Why aren’t America’s students showing up?

Nearly four years into America’s learning-loss crisis, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the country’s schools is a basic one: getting students to show up. Rates of absenteeism have surged since the start of the pandemic, across nearly all regions, income levels and age groups. School leaders need to act now to solve the problem, or risk seeing millions of students lose any chance of recovery.

By every measure, U.S. students are missing huge amounts of school. During the 2021-22 academic year, 28% of schoolchildren were “chronically” absent — defined as missing at least 10% of the 180-day school year, or three and a half weeks. That’s up from a rate of 15% in the last full year before the pandemic. The problem is most acute in urban public school districts: Chronic absenteeism topped 40% in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago; in Detroit, the rate was 77%. But even affluent, suburban areas have seen unexcused absences soar.

Several related factors have contributed to this crisis. The advent of remote learning during the pandemic altered students’ routines and led many to conclude that in-person attendance was optional. School districts have eased grading policies that penalized students for missing class or turning assignments in late, further reducing incentives to attend. After years of COVID quarantines, parents are more inclined to keep kids home for minor illnesses or mental-health issues. Technology isn’t helping: There’s evidence that absenteeism had already begun rising in the years before the pandemic, coinciding with the explosion of smartphone and social-media use among children — which increased distractions and weakened students’ connection to school. Those problems only worsened while schools and other activities were shut down.

Reversing these trends will require school districts to employ a range of strategies. Their top priority should be identifying families with chronically absent students, informing parents about the long-term consequences of missing school, and following with up with phone calls, text messages, and home visits from school staff or social workers if the problem persists. Pandemic-era health guidelines should be revised so that students aren’t kept home for relatively innocuous coughs and colds. Meanwhile, accountability should be toughened.

For its part, the federal government should increase grants to states to promote anti-absenteeism policies and reward those that show sustained results.

Above all, the absenteeism crisis demands a greater sense of urgency. With the looming expiration of $190 billion in federal pandemic aid, many districts face a funding shortfall that threatens to limit future efforts to combat learning loss. If the U.S. hopes to prevent permanent damage to a generation of students, the first task is getting them back into the classroom.