowledge how crucial school attendance is. Furthermore I have my own aphorism which is that 'sick children go to school' - as evidenced by our patients with cancer, cystic fibrosis, JIA etc who are keen to go to school and whose parents are desperate to send them. School non attendance is more usually linked to factors such as separation anxiety, somatisation and at extremes embellishment and fabrication. there are often child and parental factors involved. School non attendance is therefore a manifestation of other underlying issues. School attendance per se seems to be crucial as even children who are successful academically function less well in society if they have not been to school. There is an unanswered question as to whether school absence is merely a symptom of wider dysfunction or an additional cause and exacerbating factor. The implication, and an orthodoxy which we believe, is that attending school is an important intervention by removing children from a somewhat negative home environment and exposing them to a more normal one in school including providing the skills required for social living. if school non attendance is predominantly a symptom of multiple other issues it is unlikely that increasing attendance alone will improve outcomes until the other cause are addressed

Ref; Understanding School Refusal A Handbook for Professionals in Education, Health and Social Care M. S. Thambirajah, Karen J. Grandison and Louise De-Hayes Jessica Kinsley publishers 2007

RE: The Link Between School Attendance and Good Health

Pediatricians and Pediatric Dentist should routinely tell the parents of their young patients that they are to return to school the same day before/after routine office visits. My experience in the school health office is that students may have an early morning or an afternoon appointment for annual/semi-annual check ups but keep the student out of school for the entire day.

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Report | Children

Student absenteeism : Who misses school and how missing school matters for performance

Report • By Emma García and Elaine Weiss • September 25, 2018

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A broader understanding of the importance of student behaviors and school climate as drivers of academic performance and the wider acceptance that schools have a role in nurturing the “whole child” have increased attention to indicators that go beyond traditional metrics focused on proficiency in math and reading. The 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which requires states to report a nontraditional measure of student progress, has codified this understanding.

The vast majority of U.S. states have chosen to comply with ESSA by using measures associated with student absenteeism—and particularly, chronic absenteeism. This report uses data on student absenteeism to answer several questions: How much school are students missing? Which groups of students are most likely to miss school? Have these patterns changed over time? And how much does missing school affect performance?

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2015 show that about one in five students missed three days of school or more in the month before they took the NAEP mathematics assessment. Students who were diagnosed with a disability, students who were eligible for free lunch, Hispanic English language learners, and Native American students were the most likely to have missed school, while Asian students were rarely absent. On average, data show children in 2015 missing fewer days than children in 2003.

Our analysis also confirms prior research that missing school hurts academic performance: Among eighth-graders, those who missed school three or more days in the month before being tested scored between 0.3 and 0.6 standard deviations lower (depending on the number of days missed) on the 2015 NAEP mathematics test than those who did not miss any school days.

Introduction and key findings

Education research has long suggested that broader indicators of student behavior, student engagement, school climate, and student well-being are associated with academic performance, educational attainment, and with the risk of dropping out. 1

One such indicator—which has recently been getting a lot of attention in the wake of the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015—is student absenteeism. Absenteeism—including chronic absenteeism—is emerging as states’ most popular metric to meet ESSA’s requirement to report a “nontraditional” 2 measure of student progress (a metric of “school quality or student success”). 3

Surprisingly, even though it is widely understood that absenteeism has a substantial impact on performance—and even though absenteeism has become a highly popular metric under ESSA—there is little guidance for how schools, districts, and states should use data about absenteeism. Few empirical sources allow researchers to describe the incidence, trends over time, and other characteristics of absenteeism that would be helpful to policymakers and educators. In particular, there is a lack of available evidence that allows researchers to examine absenteeism at an aggregate national level, or that offers a comparison across states and over time. And although most states were already gathering aggregate information on attendance (i.e., average attendance rate at the school or district level) prior to ESSA, few were looking closely into student-level attendance metrics, such as the number of days each student misses or if a student is chronically absent, and how they mattered. These limitations reduce policymakers’ ability to design interventions that might improve students’ performance on nontraditional indicators, and in turn, boost the positive influence of those indicators (or reduce their negative influence) on educational progress.

In this report, we aim to fill some of the gaps in the analysis of data surrounding absenteeism. We first summarize existing evidence on who misses school and how absenteeism matters for performance. We then analyze the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data from 2003 (the first assessment with information available for every state) and 2015 (the most recent available microdata). As part of the NAEP assessment, fourth- and eighth-graders were asked about their attendance during the month prior to taking the NAEP mathematics test. (The NAEP assessment may be administered anytime between the last week of January and the end of the first week of March, so “last month” could mean any one-month period between the first week of January and the first week of March.) Students could report that they missed no days, 1–2 days, 3–4 days, 5–10 days, or more than 10 days.

We use this information to describe how much school children are missing, on average; which groups of children miss school most often; and whether there have been any changes in these patterns between 2003 and 2015. We provide national-level estimates of the influence of missing school on performance for all students, as well as for specific groups of students (broken out by gender, race/ethnicity and language status, poverty/income status, and disability status), to detect whether absenteeism is more problematic for any of these groups. We also present evidence that higher levels of absenteeism are associated with lower levels of student performance. We focus on the characteristics and outcomes of students who missed three days of school or more in the previous month (the aggregate of those missing 3–4, 5–10, and more than 10 school days), which is our proxy for chronic absenteeism. 4 We also discuss data associated with children who had perfect attendance the previous month and those who missed more than 10 days of school (our proxy for extreme chronic absenteeism).

Given that the majority of states (36 states and the District of Columbia) are using “chronic absenteeism” as a metric in their ESSA accountability plans, understanding the drivers and characteristics of absenteeism and, thus, the policy and practice implications, is more important than ever (Education Week 2017). Indeed, if absenteeism is to become a useful additional indicator of learning and help guide effective policy interventions, it is necessary to determine who experiences higher rates of absenteeism; why students miss school days; and how absenteeism affects student performance (after controlling for factors associated with absenteeism that also influence performance).

Major findings include:

One in five eighth-graders was chronically absent. Typically, in 2015, about one in five eighth-graders (19.2 percent) missed school three days or more in the month before the NAEP assessment and would be at risk of being chronically absent if that pattern were sustained over the school year.

  • About 13 percent missed 3–4 days of school in 2015; about 5 percent missed 5–10 days of school (between a quarter and a half of the month); and a small minority, less than 2 percent, missed more than 10 days of school, or half or more of the school days that month.
  • We find no significant differences in rates of absenteeism and chronic absenteeism by grade (similar shares of fourth-graders and eighth-graders were absent), and the patterns were relatively stable between 2003 and 2015.
  • While, on average, there was no significant change in absenteeism levels between 2003 and 2015, there was a significant decrease over this period in the share of students missing more than 10 days of school.

Absenteeism varied substantially among the groups we analyzed. In our analysis, we look at absenteeism by gender, race/ethnicity and language status, FRPL (free or reduced-price lunch) eligibility (our proxy for poverty status), 5 and IEP (individualized education program) status (our proxy for disability status). 6 Some groups had much higher shares of students missing school than others.

  • Twenty-six percent of IEP students missed three school days or more, compared with 18.3 percent of non-IEP students.
  • Looking at poverty-status groups, 23.2 percent of students eligible for free lunch, and 17.9 percent of students eligible for reduced-price lunch, missed three school days or more, compared with 15.4 percent of students who were not FRPL-eligible (that is, eligible for neither free lunch nor reduced-price lunch).
  • Among students missing more than 10 days of school, the share of free-lunch-eligible students was more than twice as large as the share of non-FRPL-eligible students (2.3 percent vs. 1.1 percent). Similarly, the share of IEP students in this category was more than double the share of non-IEP students (3.2 percent vs. 1.5 percent).
  • Perfect attendance rates were slightly higher among black and Hispanic non-ELL students than among white students, although all groups lagged substantially behind Asian students in this indicator.
  • Hispanic ELL students and Asian ELL students were the most likely to have missed more than 10 school days, at 3.9 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. These shares are significantly higher than the overall average rate of 1.7 percent and than the shares for their non-ELL counterparts (Hispanic non-ELL students, 1.6 percent; Asian non-ELL students, 0.6 percent).

Absenteeism varied by state. Some states had much higher absenteeism rates than others. Patterns within states remained fairly consistent over time.

  • In 2015, California and Massachusetts were the states with the highest full-attendance rates: 51.1 and 51.0 percent, respectively, of their students did not miss any school days; they are closely followed by Virginia (48.4 percent) and Illinois and Indiana (48.3 percent).
  • At the other end of the spectrum, Utah and Wyoming had the largest shares of students missing more than 10 days of school in the month prior to the 2015 assessment (4.6 and 3.5 percent, respectively).
  • Five states and Washington, D.C., stood out for their high shares of students missing three or more days of school in 2015: in Utah, nearly two-thirds of students (63.5 percent) missed three or more days; in Alaska, nearly half (49.6 percent) did; and in the District of Columbia, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana, nearly three in 10 students were in this absenteeism category.
  • In most states, overall absenteeism rates changed little between 2003 and 2015.

Prior research linking chronic absenteeism with lowered academic performance is confirmed by our results. As expected, and as states have long understood, missing school is negatively associated with academic performance (after controlling for factors including race, poverty status, gender, IEP status, and ELL status). As students miss school more frequently, their performance worsens.

  • Overall performance gaps. The gaps in math scores between students who did not miss any school and those who missed three or more days of school varied from 0.3 standard deviations (for students who missed 3–4 days of school the month prior to when the assessment was taken) to close to two-thirds of a standard deviation (for those who missed more than 10 days of school). The gap between students who did not miss any school and those who missed just 1–2 days of school was 0.10 standard deviations, a statistically significant but relatively small difference in practice.
  • For Hispanic non-ELL students, missing more than 10 days of school harmed their performance on the math assessment more strongly than for the average (0.74 standard deviations vs. 0.64 on average).
  • For Asian non-ELL students, the penalty for missing school was smaller than the average (except for those missing 5–10 days).
  • Missing school hindered performance similarly across the three poverty-status groups (nonpoor, somewhat poor, and poor). However, given that there are substantial differences in the frequency with which children miss school by poverty status (that is, poor students are more likely to be chronically absent than nonpoor students), absenteeism may in fact further widen income-based achievement gaps.

What do we already know about why children miss school and which children miss school? What do we add to this evidence?

Poor health, parents’ nonstandard work schedules, low socioeconomic status (SES), changes in adult household composition (e.g., adults moving into or out of the household), residential mobility, and extensive family responsibilities (e.g., children looking after siblings)—along with inadequate supports for students within the educational system (e.g., lack of adequate transportation, unsafe conditions, lack of medical services, harsh disciplinary measures, etc.)—are all associated with a greater likelihood of being absent, and particularly with being chronically absent (Ready 2010; U.S. Department of Education 2016). 8 Low-income students and families disproportionately face these challenges, and some of these challenges may be particularly acute in disadvantaged areas 9 ; residence in a disadvantaged area may therefore amplify or reinforce the distinct negative effects of absenteeism on educational outcomes for low-income students.

A detailed 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Education showed that students with disabilities were more likely to be chronically absent than students without disabilities; Native American and Pacific Islander students were more likely to be chronically absent than students of other races and ethnicities; and non-ELL students were more likely to be chronically absent than ELL students. 10 It also showed that students in high school were more likely to miss school than students in other grades, and that about 500 school districts reported that 30 percent or more of their students missed at least three weeks of school in 2013–2014 (U.S. Department of Education 2016).

Our analysis complements this evidence by adding several dimensions to the breakdown of who misses school—including absenteeism rates by poverty status and state—and by analyzing how missing school harms performance. We distinguish by the number of school days students report having missed in the month prior to the assessment (using five categories, from no days missed to more than 10 days missed over the month), 11 and we compare absenteeism rates across grades and across cohorts (between 2003 and 2015), as available in the NAEP data. 12

How much school are children missing? Are they missing more days than the previous generation?

In 2015, almost one in five, or 19.2 percent of, eighth-grade students missed three or more days of school in the month before they participated in NAEP testing. 13 About 13 percent missed 3–4 days, roughly 5 percent missed 5–10 days, and a small share—less than 2 percent—missed more than 10 days, or half or more of the instructional days that month ( Figure A , bottom panel). 14

How much school are children missing? : Share of eighth-grade students by attendance/absenteeism category, in the eighth-grade mathematics NAEP sample, 2003 and 2015

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Source: EPI analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress microdata, 2003 and 2015

On average, however, students in 2015 did not miss any more days than students in the earlier period; by some measures, they missed less school than children in 2003 (Figure A, top panel). While the share of students with occasional absences (1–2 days) increased moderately between 2003 and 2015, the share of students who missed more than three days of school declined by roughly 3 percentage points between 2003 and 2015. This reduction was distributed about evenly (in absolute terms) across the shares of students missing 3–4, 5–10, and more than 10 days of school. But in relative terms, the reduction was much more significant in the share of students missing more than 10 days of school (the share decreased by nearly one-third). We find no significant differences by grade ( Appendix Figure A ) or by subject. Thus, we have chosen to focus our analyses below on the sample of eighth-graders taking the math assessment only.

