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eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #9 focuses on chronic absenteeism.
Key points:
The biggest problem in education is that kids aren’t showing up to school. Last year, 26 percent of students missed a month of class or more, leading to dramatic declines in academic performance. Chronic absenteeism accounted for 27 percent of the drop in math scores and 45 percent of the decline in reading scores from 2019 to 2022. Students who are chronically absent are 7x more likely to drop out before graduating, and while state and district leaders are scrambling for solutions, kids are falling further behind.
Why chronic absenteeism is hard to solve
In 2019, only 13 percent of students in the U.S. were chronically absent. Typically, these students missed school because of significant personal reasons–long-term illness, gang involvement, clinical depression, working jobs to support their families, lacking transportation, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, etc.–that aren’t easily fixed.
However, since the pandemic, the rate of chronic absenteeism has doubled from 13 percent to 26 percent.
The change is cultural. For the last hundred years, it was drilled into the American psyche that “school is important.” A great effort was made to provide bussing to any child who lived too far to walk, and the expectation was that every child should come to school every day. Cutting class was sure to land you in the principal’s office or potentially even lead to police showing up at your door.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, this narrative flipped. As parents began working from home, their kids sat beside them. With lectures recorded and assignments posted online, attending class began to feel optional. When school doors reopened, many families didn’t fully come back. Common excuses like being tired, missing the bus, or simply not feeling like going were validated and excused rather than admonished. While students who skip school were once seen as delinquent, for many families it has become culturally acceptable–almost even expected–for kids to stay home whenever they or their parents want.
Overwhelmed by the drastic rise in absenteeism, school staff are unable to revert cultural norms about attendance. And it’s not their fault.
The root of the problem
Each student’s situation is unique. Some students may struggle with reliable transportation, while others skip certain classes they don’t like, and others still are disengaged with school entirely. Without knowing why students are missing school, staff cannot make progress addressing the root cause of chronic absenteeism.
Today, nearly 75 percent of student absences are “unexplained,” meaning that no authorized parent called or emailed the school to say where their children are and why they aren’t in class. This lack of clarity makes it impossible for schools to offer personalized solutions and keep students engaged. Unexplained absences only deepen the disconnect and limit schools’ ability to tackle absenteeism effectively.
Knowing why students are missing school is critical, but also very difficult to uncover. At a high school of 2,000 students with 85 percent average daily attendance, 225 students will be absent each day without providing any explanation. In an ideal world, schools would speak with every parent to find out the reason their child wasn’t in class–but schools can’t possibly make 225 additional phone calls without 3-5 additional staff. Instead, they rely on robocalls and absence letters, and those methods don’t work nearly well enough.
Normalize attendance again: It takes a village
Improving attendance is about more than just allocating additional resources. It’s about shifting the mindset and fostering a culture that prioritizes presence. This starts with schools and communities making attendance a shared responsibility, not just a policy.
First, schools must take the initiative to understand why students are missing school. Whether through modern AI-driven attendance systems or with more traditional methods like phone calls, understanding the root causes is critical to addressing the issue.
Next, categorize and recognize patterns. Small adjustments can have big impacts. One district noticed that students who were 0.9 miles away from school were much more likely to not show up because their bussing policy was for families living 1 mile away from school or further. By changing their policy, they saw a surge in attendance. Similarly, pinpointing specific classes that students are skipping can help tailor interventions, whether through teacher engagement or offering additional support.
Lastly, schools should focus resources on students facing the most severe challenges. These students often require personalized solutions, such as home visits for unresponsive parents or help with transportation. Targeted efforts like these create a direct impact on reducing absenteeism and improving overall attendance.
When communities unite to make school attendance a priority, students receive the support they need to succeed. Tackling chronic absenteeism is not an easy task, but with focused effort and a culture of engagement, we can reverse this troubling trend and give students the foundation they deserve for future success.
How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.
How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.
How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.
Reaction to the U.S. Department of Education’s announcement this week that it is shifting management of a handful of programs to other federal agencies ranged from celebration to condemnation.
The moves fulfill “a promise made and a promise kept to put students first and return education to the states,” said Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, on X on Tuesday.
Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, applauded the federal education management shifts in a Tuesday statement. “It won’t be seamless, and it won’t succeed unless the new agencies clearly communicate with states, communities, and parents about their new flexibility — how funds can be better spent, and how to avoid getting snared in fresh compliance traps. But shifting power closer to communities is the right direction.”
But opponents say the transfers will create more burdens and inefficiencies.
MomsRising, a grassroots organization focused on economic security and anti-discrimination practices against women and moms, called the moves “reckless, harmful, and unlawful” in a Wednesday statement.
“Further dismantling the Department of Education will undermine learning opportunities for children in every state, harming families and undermining our workforce, our economy, and our country as a whole for generations to come,” MomsRising said.
Although management of special education, civil rights enforcement and federal student aid is not moving out of the Education Department, the agency is still exploring the best options for the structure of those activities, a senior department official said during a press call on Tuesday.
The six new interagency agreements will help “break up the federal education bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the President’s promise to return education to the states,” the Education Department said in a Tuesday statement.
Management of career and technical education moved out of the Education Department to the U.S. Department of Labor earlier this year. CTE and K-12 administrative organizations had voiced reservations, saying they feared CTE would lose its education and career exploration focus and that programming would be driven solely by workforce needs.
Interagency agreements and other cross-agency collaborations have been used by the Education Department in the past, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. These practices typically have broad support, because they address alignment on specific programs between two or more agencies through shared funding and programming.
Tuesday’s announcement was significant for the large-scale movement of certain core programs out of the agency. Included in the new partnerships is an IAA with the U.S. Department of Labor to handle the management of about $28 billion in K-12 funding for low-income school districts, homeless youth, migrant students, academic support, afterschool programs, districts receiving Impact Aid, as well as other activities.
This partnership, the Education Department said, would streamline the administration of K-12 programs and align education programs with DOL’s workforce programs to improve the nation’s education and workforce systems.
Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, a nonprofit that seeks to eliminate economic and racial barriers in schools, said in a Tuesday statement that the changes will exacerbate hardships faced by underserved students.
“These new directives only serve to further distance students — particularly students of color, those from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners — from educational opportunities,” Forte said. “The other agencies that are now charged with protecting students’ educational civil rights simply do not have the relationships, expertise, or staff capacity to do so.”
On the flip side, the America First Policy Institute applauded the changes in a Thursday statement, saying the move would “preserve program service levels and responsiveness while reducing costs and giving states more flexibility to meet the needs of students and families.”
While many organizations and individuals praised or criticized the shift in management, several others said they want more details about logistics and exactly what would change.
For example, would the education secretary need to call the labor secretary if a decision needs to be made? And what agency would be tapped by staff seeking policy or procedure clarifications? This scenario was brought up by Braden Goetz — senior policy advisor at the Center on Education and Labor at New America and a previous director of the policy and research team in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the Education Department — during a Wednesday House Education and Workforce subcommittee hearing on CTE.
Goetz predicted that state officials in North Dakota, which passed a public charter school bill this year, will now need to seek clarity from the Labor Department on understanding Education Department regulations for charter schools.
“Good luck to them,” Goetz said.
The senior Education Department official on Tuesday’s press call said more details about operations and staffing for the IAAs will be better known in the coming weeks or months.
How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.
How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.
