Reframing the US Attendance Crisis: School Absences Send Powerful Signals about Children Nationally

Abstract

Some believe that holding schools accountable for student attendance will lead schools to act to reduce student absences and by doing so will increase student achievement, particularly for historically underserved students. We question both the premise that reducing absence will lead to substantial improvements in student achievement and fairness of holding school accountable for increasing attendance. Using two cohorts of nationally-representative data on kindergarteners, we find that factors unrelated to missed instruction account for at least 77 percent of the association between attendance and test score achievement among US children with twenty or more absences. We argue the attendance crisis conceals more troubling crises that will produce inequalities even if every child attends school every day, and that schools are ill-suited to address all the underlying causes of student absence. Absence is a symptom of the myriad challenges students and their families face—challenges that need to be addressed at a larger systemic level.