Which groups miss school most often? Which groups suffer the most from chronic absenteeism?

Absenteeism by race/ethnicity and language status.

Hispanic ELLs and the group made up of Native Americans plus “all other races” (not white, black, Hispanic, or Asian) are the racial/ethnic and language status groups that missed school most frequently in 2015. Only 39.6 percent (Native American or other) and 41.2 percent (Hispanic ELL) did not miss any school in the month prior to the assessment (vs. 44.4 percent overall, 43.2 percent for white students, 43.5 percent for black students, and 44.1 percent for Hispanic non-ELL students; see Figure B1 ). 15

Which groups of students had the highest shares missing no school? : Share of eighth-graders with perfect attendance in the month prior to the 2015 NAEP mathematics assessment, by group

Notes: Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL eligibility, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

Source: EPI analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress microdata, 2015

Asian students (both non-ELL and ELL) are the least likely among all racial/ethnic student groups to be absent from school at all. Two-thirds of Asian non-ELL students and almost as many (61.6 percent of) Asian ELL students did not miss any school. Among Asian non-ELL students, only 8.8 percent missed three or more days of school: 6.1 percent missed 3–4 days (12.7 percent on average), 2.1 percent missed 5–10 days (relative to 4.8 percent for the overall average), and only 0.6 percent missed more than 10 days of school (relative to 1.7 percent for the overall average). Among Asian ELL students, the share who missed three or more days of school was 13.3 percent.

As seen in Figure B2 , the differences in absenteeism rates between white students and Hispanic non-ELL students were relatively small, when looking at the shares of students missing three or more days of school (18.3 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively). The gaps are somewhat larger for black, Native American, and Hispanic ELL students relative to white students (with shares missing three or more days at 23.0, 24.0, and 24.1 percent, respectively, relative to 18.3 percent for white students).

Which groups of students had the highest shares missing three or more days? : Share of eighth-graders missing three or more days of school in the month prior to the 2015 NAEP mathematics assessment, by group

Notes: This chart represents the aggregate of data for students who missed 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days of school. Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL eligibility, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

Among students who missed a lot of school (more than 10 days), there were some more substantial differences by race and language status. About 3.9 percent of Hispanic ELL students and 3.2 percent of Asian ELL students missed more than 10 days of school, compared with 2.2 percent for Native American and other races, 2.0 percent for black students, 1.4 percent for white students, and only 0.6 percent for Asian non-ELL students (all relative to the overall average of 1.7 percent) (see Figure B3 ).

Which groups of students had the highest shares missing more than 10 days? : Share of eighth-graders missing more than 10 days of school in the month prior to the 2015 NAEP mathematics assessment, by group

Notes:  Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL status, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

Absenteeism by income status

The attendance gaps are even larger by income status than they are by race/ethnicity and language status (Figures B1–B3). Poor (free-lunch-eligible) students were 5.9 percentage points more likely to miss some school than nonpoor (non-FRPL-eligible) students, and they were 7.8 percentage points more likely to miss school three or more days (23.2 vs. 15.4 percent). 16 Among somewhat poor (reduced-price-lunch-eligible) students, 17.9 percent missed three or more days of school. The lowest-income (free-lunch-eligible) students were 4.1 percentage points more likely to miss school 3–4 days than non-FRPL-eligible students, and more than 2.4 percentage points more likely to miss school 5–10 days ( Appendix Figure B ). Finally, and most striking, free-lunch-eligible students—the most economically disadvantaged students—were more than twice as likely to be absent from school for more than 10 days as nonpoor students. In other words, they were much more likely to experience extreme chronic absenteeism. Figures B1–B3 show that the social-class gradient for the prevalence of absenteeism, proxied by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch, is noticeable in all absenteeism categories, and especially when it comes to those students who missed the most school.

Absenteeism by disability status

Students with IEPs were by far the most likely to miss school relative to all other groups. 17 The share of IEP students missing school exceeded the share of non-IEP students missing school by 7.7 percentage points (Figure B1). More than one in four IEP students had missed school three days or more in the previous month (Figure B2). About 15.5 percent of students with IEPs missed school 3–4 days (vs. 12.4 percent among non-IEP students); 7.3 percent missed 5–10 days; and 3.2 percent missed more than 10 days of school in the month before being tested (Appendix Figure B; Figure B3).

Absenteeism by gender

The differences by gender are slightly surprising (Figures B1–B3). Boys showed a higher full-attendance rate than girls (46.6 vs. 42.1 percent did not miss any school), and boys were no more likely than girls to display extreme chronic absenteeism (1.7 percent of boys and 1.6 percent of girls missed more than 10 days of school). Boys (18.2 percent) were also slightly less likely than girls (20.2 percent) to be chronically absent (to miss three or more days of school, as per our definition).

Has there been any change over time in which groups of children are most often absent from school?

For students in several groups, absenteeism fell between 2003 and 2015 ( Figure C1 ), in keeping with the overall decline noted above. Hispanic students (both ELL and non-ELL), Asian non-ELL students, Native American and other race students, free-lunch-eligible (poor) students, reduced-priced-lunch-eligible (somewhat poor) students, non-FRPL-eligible (nonpoor) students, and IEP students were all less likely to miss school in 2015 than they were over a decade earlier. For non-IEP and white students, however, the share of students who did not miss any school days in the month prior to NAEP testing remained essentially unchanged, while it increased slightly for black students and Asian ELL students (by about 2 percentage points each).

How much have perfect attendance rates changed since 2003? : Percentage-point change in the share of eighth-graders who had perfect attendance in the month prior to the NAEP mathematics assessment, between 2003 and 2015, by group

Notes: Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL status, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

As seen in Figure C2 , we also note across-the-board reductions in the shares of students who missed three or more days of school (with the exception of the share of Asian ELL students, which increased by 1.7 percentage points over the time studied). The largest reductions occurred for students with disabilities (IEP students), Hispanic non-ELL students, Native American students or students of other races, free-lunch-eligible students, and non-FRPL-eligible students (each of these groups experienced a reduction of at least 4.4 percentage points). 18 For all groups except Asian ELL students, the share of students missing more than 10 days of school ( Figure C3 ) also decreased (for Asian ELL students, it increased by 1.3 percentage points).

How much have rates of students missing three or more days changed since 2003? : Percentage-point change in the share of eighth-graders who were absent from school three or more days in the month prior to the NAEP mathematics assessment, between 2003 and 2015, by group

Notes: This chart represents the aggregate of data for students who missed 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days of school. Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL status, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

How much have rates of students missing more than 10 days changed since 2003? : Percentage-point change in the share of eighth-graders who were absent from school more than 10 days in the month prior to the NAEP mathematics assessment, between 2003 and 2015, by group

Notes: Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL status, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines).

In order to get a full understanding of these comparisons, we need to look at both the absolute and relative differences. Overall, the data presented show modest absolute differences in the shares of students who are absent (at any level) in various groups when compared with the averages for all students (Figures B1–B3 and Appendix Figure B). The differences (both absolute and relative) among student groups missing a small amount of school (1–2 days) are minimal for most groups. However, while the differences among groups are very small in absolute terms for students missing a lot of school (more than 10 days), some of the differences are very large in relative terms. (And, taking into account the censoring problem mentioned earlier, they could potentially be even larger.)

The fact that the absolute differences are small is in marked contrast to differences seen in many other education indicators of outcomes and inputs, which tend to be much larger by race and income divisions (Carnoy and García 2017; García and Weiss 2017). Nevertheless, both the absolute and relative differences we find are revealing and important, and they add to the set of opportunity gaps that harm students’ performance.

Is absenteeism particularly high in certain states?

Share of students absent from school, by state and by number of days missed, 2015.

Notes: Based on the number of days eighth-graders in each state reported having missed in the month prior to the NAEP mathematics assessment. “Three or more days” represents the aggregate of data for students who missed 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days of school.

Over the 2003–2015 period, 22 states saw their share of students with perfect attendance grow. The number drops to 15 if we count only states in which the share of students not missing any school increased by more than 1 percentage point. In almost every state (44 states), the share of students who missed more than 10 school days decreased, and in 41 states, the share of students who missed three or more days of school also dropped, though it increased in the other 10. 19 Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Indiana, New Hampshire, and California were the states in which these shares decreased the most, by more than 6 percentage points, while Utah, Alaska, and North Dakota were the states where this indicator (three or more days missed) showed the worst trajectory over time (that is, the largest increases in chronic absenteeism).

Is absenteeism a problem for student performance?

Previous research has focused mainly on two groups of students when estimating how much absenteeism influences performance: students who are chronically absent and all other students. This prior research has concluded that students who are chronically absent are at serious risk of falling behind in school, having lower grades and test scores, having behavioral issues, and, ultimately, dropping out (U.S. Department of Education 2016; see summary in Gottfried and Ehrlich 2018). Our analysis allows for a closer examination of the relationship between absenteeism and performance, as we look at the impact of absenteeism on student performance at five levels of absenteeism. This design allows us to test not only whether different levels of absenteeism have different impacts on performance (as measured by NAEP test scores), but also to identify the point at which the impact of absenteeism on performance becomes a concern. Specifically, we look at the relationship between student absenteeism and mathematics performance among eighth-graders at various numbers of school days missed. 20

The results shown in Figure D and Appendix Table 1 are obtained from regressions that assess the influence of absenteeism and other individual- and school-level determinants of performance. The latter include students’ race/ethnicity, gender, poverty status, ELL status, and IEP status, as well as the racial/ethnic composition of the school they attend and the share of students in their school who are eligible for FRPL (a proxy for the SES composition of the school). Our results thus identify the distinct association between absenteeism and performance, net of other factors that are known to influence performance. 21

In general, the more frequently children missed school, the worse their performance. Relative to students who didn’t miss any school, those who missed some school (1–2 school days) accrued, on average, an educationally small, though statistically significant, disadvantage of about 0.10 standard deviations (SD) in math scores (Figure D and Appendix Table 1, first row). Students who missed more school experienced much larger declines in performance. Those who missed 3–4 days or 5–10 days scored, respectively, 0.29 and 0.39 standard deviations below students who missed no school. As expected, the harm to performance was much greater for students who were absent half or more of the month. Students who missed more than 10 days of school scored nearly two-thirds (0.64) of a standard deviation below students who did not miss any school. All of the gaps are statistically significant, and together they identify a structural source of academic disadvantage.

The more frequently students miss school, the worse their performance : Performance disadvantage experienced by eighth-graders on the 2015 NAEP mathematics assessment, by number of school days missed in the month prior to the assessment, relative to students with perfect attendance in the prior month (standard deviations)

Notes: Estimates are obtained after controlling for race/ethnicity, poverty status, gender, IEP status, and ELL status; for the racial/ethnic composition of the student’s school; and for the share of students in the school who are eligible for FRPL (a proxy for school socioeconomic composition). All estimates are statistically significant at p < 0.01.

The results show that missing school has a negative effect on performance regardless of how many days are missed, with a moderate dent in performance for those missing 1–2 days and a troubling decline in performance for students who missed three or more days that becomes steeper as the number of missed days rises to 10 and beyond. The point at which the impact of absenteeism on performance becomes a concern, therefore, is when students miss any amount of school (vs. having perfect attendance); the level of concern grows as the number of missed days increases.

Gaps in performance associated with absenteeism are similar across all races/ethnicities, between boys and girls, between FRPL-eligible and noneligible students, and between students with and without IEPs. For example, relative to nonpoor (non-FRPL-eligible) students who did not miss any school, nonpoor children who missed school accrued a disadvantage of -0.09 SD (1–2 school days missed), -0.27 SD (3–4 school days missed), -0.36 SD (5–10 school days missed), and -0.63 SD (more than 10 days missed). For students eligible for reduced-price lunch (somewhat poor students) who missed school, compared with students eligible for reduced-price lunch who did not miss any school, the gaps are -0.16 SD (1–2 school days missed), -0.33 SD (3–4 school days missed), -0.45 SD (5–10 school days missed), and -0.76 SD (more than 10 days missed). For free-lunch-eligible (poor) students who missed school, relative to poor students who do not miss any school, the gaps are -0.11 SD (1–2 school days missed), -0.29 SD (3–4 school days missed), -0.39 SD (5–10 school days missed), and -0.63 SD (more than 10 days missed). By IEP status, relative to non-IEP students who did not miss any school, non-IEP students who missed school accrued a disadvantage of -0.11 SD (1–2 school days missed), -0.30 SD (3–4 school days missed), -0.40 SD (5–10 school days missed), and -0.66 SD (more than 10 days missed). And relative to IEP students who did not miss any school, IEP students who missed school accrued a disadvantage of -0.05 SD (1–2 school days missed), -0.21 SD (3–4 school days missed), -0.31 SD (5–10 school days missed), and -0.52 SD (more than 10 days missed). (For gaps by gender and by race/ethnicity, see Appendix Table 1).

Importantly, though the gradients of the influence of absenteeism on performance by race, poverty status, gender, and IEP status (Appendix Table 1) are generally similar to the gradients in the overall relationship between absenteeism and performance for all students, this does not mean that all groups of students are similarly disadvantaged when it comes to the full influence of absenteeism on performance. The overall performance disadvantage faced by any given group is influenced by multiple factors, including the size of the group’s gaps at each level of absenteeism (Appendix Table 1), the group’s rates of absenteeism (Figure B), and the relative performance of the group with respect to the other groups (Carnoy and García 2017). The total gap that results from adding these factors can thus become substantial.

To illustrate this, we look at Hispanic ELL, Asian non-ELL, Asian ELL, and FRPL-eligible students. The additional penalty associated with higher levels of absenteeism is smaller than average for Hispanic ELL students experiencing extreme chronic absenteeism; however, their performance is the lowest among all groups (Carnoy and García 2017) and they have among the highest absenteeism rates.

The absenteeism penalty is also smaller than average for Asian non-ELL students (except at 5-10 days); however, in contrast with the previous example, their performance is the highest among all groups (Carnoy and García 2017) and their absenteeism rate is the lowest.

The absenteeism penalty for Asian ELL students is larger than average, and the gradient is steeper. 22 Asian ELL students also have lower performance than most other groups (Carnoy and García 2017).

Finally, although there is essentially no difference in the absenteeism–performance relationship by FRPL eligibility, the higher rates of absenteeism (at every level) for students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, relative to nonpoor (FRPL-ineligible) students, put low-income students at a greater risk of diminished performance due to absenteeism than their higher-income peers, widening the performance gap between these two groups.

Conclusions

Student absenteeism is a puzzle composed of multiple pieces that has a significant influence on education outcomes, including graduation and the probability of dropping out. The factors that contribute to it are complex and multifaceted, and likely vary from one school setting, district, and state to another. This analysis aims to shed additional light on some key features of absenteeism, including which students tend to miss school, how those profiles have changed over time, and how much missing school matters for performance.

Our results indicate that absenteeism rates were high and persistent over the period examined (2003–2015), although they did decrease modestly for most groups and in most states. Unlike findings for other factors that drive achievement gaps—from preschool attendance to economic and racial school segregation to unequal funding (Carnoy and García 2017; García 2015; García and Weiss 2017)—our findings here seem to show some positive news for black and Hispanic students: these students had slightly higher perfect attendance rates than their white peers; in addition, their perfect attendance rates have increased over time at least as much as rates for white students. But with respect to the absenteeism rates that matter the most (three or more days of school missed, and more than 10 days of school missed), black and Hispanic students still did worse (just as is the case with other opportunity gaps faced by these students). Particularly worrisome is the high share of Hispanic ELL students who missed more than 10 school days—nearly 4 percent. Combined with the share of Hispanic ELL students who missed 5–10 school days (nearly 6 percent), this suggests that one in 10 children in this group would miss school for at least a quarter of the instructional time.

The advantages that Asian students enjoy relative to white students and other racial/ethnic groups in academic settings is also confirmed here (especially among Asian non-ELL students): the Asian students in the sample missed the least school. And there is a substantial difference in rates of absenteeism by poverty (FRPL) and disability (IEP) status, with the difference growing as the number of school days missed increases. Students who were eligible for free lunch were twice as likely as nonpoor (FRPL-ineligible) students to be absent more than 10 days, and students with IEPs were more likely than any other group to be absent (one or more days, that is, to not have perfect attendance).

Missing school has a distinct negative influence on performance, even after the potential mediating influence of other factors is taken into account, and this is true at all rates of absenteeism. The bottom line is that the more days of school a student misses, the poorer his or her performance will be, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, disability, or poverty status.

These findings help establish the basis for an expanded analysis of absenteeism along two main, and related, lines of inquiry. One, given the marked and persistent patterns of school absenteeism, it is important to continue to explore and document why children miss school—to identify the full set of factors inside and outside of schools that influence absenteeism. Knowing whether (or to what degree) those absences are attributable to family circumstances, health, school-related factors, weather, or other factors, is critical to effectively designing and implementing policies and practices to reduce absenteeism, especially among students who chronically miss school. The second line of research could look at variations in the prevalence and influence of absenteeism among the states, and any changes over time in absenteeism rates within each state, to assess whether state differences in policy are reducing absenteeism and mitigating its negative impacts. For example, in recent years, Connecticut has made reducing absenteeism, especially chronic absenteeism, a top education policy priority, and has developed a set of strategies and resources that could be relevant to other states as well, especially as they begin to assess and respond to absenteeism as part of their ESSA plans. 23

The analyses in this report confirm the importance of looking closely into “other” education data, above and beyond performance (test scores) and individual and school demographic characteristics. The move in education policy toward widening accountability indicators to indicators of school quality, such as absenteeism, is important and useful, and could be expanded to include other similar data. Indicators of bullying, school safety, student tardiness, truancy, level of parental involvement, and other factors that are relevant to school climate, well-being, and student performance would also merit attention.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge John Schmitt and Richard Rothstein for their insightful comments and advice on earlier drafts of the paper. We are also grateful to Krista Faries for editing this report, to Lora Engdahl for her help structuring it, and to Julia Wolfe for her work preparing the tables and figures included in the appendix. Finally, we appreciate the assistance of communications staff at the Economic Policy Institute who helped to disseminate the study, especially Dan Crawford and Kayla Blado.

About the authors

Emma García  is an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute, where she specializes in the economics of education and education policy. Her areas of research include analysis of the production of education, returns to education, program evaluation, international comparative education, human development, and cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis in education. Prior to joining EPI, García was a researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, and the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, and did consulting work for the National Institute for Early Education Research, MDRC, and the Inter-American Development Bank. García has a Ph.D. in economics and education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Elaine Weiss  served as the national coordinator for the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) from 2011 to 2017, in which capacity she worked with four co-chairs, a high-level task force, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive. She is currently working on a book drawing on her BBA case studies, co-authored with Paul Reville, to be published by the Harvard Education Press. Weiss came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew’s Partnership for America’s Economic Success campaign. Weiss was previously a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s task force on child abuse and served as volunteer counsel for clients at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Appendix figures and tables

Are there significant differences in student absenteeism rates across grades and over time : shares of fourth-graders and eighth-graders who missed school no days, 1–2 days, 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days in the month before the naep mathematics assessment, 2003 and 2015, detailed absenteeism rates by group : shares of eighth-graders in each group who missed school no days, 1–2 days, 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days in the month before the naep mathematics assessment, 2015, the influence of absenteeism on eighth-graders' math achievement : performance disadvantage experienced by eighth-graders on the 2015 naep mathematics assessment, by group and by number of days missed in the month prior to the assessment, relative to students in the same group with perfect attendance in the prior month (standard deviations).

*** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05; * p < 0.1

Notes: Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL eligibility, and IEP status. ELL stands for English language learner; IEP stands for individualized education program (learning plan designed for each student who is identified as having a disability); and FRPL stands for free or reduced-price lunch (federally funded meal programs for students of families meeting certain income guidelines). Estimates for the “All students” sample are obtained after controlling for race/ethnicity, poverty status, gender, IEP status, and ELL status; for the racial/ethnic composition of the student’s school; and for the share of students in the school who are eligible for FRPL (a proxy for school socioeconomic composition). For each group, controls that are not used to identify the group are included (for example, for black students, estimates control for poverty status, gender, IEP status, and ELL status; for the racial/ethnic composition of the student’s school; and for the share of students in the school who are eligible for FRPL; etc.)

1. See García 2014 and García and Weiss 2016.

2. See ESSA 2015. According to ESSA, this nontraditional indicator should measure “school quality or student success.” (The other indicators at elementary/middle school include measures of academic achievement, e.g., performance or proficiency in reading/language arts and math; academic progress, or student growth; and progress in achieving English language proficiency.)

3. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have included student absenteeism as an accountability metric in their states’ ESSA plans. This metric meets all the requirements (as outlined in ESSA) to be considered a measure of school quality or student success (valid, reliable, calculated the same for all schools and school districts across the state, can be disaggregated by student subpopulation, is a proven indicator of school quality, and is a proven indicator of student success; see Education Week 2017). See FutureEd 2017 for differences among the states’ ESSA plans. See the web page “ ESSA Consolidated State Plans ” (on the Department of Education website) for the most up-to-date information on the status and content of the state plans.

4. There is no precise official definition that identifies how many missed days constitutes chronic absenteeism on a monthly basis. Definitions of chronic absenteeism are typically based on the number of days missed over an entire school year, and even these definitions vary. For the Department of Education, chronically absent students are those who “miss at least 15 days of school in a year” (U.S. Department of Education 2016). Elsewhere, chronic absenteeism is frequently defined as missing 10 percent or more of the total number of days the student is enrolled in school, or a month or more of school, in the previous year (Ehrlich et al. 2013; Balfanz and Byrnes 2012). Given that the school year can range in length from 180 to 220 days, and given that there are about 20–22 instructional days in a month of school, these latter two definitions imply that a student is chronically absent if he or she misses between 18 and 22 days per year (depending on the length of the school year) or more, or between 2.0 and about 2.5 days (or more) per month on average (assuming a nine-month school year). In our analysis, we define students as being chronically absent if they have missed three or more days of school in the last month (the aggregate of students missing “3–4,” “5–10,” or “more than 10 days”), and as experiencing extreme chronic absenteeism if they have missed “more than 10 days” of school in the last month. These categories are not directly comparable to categories used in studies of absenteeism on a per-year basis or that use alternative definitions or thresholds. We purposely analyze data for each of these “days absent” groups separately to identify their distinct characteristics and the influence of those differences on performance. (Appendix Figure B and Appendix Table 1 provide separate results for each of the absenteeism categories.)

5.  In our analysis, we define “poor” students as those who are eligible for free lunch; we define “somewhat poor” students as those who are eligible for reduced-price lunch; and we define “nonpoor” students as those who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. We use “poverty status,” “income status,” “socioeconomic status” (“SES”), and “social class” interchangeably throughout our analysis. We use the free or reduced-price lunch status classification as a metric for individual poverty, and we use the proportion of students who are eligible for FRPL as a metric for school poverty (in our regression controls; see Figure D). The limitations of these variables to measure economic status are discussed in depth in Michelmore and Dynarski’s (2016) study. FRPL statuses are nevertheless valid and widely used proxies of low(er) SES, and students’ test scores are likely to reflect such disadvantage (Carnoy and García 2017).

6. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), an IEP must be designed for each student with a disability. The IEP “guides the delivery of special education supports and services for the student” (U.S. Department of Education 2000). For more information about IDEA, see U.S. Department of Education n.d.

7. Students are grouped by gender, race/ethnicity and ELL status, FRPL eligibility, and IEP status.

8. The U.S. Department of Education (2016) defines “chronically absent” as “missing at least 15 days of school in a year.” Ready (2010) explains the difference between legitimate or illegitimate absences, which may respond to different circumstances and behaviors. Ready’s findings, pertaining to children at the beginning of school, indicate that, relative to high-SES students, low-SES children with good attendance rates experienced greater gains in literacy skills during kindergarten and first grade, narrowing the starting gaps with their high-SES peers. No differences in math skills gains were detected in kindergarten.

9. U.S. Department of Education 2016. This report uses data from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection 2013–2014.

10. The analysis finds no differences in absenteeism by gender. It is notable that the Department of Education report finds that ELL students have lower absenteeism rates than their non-ELL peers, given that we find (as described later in the report) that Asian ELL students have higher absenteeism rates than Asian non-ELL students and that Hispanic ELL students have higher absenteeism rates than Hispanic non-ELL students. It is important to note, however, that the data the Department of Education analyze compared all ELL students to all non-ELL students (not only Asian and Hispanic students separated out by ELL status), and thus our estimates are not directly comparable.

11. Children in the fourth and eighth grades were asked, “How many days were you absent from school in the last month?” The possible answers are: none, 1–2 days, 3–4 days, 5–10 days, and more than 10 days. An important caveat concerning this indicator and results based on its utilization is that there is a potential inherent censoring problem: Children who are more likely to miss school are also likely to miss the assessment. In addition, some students may be inclined to underreport the number of days that they missed school, in an effort to be viewed more favorably (in social science research, this may introduce a source of response-bias referred to as “social desirability bias”). Although we do not have any way to ascertain the extent to which these might be problems in the NAEP data and for this question in particular, it is important to read our results and findings as a potential underestimate of what the rates of missingness are, as well as what their influence on performance is.

12. One reason to look at different grades is to explore the potential connection between early absenteeism and later absenteeism. Ideally, we would be able to include data on absenteeism from earlier grades in students’ academic careers since, as Nai-Lin Chang, Sundius, and Wiener (2017) explain, attendance habits are developed early and often set the stage for attendance patterns later on. These authors argue that detecting absenteeism early on can improve pre-K to K transitions, especially for low-income children, children with special needs, or children who experience other challenges at home; these are the students who most need the social, emotional, and academic supports that schools provide and whose skills are most likely to be negatively influenced by missing school. Gottfried (2014) finds reduced reading and math achievement outcomes, and lower educational and social engagement, among kindergartners who are chronically absent. Even though we do not have information on students’ attendance patterns at the earliest grades, looking at patterns in the fourth and eighth grades can be illuminating.

13. Students are excluded from our analyses if their absenteeism information and/or basic descriptive information (gender, race/ethnicity, poverty status, and IEP) are missing.

14. All categories combined, we note that in 2015, 49.5 percent of fourth-graders and 55.6 percent of eighth-graders missed at least one day of school in the month prior. Just over 30 percent of fourth-graders and 36.4 percent of eighth-graders missed 1–2 days of school during the month.

15. In the sample, 52.1 percent of students are white, 14.9 percent black, 4.5 percent Hispanic ELL, 19.4 percent Hispanic non-ELL, less than 1 percent Asian ELL, 4.7 percent Asian non-ELL, and 3.8 percent Native American or other.

16. Of the students in the sample, 47.8 percent are not eligible for FRPL, 5.2 percent are eligible for reduced-price lunch, and 47.0 percent are eligible for free lunch.

17. In the 2015 eighth-grade mathematics sample, 10.8 percent of students had an IEP.

18. For students who were eligible for reduced-price lunch (somewhat poor students), shares of students absent three or more days also decreased, but more modestly, by 3.3 percentage points.

19. Number of states is out of 51; the District of Columbia is included in the state data.

20. The results discussed below cannot be interpreted as causal, strictly speaking. They are obtained using regression models with controls for the relationship between performance and absenteeism (estimates are net of individual, home, and school factors known to influence performance and are potential sources of selection). However, the literature acknowledges a causal relationship between (high-quality) instructional time and performance, in discussions about the length of the school day (Kidronl and Lindsay 2014; Jin Jez and Wassmer 2013; among others) and the dip in performance children experience after being out of school for the summer (Peterson 2013, among others). These findings could be extrapolable to our absenteeism framework and support a more causal interpretation of the findings of this paper.

21. Observations with full information are used in the regressions. The absenteeism–performance relationship is only somewhat sensitive to including traditional covariates in the regression (not shown in the tables; results available upon request). The influence of absenteeism on performance is distinct and is not due to any mediating effect of the covariates that determine education performance.

22. Asian ELL students who miss more than 10 days of school are very far behind Asian ELL students with perfect attendance, with a gap of more than a standard deviation. This result needs to be interpreted with caution, however, as it is based on a very small fraction of students for whom selection may be a concern, too.

23. The data used in our analysis are for years prior to the implementation of measures intended to tackle absenteeism. See Education Week 2017. Data for future (or more recent) years will be required to analyze whether Connecticut’s policies have had an effect on absenteeism rates in the state.

Balfanz, Robert, and Vaughan Byrnes. 2012. The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools . Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, May 2012.

Carnoy, Martin, and Emma García. 2017. Five Key Trends in U.S. Student Performance: Progress by Blacks and Hispanics, the Takeoff of Asians, the Stall of Non-English Speakers, the Persistence of Socioeconomic Gaps, and the Damaging Effect of Highly Segregated Schools . Economic Policy Institute, January 2017.

Education Week. 2017. School Accountability, School Quality and Absenteeism under ESSA (Expert Presenters: Hedy Chang and Charlene Russell-Tucker) (webinar).

Ehrlich, Stacy B., Julia A. Gwynne, Amber Stitziel Pareja, and Elaine M. Allensworth with Paul Moore, Sanja Jagesic, and Elizabeth Sorice. 2013. Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools: Relationships with Learning Outcomes and Reasons for Absences . The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, September 2013.

ESSA. 2015. Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 , Pub. L. No. 114-95 § 114 Stat. 1177 (2015–2016).

FutureEd. 2017. Chronic Absenteeism and the Fifth Indicator in State ESSA Plans . Georgetown University.

García, Emma. 2014. The Need to Address Noncognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda . Economic Policy Institute, December 2014.

García, Emma. 2015. Inequalities at the Starting Gate: Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills Gaps between 2010–2011 Kindergarten Classmates . Economic Policy Institute, June 2015.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2016. Making Whole-Child Education the Norm. How Research and Policy Initiatives Can Make Social and Emotional Skills a Focal Point of Children’s Education . Economic Policy Institute, August 2016.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2017. Education Inequalities at the School Starting Gate: Gaps, Trends, and Strategies to Address Them . Economic Policy Institute, September 2017.

Gottfried, Michael A. 2014. “Chronic Absenteeism and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes.” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 19, no. 2: 53–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2014.962696 .

Gottfried, Michael A., and Stacy B. Ehrlich. 2018. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Combating Chronic Absence.” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 23, no. 1–2: 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2018.1439753 .

Jin Jez, Su, and Robert W. Wassmer. 2013. “The Impact of Learning Time on Academic Achievement.” Education and Urban Society 47, no. 3: 284–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124513495275 .

Kidronl, Yael, and Jim Lindsay. 2014. The Effects of Increased Learning Time on Student Academic and Nonacademic Outcomes: Findings from a Meta-Analytic Review . REL 2014-015. Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia.

Michelmore, K., and S. Dynarski. 2016.  The Gap within the Gap: Using Longitudinal Data to Understand Income Differences in Student Achievement . National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 22474.

Nai-Lin Chang, Hedy, Jane Sundius, and Louise Wiener. 2017. “ Using ESSA to Tackle Chronic Absence from Pre-K to K–12 ” (blog post). National Institute for Early Education Research website, May 23, 2017.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Various years. NAEP microdata (unpublished data).

Peterson, T.K., ed. 2013. Expanding Minds and Opportunities: Leveraging the Power of Afterschool and Summer Learning for Student Success . Washington, D.C.: Collaborative Communications Group.

Ready, Douglas D. 2010. “Socioeconomic Disadvantage, School Attendance, and Early Cognitive Development: The Differential Effects of School Exposure.” Sociology of Education 83, no. 4: 271–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040710383520 .

U.S. Department of Education. 2000. A Guide to the Individualized Education Program . Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, July 2000.

U.S. Department of Education. 2016. Chronic Absenteeism in the Nation’s Schools: An Unprecedented Look at a Hidden Educational Crisis (online fact sheet).

U.S. Department of Education. n.d. “ About IDEA ” (webpage). IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) website . Accessed September 19, 2018.

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Why attendance matters

by: The GreatSchools Editorial Team | Updated: March 1, 2023

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Why attendance matters in kindergarten

Successful schools begin by engaging students and making sure they come to school regularly. That may seem obvious. What’s less obvious is that the consequences of low attendance are serious for all children and for the community, not just the students who miss school.

School attendance data on GreatSchools.org, which comes from the state Department of Education, provides parents and the community baseline information on the quality of a school. You can locate each school’s attendance data on their GreatSchools.org school profile page in the Equity section, under Race/Ethnicity, then click on the Discipline & attendance tab. Here’s an example to check out in Temple, TX .

What does the attendance rate tell you about a school?

The attendance rate tells you the average percentage of students attending school each day in the given year, as reported by the state Department of Education. (Some states report this attendance rate as the percentage of students with unexcused absences.) You can also see the state average for the attendance rate and compare how your school stacks up. In some states, you will see the mobility rate (which means the percentage of students who transfer out of the school). Most schools have high attendance rates. If your school’s attendance rate is below the state average, the school may face challenges in getting students to come to school regularly. Ask the principal why the attendance rate is lower than the state average and what the school is doing to address this issue.

How important is attendance for your child?

The attendance rate is important because students are more likely to succeed in academics when they attend school consistently. It’s difficult for the teacher and the class to build their skills and progress if a large number of students are frequently absent. In addition to falling behind in academics, students who are not in school on a regular basis are more likely to get into trouble with the law and cause problems in their communities.

A 2019 report by physicians at Council on School Health published in Pediatrics states: “Chronic school absenteeism, starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, puts students at risk for poor school performance and school dropout.” An earlier 2008 study conducted by the Rodel Community Scholars at Arizona State University that tracked students from kindergarten through high school found the same pattern: high school dropout patterns were linked with poor attendance, beginning in kindergarten. Gregory Hickman, director of the Rodel Community Scholars program and former director of the Arizona Dropout Initiative, notes they discovered that as early as kindergarten, behavioral differences are apparent between children who go on to graduate and those who drop out, with dropouts missing an average of 124 days of school by eighth grade. In their report, researchers wrote: “Educators should begin developing strategies to improve student attendance from as early as kindergarten.”

The U.S. Department of Education categorizes “chronic” absence as missing 15 or more days in a school year. Some organizations, researchers, and an increasing number of states define chronic as missing 10 percent of the school year (approximately 18 days). Estimates of the number of chronically absent students in the U.S. vary from 13 percent to 16 percent .

School budgets may suffer when students don’t attend. In many states, school budgets are based on the average daily attendance at a school. If many students enrolled at a school fail to consistently attend, the school has less money to pay for essential classroom needs.

How can schools increase their attendance rate?

According to the National Center for Student Engagement , schools are most effective in achieving high attendance rates when parents, school leaders, and community members work together to focus on reducing absences and truancy, and keeping kids in schools. The center provides 10 tips for schools and communities to improve their attendance rates . Among them:

  • Make the school a place where parents/guardians and students feel welcome and respected. Create an environment that enables students to feel successful in something — no matter how small.
  • Reward and recognize good attendance (not just “perfect” attendance).
  • Forge a relationship with local businesses so that they cooperate in encouraging students to go to school and not congregate at businesses during school hours.
  • Ask teachers to phone parents when their children are not in school to let them know the school is concerned.
  • Talk to students about why they were gone and let them know they were missed.

What other factors should you consider when evaluating your school?

The attendance rate is just one factor to consider when sizing up your school. You’ll want to look at the test scores, student-teacher ratio, parent reviews, and other data that you can find on GreatSchools.org. You’ll also want to find out more about the school climate, quality of school leadership, parent involvement, and other factors that aren’t apparent from school data.

Questions parents should ask

If you are concerned about the attendance rate at your school, here are some questions you might ask your principal and your school site council:

  • Does the school provide a welcoming atmosphere for students and parents?
  • Do students feel safe at school?
  • What actions does the school take to follow up on students who are absent?
  • Do teachers call parents when students are frequently absent?
  • Does the school know why students are absent? The school cannot address the problem if administrators don’t understand the causes.
  • Has the school taken steps to forge a positive relationship with local business and community members to work together to encourage students to come to school?
  • Does the school reward students for good attendance?
  • What can parents do to help the school encourage all students to attend?

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Why School Attendance Matters and Strategies to Improve It

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School attendance matters. It is arguably one of the most important indicators of school success. You cannot learn what you are not there to learn. Students who attend school regularly improve their chances of being academically successful. There are obvious exceptions to both sides of the rule. There are a few students deemed academically successful who also have attendance issues and a few students who struggle academically who are always present. However, in most cases, strong attendance correlates with academic success, and poor attendance correlates with academic struggles.

To understand the importance of attendance and the influence the lack thereof has, we must first define what constitutes both satisfactory and poor attendance.  Attendance Works , a non-profit dedicated to improving school attendance, has categorized school attendance into three distinct categories. Students who have 9 or fewer absences are satisfactory. Those with 10-17 absences are exhibiting warning signs for potential attendance issues.  Students with 18 or more absences have a clear cut chronic attendance issue. These numbers are based on the traditional 180-day school calendar.

Teachers and administrators will agree that the students who need to be at school the most are the ones that are seemingly seldom there. Poor attendance creates significant learning gaps. Even if students complete the make-up work, they most likely will not learn and retain the information as well as if they had been there.

Make-up work can pile up very quickly. When students return from an extended hiatus, they not only have to complete the make-up work, but they also have to contend with their regular classroom assignments. Students often make the decision to rush through or completely ignore the make-up work so that they can keep pace with their regular class studies.  Doing this naturally creates a learning gap and causes the student’s grades to drop. Over time, this learning gap increases to the point where it becomes nearly impossible to close.

Chronic absenteeism will lead to frustration for the student. The more they miss, the more difficult it becomes to catch up. Eventually, the student gives up altogether putting them on a path towards being a high school dropout. Chronic absenteeism is a key indicator that a student will drop out. This makes it even more critical to find early intervention strategies to prevent attendance from ever becoming an issue.

The amount of schooling missed can quickly add up. Students who enter school at kindergarten and miss an average of 10 days per year until they graduate high school will miss 140 days. According to the definition above, this student would not have an attendance problem. However, all together that student would miss nearly an entire year of school when you add everything together. Now compare that student with another student who has a chronic attendance issue and misses an average of 25 days a year. The student with a chronic attendance issue has 350 missed days or almost two entire years. It is no wonder that those who have attendance issues are almost always further behind academically than their peers who have satisfactory attendance.

Strategies to Improve School Attendance

Improving school attendance can prove to be a difficult endeavor.  Schools often have very little direct control in this area. Most of the responsibility falls on the student’s parents or guardians, especially the elementary aged ones.  Many parents simply do not understand how important attendance is. They do not realize how quickly missing even a day a week can add up. Furthermore, they do not understand the unspoken message that they are relaying to their children by allowing them to miss school regularly.  Finally, they do not understand that they are not only setting their children up to fail in school, but also in life.

For these reasons, it is essential that elementary schools in particular focus on educating parents on the value of attendance.  Unfortunately, most schools operate under the assumption that all parents already understand how important attendance is, but that those whose children have a chronic attendance issue are simply ignoring it or do not value education. The truth is that most parents want what is best for their children, but have not learned or been taught what that is. Schools must invest a significant amount of their resources to educate their local community adequately on the importance of attendance.

Regular attendance should play a part in the daily anthem of a school and a critical role in defining the culture of a school. The fact is that every school has an attendance policy . In most cases, that policy is only punitive in nature meaning that it simply provides parents with an ultimatum that essentially says “get your child to school or else.”  Those policies, while effective for a few, will not deter many for whom it has become easier to skip school than it is to attend. For those, you have to show them and prove to them that attending school on a regular basis will help lead to a brighter future.

Schools should be challenged to develop attendance policies and programs that are more preventive in nature than they are punitive. This begins with getting to the root of the attendance issues on an individualized level. School officials must be willing to sit down with parents and listen to their reasons for why their children are absent without being judgmental. This allows the school to form a partnership with the parent wherein they can develop an individualized plan for improving attendance, a support system for follow through, and a connection to outside resources if necessary.

This approach will not be easy. It will take a lot of time and resources. However, it is an investment that we should be willing to make based on how important we know attendance to be.  Our goal should be to get every child to school so that the effective teachers we have in place can do their jobs. When that happens, the quality of our school systems will improve significantly .

  • Why Daily School Attendance Matters
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  • School Issues That Negatively Impact Student Learning
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  • How to Deal With Late Work and Makeup Work
  • How Much Damage Do Bad Grades Do?
  • What Do Private School Admissions Committees Look For?
  • 7 Factors that Make Teaching So Challenging

Chronic absenteeism: An old problem in search of new answers

Subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, brian a. jacob and brian a. jacob walter h. annenberg professor of education policy; professor of economics, and professor of education - university of michigan, former brookings expert kelly lovett kelly lovett project manager - youth policy lab, university of michigan.

July 27, 2017

  • 18 min read

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Education (USED) identifies “chronic absenteeism” as a hidden educational crisis. 1 In 2013-14, roughly 14 percent of students nationwide were chronically absent—defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days, excused or unexcused, which in most states would correspond to about 18 days of school missed each year. 2 In some cities, that rate is considerably higher, with Detroit topping the list at 57.3 percent of students chronically absent. 3

Absenteeism is not a new concern, however. Educators and local officials were focused on this issue as early as the late 19 th century—a quarter of the juveniles jailed at the Chicago House of Correction in 1898 were there for truancy. 4 From Tom Sawyer to Ferris Bueller, truancy has been a staple of popular culture in the U.S.

And yet, despite considerable effort on the part of schools, communities, and states over the past 20 years, little progress has been made. 5 It is worth reviewing what we know about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions for chronic absenteeism.

The consequences of chronic absenteeism

Chronic absenteeism is associated with a host of adverse academic outcomes. A 2008 study of graduation patterns in Chicago Public Schools, for example, found that the number of days students were absent in eighth grade was eight times more predictive of freshman year course failure than eighth grade test scores. 6 The same study found that freshman year absences were nearly as predictive of graduation rates as grade point average (GPA) and course failures, two more commonly used metrics for identifying students at risk of not graduating. 7 Similarly, a study of Baltimore City Public Schools found that chronic absenteeism was the strongest sixth grade predictor of not graduating high school. 8

For younger students, research has shown that chronic absenteeism in kindergarten is associated with lower achievement in reading and math in later grades, even when controlling for a child’s family income, race, disability status, attitudes toward school, socioemotional development, age at kindergarten entry, type of kindergarten program, and preschool experience. 9 Chronic absenteeism has also been linked to poor socioemotional outcomes, even after controlling for a rich set of student factors including lagged socioemotional measures. 10

It is worth noting that the existing research can’t definitively say that chronic absenteeism directly causes students to have worse academic outcomes. It may be the case, for example, that poor academic performance causes a student to choose to miss school, rather than the reverse. Or there may be a third confounding factor that causes both, such as lack of sleep that causes a student both to miss his bus in the morning, hence leading to low attendance, and to struggle to focus for exams, hence leading to low achievement. Nonetheless, the intuitive connection between school attendance and learning—coupled with the strong patterns of association between absenteeism and performance—suggests that chronic absenteeism is a problem worth addressing.

Patterns of chronic absenteeism by student demographics

CCF_20170727_Jacob_Evidence_Speaks_1

While national data do not allow one to examine chronic absenteeism by socioeconomic status, existing research finds that chronic absenteeism is significantly more common among economically disadvantaged students.13 For example, a national study of kindergartners found that 21 percent of poor children were chronically absent compared to only 8 percent of their non-poor peers. 13

Other research finds an interesting pattern across grades—namely, chronic absenteeism is high in kindergarten, drops to the lowest rates around fourth and fifth grade, and then climbs steadily through middle and high school to peak in 12 th grade. 14

Reasons for chronic absenteeism

Researchers categorize the underlying causes of truancy into four groups: (i) student-specific factors, (ii) family-specific factors, (iii) school-specific factors, and (iv) community-specific factors (Table 1). As one might expect, the importance of various factors depends a great deal on the student’s age and social context. Kindergarten absenteeism is most strongly related to family factors—e.g., children whose parents suffer from substance abuse, or whose work schedules makes it difficult for them to get their children out the door each morning.

Teenage truancy, on the other hand, is more frequently associated with student- or school-factors, such as fear of bullying or disengagement with school. For example, in a recent Evidence Speaks post , Jing Liu and Susanna Loeb reported that high school teachers have differential effects on unexcused class absences—that is, when students miss only part of the school day—highlighting how the academic environment can influence school attendance. 15

What do we know about reducing chronic absenteeism?

Schools, communities, and states have been working for years to reduce truancy through implementation of myriad interventions. Some are based in schools and operated by teachers or counselors; others are court-based, administered by judges, social workers or other court staff; yet others are community-based, and organized by local non-profits. Some programs work with families; others focus primarily on students themselves; and a few attempt to address structural school factors.

There are hundreds of studies on programs designed to increase school attendance. Unfortunately, very few meet even a minimum standard of rigor. A 2012 meta-analysis conducted by the Campbell Collaboration identified 391 studies of truancy interventions, only 28 of which provided any plausible basis for determining that the program was effective. 16 The authors find that many of these interventions were effective, on average leading to a reduction in the number of days absent by 4.69 days. 17 However, for the most part, these interventions studied were small, locally-developed programs, so it is not known whether these approaches can be replicated at scale.

A handful of large, well-known interventions designed to support at-risk students target school attendance as a key intermediate outcome. These programs share several common features, including an early warning system to identify at-risk students and individualized support for such students. Interventions are typically provided within a case management model, where school personnel or program staff work with students, and often their families, on a range of issues. The verdict on these programs is mixed, however.

One such program, Check & Connect , showed some promise in two small RCTs that studied the intervention for students with disabilities. 18 The program involved monitoring student attendance, suspensions, course grades, and credits to provide individualized attention to at-risk students, and basic interventions include conversations between a monitor and the student about topics such as progress in school and how to resolve conflicts and cope with challenges. However, a more recent quasi-experimental study on a broader population finds no effects. 19

On the other hand, interim results from a recent RCT of the Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (EWIMS) indicate that the program has reduced chronic absenteeism rates from 14 to 10 percent. 20 EWIMS is primarily a monitoring system, rather than a single intervention, but includes highly detailed and structured guidance for schools, along with a tool to help monitor student attendance and academic performance. Interventions for students found to be off-track are determined and implemented by school or district staff.

There is also some non-experimental evidence that an initiative in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg—which brought together a dozen city agencies to institute a pilot program that had many features considered best practices in truancy reduction—reduced absenteeism rates among poor children in participating schools. 21 The program included improved use of data to identify students at risk of chronic absenteeism, student mentors, principal-led school partnership meetings, connections to community resources, an awareness campaign, and attendance incentives.

States and localities, for their part, have enacted a variety of measures aimed at curbing truancy, including laws that mandate steep fines and even jail time for juvenile truants and their parents. 22 Many such laws have gained notoriety for the draconian consequences they impose. Several years ago, for example, a Houston-area judge jailed a 17-year-old honor-roll student who had missed school because she was working two jobs to support her siblings after her parents divorced and moved out of state. 23 There is no evidence to suggest the these laws as a whole have reduced chronic absenteeism, and critics point out that they impose harsh and undue burdens on poor families and students with disabilities. 24

On the other hand, recent evidence suggests that “No Pass, No Drive” laws—which make obtaining (or keeping) a driver’s license conditional on school performance—reduce chronic absenteeism among high school students. 25

Several recent studies have tested low-cost, information-based interventions to improve student attendance. In one such program, parents received a postcard about the importance of attendance. One random-assignment evaluation found that sending parents that single postcard reminder about the importance of attending school increased attendance by 2.4 percent. 26 A similar intervention reduced absences by about 10 percent. 27 Text messaging to parents, which has gained popularity recently as a low-cost intervention, has been shown to improve attendance by 17 percent. 28

Where to go from here?

The first step is for states and districts to collect high quality data. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to report data on chronic absenteeism, but there is still much work to be done at the school and district level to ensure the quality and consistency of such data. 29  One way to accomplish this would be for states to adopt chronic absenteeism as the fifth accountability measure in statewide ESSA systems, as recommended in a recent Hamilton Project report. 30

The next step is for schools to use this data in a strategic and ongoing way to identify truant students, and then monitor efforts to improve their attendance. The evidence suggests that a variety of different types of programs can be successful. As with all programs, the quality of implementation seems critical. In the case of truancy prevention, implementation is particularly challenging because staff need to identify and respond to a variety of different factors underlying the absenteeism—from parental substance abuse to school bullying to transportation challenges.

While some broad policies such as No Pass, No Drive and some low-intensity interventions have produced small improvements, it is likely that substantial improvement will require more substantial investments. Fortunately, because attendance is a “high-frequency” outcome, it affords educators and researchers a perfect laboratory to pilot and test a variety of strategies in a relatively short period of time. Some recently developed interventions seem promising. We hope that the renewed attention on chronic absenteeism by policymakers will be accompanied by greater collaboration between educators and researchers to develop and assess strategies for keeping kids in school.

The authors were not paid by any entity outside of Brookings to write this particular article and did not receive financial support from or serve in a leadership position with any entity whose political or financial interests could be affected by this article.

  • US Department of Education. Chronic absenteeism in the nation’s schools. From: https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/chronicabsenteeism.html
  • There is not a single, agreed-upon definition of the chronic absenteeism. It is commonly defined as missing 10 percent or more of a school year. When the US Department of Education (USED) instituted reporting of chronic absenteeism in the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), however, the requested measure was the proportion of students who were absent 15 or more days of the school year. All definitions of chronic absenteeism consider both unexcused and excused absences, due to the commonsense assumption that missed learning impacts students regardless of the reason for the absence.
  • Author’s calculations based on the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), available here: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-2013-14.html
  • https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/06/inexcusable-absences#.mtO3pAORA
  • Maynard, B., McCrea, K., Pigott, T., & Kelly, M. 2012 . Indicated Truancy Interventions: Effects on School Attendance among Chronic Truant Students. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2012:10.
  • Allensworth, E. & J. Easton, 2008. What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools: A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Attendance in the Freshman Year. Consortium on Chicago School Research, July 2008.
  • Allensworth, E. & J. Easton, 2008. What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools:  A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Attendance in the Freshman Year. Consortium on Chicago School Research , July 2008.
  • Baltimore Education Research Consortium. 2011. Destination Graduation: Sixth Grade Early Warning Indicators for Baltimore City Schools: Their Prevalence and Impact.
  • Romero, M. & Lee, Y. 2007. A National Portrait of Chronic Absenteeism in the Early Grades. New York, NY: National Center for Children in Poverty: The Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia .
  • Gottfried, M. 2014. Chronic Absenteeism and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR) , 19:2, 53-75.
  • Romero, M. & Lee, Y. 2008. The Influence of Maternal and Family Risk on Chronic Absenteeism in Early Schooling. New York, NY: National Center for Children in Poverty: The Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia .
  • Balfanz, R. & Byrnes, V. 2012. The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools. Everyone Graduates Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
  • https://www.brookings.edu/research/going-to-school-is-optional-schools-need-to-engage-students-to-increase-their-lifetime-opportunities/
  • The study sample included interventions such as student counseling, behavioral interventions, family therapy, interdisciplinary team meetings, criminal prosecution, case management. The authors found that intervention effects did not vary significantly by program type, though the number of studies of each type was small enough that it would have been difficult to differentiate between program effects.
  • U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. 2015. Dropout Prevention intervention report: Check & Connect. Retrieved from http://whatworks.ed.gov
  • https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Mentoring-for-at-risk-high-school-students-check-%26-connect-February-2017.pdf
  • https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/midwest/pdf/REL_2017272.pdf
  • Poor students in pilot schools were 15 percent less likely to be chronically absent, relative to similar students at comparison schools. Balfanz, R. & Byrnes, V. 2014. Meeting the Challenge of Combating Chronic Absenteeism. Everyone Graduates Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
  • See, for example, the following articles: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/the-truancy-trap/261937/ and https://newrepublic.com/article/121186/truancy-laws-unfairly-attack-poor-children-and-parents .
  • Horswell, Cindy. “Charges dropped against honor student jailed for truancy.” The Houston Chronicle, May 31, 2012.
  • A 2011 study in Washington State found that while truants who received court petitions showed a modest short-term increase in attendance, they fared no better in the long-run than other truant students who did not experience the judicial intervention. See: https://www.courts.wa.gov/subsite/wsccr/docs/TruancyEvalReport.pdf
  • Rashmi Barua and Marian Vidal-Fernandez (2014). “No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time,” The Journal of Human Capital, 8 (4): 399-431.
  • https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/midatlantic/pdf/REL_2017252.pdf
  • Rogers, T. & Feller, S. 2014. Intervening through Influential Third Parties: Reducing Student Absences at Scale via Parents. http://www.attendanceworks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Todd-Rogers-Avi-F.-nfluential_third_parties.pdf
  • Bergman, P. & Chan, E. 2017. “Leveraging Parents through Technology: The Impact of High-Frequency Information on Student Achievement.”
  • In Michigan, for example, school officials have expressed concern about attendance reporting standards. Some schools count all students present until a teacher submits attendance, while others consider all students to be absent until attendance is submitted. In addition, there is no consistent definition of how much of a school day a student must miss before being considered absent for the full day, or how tardy a student may be before being counted as absent for a class period.
  • http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/lessons_school_accountability_essa.pdf

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Investigating the reasons for students’ attendance in and absenteeism from lecture classes and educational planning to improve the situation

Sepideh mokhtari.

Education Development Office, School of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Sakineh Nikzad

1 Department of Prosthodontics, School of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Saeedeh Mokhtari

2 Department of Pediatric Dentistry, School of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Siamak Sabour

3 Department of Clinical Epidemiology, School of Public Health and Safety, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Sepideh Hosseini

Background:.

This study investigated the reasons for the students’ attendance in and absenteeism from lecture classes from the perspective of professors, students, and educational planning to change the unsatisfactory status quo.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

The present study was a narrow needs assessment survey which was performed on students ( n = 70) of the Faculty of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, in four stages. In the first stage, the opinions of professors and students about the reasons for absenteeism from the lecture classes were collected. In the second stage, the results of the first stage were discussed by an expert panel to find solutions for the problem. The results of the survey were tabulated, summarized, and discussed. In the third stage, online classes were held as one of the solutions and evaluated in the fourth stage.

The results showed that various factors, such as professor empowerment, evaluation system, audiovisual equipment of the classes, educational curriculum, and class schedules, are associated with the students’ attendance in the classes. Along with these factors, one of the most important reasons for students’ absenteeism from classes in recent years might be the generational differences of students. The evaluation of online classes showed that the ratio of the number of students who actively participated in the online classes to the number of students participating in the online classes varied from 30% to 64% ( P < 0.05).

CONCLUSION:

In addition to improving the factors associating students’ attendance in classes, online education is a proper solution for reducing absenteeism in lecture classes and increasing students’ active participation from the perspective of professors and students.

Introduction

Academic performance is one of the most critical issues of students in higher education. Since learning requires attendance and active participation in classes, attendance in classes is thought to be an essential factor in students’ academic performance.[ 1 , 2 , 3 ] Previously, it was believed that students with a high attendance rate were more successful at the end of their course.[ 4 ] Students’ absenteeism from the classes significantly reduces academic achievement, which in turn disrupts the expected learning goals.[ 2 ] Class attendance and learning have received much attention, and there is a well-established positive relationship between class attendance and academic grades.[ 5 ] According to researchers, class attendance is a predictor of student success and reflects a student's positive learning habits, skills, and attitudes, all of which are directly related to their ultimate success.[ 6 ] Absenteeism is an essential issue in the medical and health sciences despite the strictness of attendance policies, affecting students’ performance around the world. Students who attend classes regularly receive useful information and use medical skills more professionally than others throughout their lives.[ 7 ] For example, nursing students’ absenteeism from classes adversely affects their performance and prolongs their duration of the study.[ 8 ] Absenteeism also prevents them from accessing relevant information and contact with relevant materials (clinical skills, lectures, and practical sessions) necessary for active learning.[ 9 ] Medical physiology education also states that classroom lectures should be considered an essential component.[ 10 ]

Although there is a high rate of absenteeism from classes, the students’ presence in the classes is significant to educational institutes because providing resources for this type of education is costly and challenging.[ 3 ] On the other hand, with the emergence of new educational technologies and new online learning methods, the level of interest and the presence of students in classes have decreased even more. Today, the world is affected by the widespread availability of the Internet, which paves the way for a revolution in education. Conventional classes have been replaced by smart classes with the latest technology.[ 11 ] The children of this generation are not confined to traditional textbooks and have more opportunities to access online education.

In recent years, in the Faculty of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, the low attendance rate of students in some lectures has attracted the attention of education planners in this faculty. This nonattendance has invoked protests by some faculty members in recent years. Therefore, to solve this problem, this study examined the root causes of the problem to provide plans to solve the problem.

Materials and Methods

The present study was a narrow needs assessment survey which was performed on students ( n = 70) of the Faculty of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, in four stages. We had a preset list of questions to be answered by a predetermined sample of the professors ( n = 24) and students ( n = 70) to answer these questions chosen in advance. In the first stage, the opinions of professors and students about the reasons for absenteeism from the lecture classes were collected. In the second stage, the results of the first stage were discussed by an expert panel to find solutions for the problem. The results of the survey were tabulated, summarized, and discussed. In the third stage, online classes were held as one of the solutions and evaluated in the fourth stage

The research steps were designed as follows:

  • Step 1: Investigation of the factors associating with the attendance and absenteeism of students from classroom lectures
  • Step 2: Provision of solutions to increase students’ attendance in classes
  • Step 3: Implementation of the proposed solutions based on the set implementation priorities
  • Step 4: Evaluation.

After the study protocol was approved by the Faculty Ethics Committee, the study was instituted.

Step 1: Evaluation of the factors affecting the attendance and absenteeism of students from classes from the perspective of professors and students

At this stage, the students’ opinions were collected both qualitatively and quantitatively by the “focus group” method, and the data were collected through a regional standard questionnaire. In this way, since face-to-face sessions with students and discussing open-end questions might help better identify the factors that associate with students’ attendance in classes, a focus group was formed, consisting of student representatives (approximately 10 from each academic year). Then, two faculty members on behalf of the Vice-Chancellor for Education interviewed these students and collected their opinions and views. In the next step, to quantify the students’ opinions, a valid and reliable questionnaire (Cronbach's α = 0.86) was submitted to all the clinical students. The questionnaire was designed in two parts: the study of factors associating with the presence and absence, each of which was based on 12 questions. The questions were scored on a five-point Likert scale and explained to the students before completing the questionnaire.

The professors’ views were also qualitatively examined by the “focus group” method. The young professors were only a few years older than the students, belonging almost to the same generation. Therefore, it was expected that the opinions of young professors would be different from those of experienced professors. As a result, two professors from each department of the faculty (including 12 departments), as young professors and experienced professors, were selected. Then, the opinions of these two groups of professors on the subject were examined in two separate sessions in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor for Education. In each of these sessions, 12 professors, project managers, and statistical consultants were present. This stage was carried out to analyze the reasons for students’ absence from the classes so that the results would be a basis for educational programming.

Step 2: A meeting of experts and provision of solutions to increase student attendance in classes for theoretical lessons

A meeting was held in the Educational Deputy Office with the project managers’ presence to determine proper strategies and plans. After reviewing the results of the students’ and professors’ opinions and summarizing the issues raised in the Educational Council Meeting, the project managers presented their strategies to increase the students’ attendance.

Step 3: Implementation of solutions based on executive priorities

Finally, one of the solutions was adopted by the Vice-Chancellor for Education of the Faculty of Dentistry and implemented.

Step 4: Evaluation

In this stage, to evaluate the proposed solution after its implementation, a meeting was held with the project managers and professors to collect the professors’ opinions. Besides, a reliable and valid regional standard questionnaire was designed to collect students’ opinions ( n = 70). With the cooperation of the University Development Office and the use of the e-poll system, a survey of students was conducted through the web. To get the results, data were analyzed using McNemar's test.

In the first stage, which included the evaluation of factors affecting attendance, 85 questionnaires were completed in the group with 70 students (71% response rate). Tables ​ Tables1 1 and ​ and2 2 present the results of the survey of clinical dental students of Tehran University of Medical Sciences on the reasons for attending and not attending the classes for theoretical courses, respectively.

Prioritizing the factors affecting the absence of lecture classes from the students’ perspectives

Prioritizing the factors affecting the attendance of lecture classes from the students’ perspectives

Factors which were responsible for attendance or absenteeism of students from the classes basis of the young and experienced professors 's evaluation showed in Table 3 .

Factors responsible for attendance or absenteeism of students from the classes basis of the young and experienced professors ‘s evaluation

In addition, the following were some of the highlights of the differences between the views of young and experienced professors:

  • Both groups of young and experienced professors emphasized the development of virtual education
  • In both groups, some professors believed in mandatory attendance, while others considered mandatory attendance useless, disturbing the classroom's peace
  • Young professors laid greater emphasis on the practical and clinical nature of the material presented as an essential factor in attracting students, compared to experienced professors
  • Young professors emphasized the rotational nature of the teaching curriculum of professors as an essential factor in attracting students and increasing the ability of professors
  • Young professors believed that the exciting topics and chapters of the course that attract students are always in the experienced professors’ teaching agenda, and teaching entirely theoretical and unattractive topics is usually the responsibility of young professors
  • Young professors emphasized presenting new educational methods, such as PBL, to increase students’ active learning
  • Young professors pointed to the critical role of university policies in this regard and mentioned the gap in incentive policies for active professors in the education development compared to the incentive policies for research activities.

In stage 2, the project managers summarized the strategies for increasing student attendance in the following six areas after evaluating the students’ and professors’ points of view:

  • Empowerment of professor
  • Paying attention to the characteristics of the new generation (the need to benefit from new technologies and developments and promotion of virtual education)
  • Improving the evaluation system
  • Improving audiovisual equipment in classrooms
  • Improving educational curricula
  • Improving class schedules.

The project managers reviewed the six areas mentioned above, and the following points were raised about these areas:

  • Professor empowerment requires policy-making and fundamental and long-term planning. It should be noted that although the faculty members might have higher capabilities for educating the learners compared to that in the past due to scientific developments, the mean abilities of current professors have not increased significantly over time
  • The use of new technologies in the educational field has not improved significantly by considering the significant changes in the characteristics of the current generation compared to the students of previous decades
  • The evaluation system performs better than that previously; however, fundamental changes and reforms are necessary
  • The audio and visual equipment of the classes is undoubtedly more better and more numerous compared to previous years
  • Concerning educational planning, the curriculum has improved in many cases. However, the timing and presentation of some topics are undesirable, necessitating a review of the new dental curriculum by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, which is beyond the jurisdiction of the faculty
  • In some cases, the class schedule poses problems for students, with highly crowded classes on some days owing to a lack of time.

During the meeting, the project managers analyzed the points mentioned above and realized that although essential factors, such as the empowerment of professors, evaluation system, audiovisual equipment of the classes, educational curriculum, and class schedules, still need to be revised, they have improved to a great deal during the past decade. Therefore, they cannot be considered as the main reasons for students’ decreased desire to attend theoretical classes in recent years. Therefore, one of the most critical factors in reducing the presence of students in recent years could be a change in students’ generational preferences and ideals. In other words, today's students are more familiar with digital technology than ever before and benefit from them. The development of education is not possible without considering the developments in the present age, mainly in the field of information technology. E-learning is expanding globally, and many of the world's leading universities are taking advantage of it. The use of new technologies is not limited to virtual education, and virtual education, despite having many benefits, exhibits a lower rate of interaction between the professors and students than in conventional classes. However, this interaction forms the basis of learning in some educational topics. Therefore, virtual education could be used in cases where the simultaneous interaction of students and professors is needed at a low rate.

On the other hand, online classes, by taking advantage of virtual education, make it possible for professors and students to interact simultaneously on the web. Therefore, although it is not an in-person educational system (physical presence), it requires a kind of presence in the new world field, a presence that will become more acknowledged over time. It seems that online classes, like computers, would soon expand significantly. Therefore, it was suggested that online experimental educational classes should be held.

Finally, the project managers prioritized their planning and implementation to solve the problem of three issues, consisting of improving the capabilities of professors in using virtual education and digital technologies, paying more attention to virtual education and improving its quality, and holding online classes which is one of the new educational technologies with many benefits of in-person and non-in-person education.

The Vice-Chancellor for Education of the Faculty placed the online experimental educational classes on its agenda to develop new educational technologies in the faculty. The design and planning of the educational classes were carried out online; after coordination and education, the professors and students held online classes for at least 1 h for each of the four theoretical lessons. Online classes were selected so that students from four different academic years participated in the study.

Project managers’ evaluation of the online class attendance

Due to mandatory attendance, many students attend university classes reluctantly. Therefore, they only have a physical presence in the classroom, and in many cases, they interfere with the learning process of other students by disturbing the peace of the class. Therefore, the effective presence of students and their active participation in classes is necessary and vital. Since holding online classes for the first time was experienced by students and participating in it required some software measures for students, there were fears that many students would not be interested if they are not forced to attend the classes. Therefore, attending these classes, like conventional classes, was considered mandatory, and in the evaluation, their active presence in the classes was measured. The classes were held beyond the working hours of the faculty by coordination between the instructors and students.

Due to the mandatory attendance in conventional and online classes, the official attendance of students in both classes was almost the same. As mentioned, students’ active participation and level of activity are vital for the learning process. Therefore, the project managers considered the participation of students in online classes as an indicator of their active presence in such classes. The students’ answers to the questions posed by the professors in class and the students’ scientific questions were considered the students’ active participation. The classes were recorded to estimate the ratio of students with active participation to the total number of students present, which was estimated at 30%–64%, depending on the teaching method used, the number of questions and answers, and students’ engagement in scientific discussions. It should be noted that many students had more than one scientific activity and active participation in class, which was not calculated in the students’ participation percentage.

eProfessors’ opinions on the impact of online classes on student attendance

After holding the online classes, a meeting was held with the project managers and instructors involved to collect the comments and suggestions of the professors. After expressing their desire to hold these classes again, the professors evaluated the active participation of students in the classes as desirable and mentioned the role of online classes in increasing students’ active participation. The professors mentioned positive aspects of this project, including the possibility of roll call (which means physical presence and not necessarily active participation) in online classes like conventional classes, the possibility of re-using the classes by students since they were allowed to record the class, the impossibility of disturbing the class peace by students who are reluctant to benefit from the class, resulting in more active participation of interested students, and creating a useful environment for students with lower self-esteem who were not active in conventional classes.

Students’ feedback assessment about attending online classes

To collect the opinions of the students, a reliable and valid questionnaire was designed, and with the cooperation of the University Development Office and using the e-poll system, the students completed it through the web. Table 4 presents the results of this questionnaire. The results showed that the majority of the students were satisfied with attending online classes and the learning process in these classes. The students were eager to continue taking part in such classes, and the vast majority (80%) were reluctant to attend conventional classes with roll calls. The majority of the students (about 90%) considered recording the classroom content an essential advantage for online classes.

Student survey results about online classes based on the questionnaire

In another survey conducted as a focus group of 30 students participating in online classes, the students were asked if their active participation in online classes was more effective compared to conventional classes. This survey results showed that 73.4% of students believed that active participation and attention to educational content in online classes were better than those of conventional classes. Some students believed that the comfort of online classes, the lack of noise from other students, and the focus on the computer screen and the professor's lecture were the most important factors. However, 16.6% believed that their attention was better in conventional classes, and 10% considered conventional and online classes the same from this perspective. Most of the students’ criticisms of online classes were related to unconventional hours, stating that they were interested in attending classes during the regular hours, if possible. Students also found attending online classes easier than attending conventional classes due to the lack of commuting.

After reviewing the evaluations (reviewing by the project executives of the professors’ and students’ opinions), the active participation of students in online classes was deemed as effective, and according to the surveys, the active participation of students and their desire to attend these classes were higher compared to conventional classes.

Students’ absenteeism is a significant concern for higher and academic education around the world. One of the most important reasons for a decrease in students’ attendance classes in recent years might be their generational differences choices. As a limitation of our study, we did not try out the survey on a test group. A test group could let us know if our instructions are clear and if our questions make sense. Therefore, we did not revise the survey on the basis of our test group feedback.

Various studies have suggested many reasons for this. Magobolo and Dube[ 9 ] considered the reasons for the absence of nursing students as illness and not receiving payment for working in their study. Desalegn et al .[ 12 ] reported that the main reasons in the questionnaire completed by students for missing classes were preparing for an examination, an unfavorable class schedule, a lack of interest in the subject, a lack of interest in the teaching style, and ease of understanding the subject without guidance. They believed that not only the behavior of the students but also the characteristics of the teachers and the teaching methods to be effective in the absenteeism of the students from the lectures. In the present study too, the teaching method was considered as the main reason for missing classes due to generational preferences and was further reviewed. Abdelrahman and Abdelkader[ 8 ] showed that nursing students too attributed the main reasons for their absenteeism to educational factors, including a lack of staff in the clinical field and a lack of understanding of the lecture's content. The present study considered another factor to be more critical by considering the empowerment of the professors. A study by Bati et al .[ 13 ] on dental, medical, pharmaceutical, and nursing students showed that the factors that prevent students from attending class lectures are mainly individual (insomnia, lack of health, and the like) and the inefficiency of lecturing in a crowded hall. It is essential to improve the coaching and mentoring system by considering individual and external factors that have a critical impact on students’ attendance. In the present study, the educational aspect was the main reason for absenteeism, and factors such as fatigue and poor classroom conditions were the other less important reasons. Rawlani et al .[ 14 ] stated that the main reason for not attending lectures is the lack of motivation of students to learn. They said that new teaching styles need to be looked into. As in our study, a new way of teaching online was proposed as a solution.

So far, various solutions have been suggested to solve the problem of students’ absenteeism from class lectures. Sharmin et al .[ 1 ] showed that the use of strict roll call policies might affect students’ attendance, and medical schools should reinforce this policy to improve their students’ academic performance. However, according to the present study, it is important to note that this policy does not lead to active student attendance and probably does not improve their academic performance. Al-Shammari[ 15 ] showed that using management techniques and class attendance rules (such as assigning a portion of the total score, extra points to attend classes, and more assignments, or deducing grades for not attending or attending classes with delay) significantly increased the attendance of higher education students and on-time arrival at the class. These improvements were significantly correlated with students’ academic achievement. Thekedam and Kottaram[ 16 ] too reported that, to eradicate the problem of absenteeism, efforts must be made to address all factors in broader social, economic, and political environments, rather than focusing merely on students or faculties. They cited early interventions and preventative measures, positive reinforcement, and rewards for students who improved their attendance as practical factors in reducing chronic absenteeism and advised establishing programs for staff development, workshops, conferences, and symposiums to improve the professors’ performance by the faculty management. Professors who have tried interactive and innovative lecturing methods, by giving better and more engaging lectures, could change students’ attitudes and provide an environment that can reduce student absenteeism.

In the present study, the most important reason for the absence of dental students was the generational characteristics and subsequent changes in students’ learning passion and preferences. In the definition of generations, individuals born in 1995 or later are referred to as Generation Z.[ 17 ] These individuals are indeed our current students. Over the years, this generation has been given various names, such as Generation Z, Internet Generation, and iGeneration, because they are mainly characterized by computer addiction as well as addiction to any other type of technology. What sets this generation apart from previous generations is that they are the “most electronic generation” in history and have grown up with technology. They are growing with the Internet, cell phones, laptops, iPods, tablets, and other electronic devices that have become part of their daily lives.[ 18 ] Generation Z prefers nontraditional teaching methods and likes to use logic-based and practical learning approaches.[ 17 ] Instead of taking notes, Generation Z students rely on computer records, are more inclined to ask questions online, and do not like to wait for answers. Instead, they prefer immediate information and communication. Generation Z students do now fill our classrooms and expect an educational environment in which they can interact in the same way they do in their virtual world. This means the demand for immediate information, visual forms of learning, and the replacement of “communication” with “interaction.”[ 19 ] Active learning classes, such as flipped classrooms or problem-based learning methods, are more popular with this younger generation.[ 20 ]

In this study, holding online classes was proposed and implemented to solve the problem of student absenteeism. The results showed that the ratio of the students with active participation in the online class to the total number of participating students varied from 30% to 64%. Besides, the results of a survey of students’ opinions showed that the majority of the students were satisfied with attending online classes and the quality of learning in these classes. Similar results have been achieved in other studies on dental students.[ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ] Changiz et al .[ 26 ] observed that students showed good readiness in all components of e-learning. Hence, the instructional designer can trust the e-learning strategies and build the course based on them. Dalmolin et al .[ 17 ] showed that in addition to the positive attitude of dental students toward e-learning, the use of websites as a supportive tool for learning was significantly different between different age groups. Younger students believed that websites were a better tool to help them learn compared to older students.

Rensburg carried out a systematic review of the data from 36 articles on online classes and reported results consistent with the present study. It can be concluded from the similar results of these two studies that online teaching and learning has positive results, such as increasing student satisfaction and motivation, improving problem-solving skills, increasing flexibility for learning, and increasing student participation for undergraduate health sciences educators and students. Rensburg[ 27 ] reported that unstable Internet connectivity, inadequate Internet access, technological problems, and concerns about useful and fast feedback to students as challenges to online teaching and learning. Ochs[ 28 ] also showed that the online classes were more efficient in some teaching areas compared to classroom instruction; therefore, determining the teaching topics in online class planning is one of the most critical topics in organizing and designing these classes. Kwok et al .[ 29 ] and Tse and Ellman[ 30 ] reported that a combination of online education with conventional class-based teaching might play an essential role in improving students’ scientific knowledge and increasing their skills in clinical areas. A review by Tang et al .[ 31 ] showed that the integration of online lectures in undergraduate medical education is more acceptable by students and leads to improved knowledge and clinical skills. The results of the present study are consistent with many studies focusing on medical education.[ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]

Fadol et al .[ 40 ] showed that both online and flipped classes were held better than the conventional classes, and flipped classes were held better than the online classes. Furthermore, students who had access to online content missed fewer classes and performed better. All these studies are consistent with the current study. However, there are studies with different results, such as that by Fish and Snodgrass,[ 41 ] which advocated conventional education (face to face) of students. The reasons for this preference were reported to be motivation and discipline in conventional teaching and concerns about learning in online courses. The study suggested that taking a course in online classes and preparing for them could help students gain a realistic understanding of online classes and produce a positive impact. A meta-analysis in 2015 also found that students performed better in conventional classes. It considered that online classes were not affordable for institutions, and reported that the possibility for students to leave online courses and changes in existing technologies were the weak points of online classes.[ 42 ] Some of the problems in the present study were a lack of sufficient funding due to the impossibility of holding classes during the regular hours, a lack of sufficient experience of some professors in holding classes (which was solved with the help of the support system), and a lack of access to laptops for all the students (some students shared their laptops with classmates).

Finally, e-learning makes it possible for students to tailor the educational content to their individual learning styles with visual media, charts, digital content, interactive videos, or web-based interactions. This is facilitated by the use of mobile devices that provide easy access. Learning online could be an excellent option to help university professors teach future dentists. Teachers need to acknowledge that by introducing e-learning courses, they can encourage students to use online tools to educate and communicate with their professors and peers. Typically, teaching in dentistry relies more on visual techniques; therefore, students are more interested in visual transmission than text transmission.[ 17 ]

Undoubtedly, with the rapid advances in educational technologies and virtual teaching methods around the world, and with generational preferences of students, soon, the physical space of most universities will become centers merely for program coordination for educational courses. Theoretical classes will be held only with new and online methods. With the advances in online classroom software, a complete simulation of conventional classes will be possible virtually so that each individual will sit in a specific chair in the virtual classroom and will be trained. Clearly, at that time, having the skills to use these technologies and using new methods of virtual learning for professors will be an essential measure of excellence and success.

The results showed that various factors, such as the empowerment of professors, evaluation system, audiovisual equipment of the classes, educational curriculum, and class schedules, affect the attendance of students in the classroom. However, significant progress has been made in many of these factors over the past decade. Therefore, along with these factors, one of the most important reasons for the decrease in the attendance of students in recent years could be related to the change of generation and preferences of students. Since the new generation is more inclined to use educational technologies, in the present study, online classes were used as a solution to increase the active participation of students in the classrooms. The results showed that online classes are suitable from the perspective of professors and students and could significantly increase the participation of students in class lectures.

Financial support and sponsorship

Conflicts of interest.

There are no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. MJ Kharazi Fard and all professors and students in Dental School of Tehran University of Medical Sciences for their assistance in this study.

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Chronic Absence

The Problem

The most recent federal data show that in the 2020-21 school year, at least 14.7 million students nationwide were chronically absent. This means that chronic absence has almost doubled from the more than 8 million students , pre-Covid-19, who were missing so many days of school that they were academically at risk. Chronic absence — missing 10 percent or more of school days due to absence for any reason—excused, unexcused absences and suspensions—can translate into students having difficulty learning to read by the third-grade, achieving in middle school, and graduating from high school. Read this research summary for more details.

Read a Summary of Key Research

Watch this video to find out how Attendance Works can help you reduce chronic absence. Update: Recently released data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that 14.7 million students were chronically absent in the 2021-2022 school year. ( 12/05/2023 )

You can also view or download the Attendance Imperative video, at this Vimeo link: Attendance Works: A Community Imperative . Attendance Works created the Attendance Imperative a decade ago to explain the problem of chronic absence, its impact on student achievement, and to offer solutions and examples of how communities and districts are addressing barriers that keep students from getting to school.

Children living in poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent—and face the most harm because their community lacks the resources to make up for the lost learning in school. Students from communities of color as well as those with disabilities are disproportionately affected.

This isn’t simply a matter of truancy or skipping school. In fact, many of these absences, especially among our youngest students, are excused. Often absences are tied to health problems, such as asthma, diabetes, and oral and mental health issues. Other barriers including lack of a nearby school bus, a safe route to school or food insecurity make it difficult to go to school every day.  In many cases, chronic absence goes unnoticed because schools are counting how many students show up every day rather than examining how many and which students miss so much school that they are falling behind. Read our  blog about truancy and chronic absence .

TruancyVChronicAbsence-updated

While chronic absence presents academic challenges for students not in class, when it reaches high levels in a classroom or school, all students may suffer because the resulting classroom churn hampers teachers’ ability to engage all students and meet their learning needs.

The good news is that our work throughout the country shows us that chronic absence is a solvable problem. What works is taking a data-driven, comprehensive approach that begins with engaging students and families as well as preventing absences from adding up before they fall behind academically. The key is using chronic absence data as a diagnostic tool to identify where prevention and early intervention are needed. 

Success Stories about Improving Attendance

With this data in hand, schools, families and community partners can together determine the causes of chronic absence, and implement approaches that address barriers to getting to class. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires districts and states to collect chronic absence data and report it publicly.  The majority of states have adopted chronic absence as a measure for school accountability. 

The challenge of improving attendance is to avoid making the incorrect assumption that chronically absent students or their parents simply do not care. By working together, all of us — schools, public officials, public agencies, civic organizations, businesses, philanthropic groups, families and students —  can ensure all children can get to school every day so they have an opportunity to learn, flourish and realize their dreams.

Find out more about Chronic Absence by choosing a section in the menu at right.

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Best College Essay Examples

Causes of poor collegiate attendance.

310 words | 2 page(s)

Students go to college to get an education so that they may enter the professional world fully prepared. Why is it then, that so many college students elect to not attend, or “cut” classes? They are fully cognizant of the importance of attending class, but still, so many of them make a decision, whether conscious or unconscious, to skip classes. These students may call upon a plethora of reasons, some even logical, for why they do not attend their classes.

There are a host of reasons for not attending classes in college. One of the conscious reasons students may elect to skip a class is due to the content of the class. Perhaps the class is boring, difficult, or unrelated to the student’s major. In this case, a student may elect to skip a class from time to time, or he may take advantage of the attendance policy and skip the number of classes allowed. Another conscious reason a student may give for skipping a class is that he is failing anyway, so why even bother with attending. Once a student gets to this point, he does not see any validity in partaking in the class. One of the unconscious reasons for not attending class is oversleeping. By the time students enter college, their sleep patterns have changed in such a way that more sleep is required. Typically, in college, students are doing the opposite-getting much less sleep than they need. Therefore, some students may easily sleep through an alarm, if they even bother to set the alarm at all. Other reasons college students may elect to not attend class is because they have other plans, do not like the professor, or are suffering from a hangover.

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The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school attendance in the UK in 2007.

The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school attendance in the UK in 2007.

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Writing9 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Some people believe that protecting the natural environment is important but many doesn't seem to be bothered to take actions. what is causing this and what are the possible solutions to this problem, some people believe that governments should ban dangerous sports even though others claim they should have the freedom to choose a sport of their liking. to what extent do you agree or disagree, all children should study a foreign language in school, starting in the earliest grades. to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience., some people believe that car-free days are effective ways to reduce air pollution. however, others argue that there are other ways that are more effective. discuss both views and give your own opinion..

IMAGES

  1. Essay 6

    causes of poor school attendance essay

  2. The chart below shows the result of a recent survey into the causes of

    causes of poor school attendance essay

  3. PPT

    causes of poor school attendance essay

  4. School Attendance Difficulties and School-related Trauma

    causes of poor school attendance essay

  5. Root Causes

    causes of poor school attendance essay

  6. The impact of poverty on education

    causes of poor school attendance essay

COMMENTS

  1. School attendance problems are complex, and our solutions need to be as

    Considering traditional attendance counts alongside school climate data, student records, academic profiles and student well-being indicators can tell a fuller story, and lead to more effective ...

  2. Why Is School Attendance Important?

    Causes of Poor School Attendance. Many factors are associated with poor school attendance: Physical health issues. Health conditions such as asthma, influenza, diabetes, tooth decay, and obesity are all associated with higher rates of student absenteeism. Nearly 10 percent of children aged four to14 are diagnosed with asthma, a leading cause of ...

  3. School attendance: analysing causes and impact in pursuit of solutions

    Attendance has been described recently by school leaders, charities and commentators as the biggest problem facing policymakers and schools. The Children's Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, commented that greater levels of absence are becoming 'normalised'. The sudden, and seemingly persistent, rise in post-pandemic absence could have ...

  4. The Link Between School Attendance and Good Health

    More than 6.5 million children in the United States, approximately 13% of all students, miss 15 or more days of school each year. The rates of chronic absenteeism vary between states, communities, and schools, with significant disparities based on income, race, and ethnicity. Chronic school absenteeism, starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, puts students at risk for poor school ...

  5. Root Causes

    Once you know which students are at risk due to poor attendance, take stock of what you know about the reasons they do or don't attend school. Reasons for absences typically fall into four broad categories: Barriers to attendance, aversion to school, disengagement from school and misconceptions about the impact of absences. See figure below.

  6. 10 Facts About School Attendance

    10 Facts About School Attendance. Absenteeism in the first month of school can predict poor attendance throughout the school year. Half the students who miss 2-4 days in September go on to miss nearly a month of school. Read more... Chronic absence appears to have doubled by the end of the 2021-22 school year.

  7. Student absenteeism: Who misses school and how missing school matters

    Poor (free-lunch-eligible) students were 5.9 percentage points more likely to miss some school than nonpoor (non-FRPL-eligible) students, and they were 7.8 percentage points more likely to miss school three or more days (23.2 vs. 15.4 percent).16 Among somewhat poor (reduced-price-lunch-eligible) students, 17.9 percent missed three or more days ...

  8. Why school attendance matters

    According to the National Center for Student Engagement, schools are most effective in achieving high attendance rates when parents, school leaders, and community members work together to focus on reducing absences and truancy, and keeping kids in schools. The center provides 10 tips for schools and communities to improve their attendance rates.

  9. PDF Absence from School: A study of its causes and effects in seven LEAs

    6.6 School strategies to deal with poor attendance 54 6.7 Effectiveness of measures dealing with attendance 57 6.8 Chapter summary 58 . Working for Democracy: Review of Community Education Training iv ... school. The causes of truancy 27% of the 662 primary school children said that at some time they had truanted

  10. Why School Attendance Matters and Strategies to Improve It

    Attendance Works, a non-profit dedicated to improving school attendance, has categorized school attendance into three distinct categories. Students who have 9 or fewer absences are satisfactory. Those with 10-17 absences are exhibiting warning signs for potential attendance issues. Students with 18 or more absences have a clear cut chronic ...

  11. Impact of COVID-2019 on school attendance problems

    TRUANCY. Heyne et al. (2018) describe truancy as a young person's absence from school or class for the whole day or most of the day [].This absence occurs without the permission of the school authorities and an attempt to conceal this from their parents is made [].The overall prevalence of US student truancy is estimated at 11% between 2002 to 2014 even with reduction efforts [].

  12. School Absenteeism and Academic Achievement: Does the Reason for

    The present study aims to advance our understanding of the association between school absenteeism and students' educational outcomes. Specifically, we investigate whether different reasons for absenteeism (truancy, sickness, exceptional domestic circumstances, and family holidays) vary in their association with students' results in high-stakes examinations at the end of secondary schooling ...

  13. Chronic absenteeism: An old problem in search of new answers

    One random-assignment evaluation found that sending parents that single postcard reminder about the importance of attending school increased attendance by 2.4 percent. 26 A similar intervention ...

  14. Investigating the reasons for students' attendance in and absenteeism

    Introduction. Academic performance is one of the most critical issues of students in higher education. Since learning requires attendance and active participation in classes, attendance in classes is thought to be an essential factor in students' academic performance.[1,2,3] Previously, it was believed that students with a high attendance rate were more successful at the end of their course.[]

  15. Essay 6

    What are the causes? Suggest some solutions. Student absenteeism is on the rise in many schools around the world. Such an undesirable development can be attributed to several underlying factors, so a range of swift measures should be taken to curb poor attendance among students. To start, poor school attendance occurs for a number of reasons.

  16. School Attendance Essay Examples

    Browse essays about School Attendance and find inspiration. Learn by example and become a better writer with Kibin's suite of essay help services. Essay Examples

  17. The Problem

    The most recent federal data show that in the 2020-21 school year, at least 14.7 million students nationwide were chronically absent. This means that chronic absence has almost doubled from the more than 8 million students, pre-Covid-19, who were missing so many days of school that they were academically at risk.Chronic absence — missing 10 percent or more of school days due to absence for ...

  18. Poor School Attendance as a Key Factor Leading ...

    This essay will touch upon what is most likely the main factor leading to juvenile delinquency and that is poor school attendance and school connectedness. There are obvious links made between academic struggle, trouble at school, bullying, truancy and school exclusion policies that lead to juvenile delinquency.

  19. (PDF) Poor School Performance

    known psychiatric causes of poor school performance. It. ... spelling scores and school attendance in some children. J Nutr. 1995; 125: 1875-1883. 12. Roberts JE, Burchinal MR, Zeisel SA. Otitis ...

  20. Causes of Poor Collegiate Attendance

    There are a host of reasons for not attending classes in college. One of the conscious reasons students may elect to skip a class is due to the content of the class. Perhaps the class is boring, difficult, or unrelated to the student's major. In this case, a student may elect to skip a class from time to time, or he may take advantage of the ...

  21. The chart shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school

    The chart shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school attendance in the UK in 2007. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. ... Writing9 was developed to check essays from the IELTS Writing Task 2 and Letters/Charts from Task 1. The service helps students ...

  22. The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor

    The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school attendance in the UK in 2007. ... Writing9 was developed to check essays from the IELTS Writing Task 2 and Letters/Charts from Task 1. The service helps students practice writing for IELTS and improve their writing skills. By using this site, you agree to read and ...

  23. The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor

    The chart below shows the results of a survey into the causes of poor school attendance in the UK in 2007. #results #survey #school #attendance #uk. The above pie chart illustrates . of . Change preposition. ... Writing9 was developed to check essays from the IELTS Writing Task 2 and Letters/Charts from Task 1. The service helps students ...