The Chronic Absenteeism Crisis Is More Complicated Than We Think

Two years ago, an electrician came to my apartment to fix a light in my house. We chatted and I told him I was a special education teacher, in one of our local city schools. He had actually gone to high school at a school that wasn’t too far from the one I was teaching at. It was one of the biggest high schools in the city with very similar demographics to mine — a high poverty, predominantly Black and Hispanic school. When he talked about the high school, he laughed.

“It was a fucking joke,” he said. “I missed 100 days my senior year and still graduated.”

I laughed, too. For the record, we have 180 school days during the school year, so this means this electrician had an attendance rate of around 47% during his senior year and still got by. He obviously wasn’t saying this like it was a good thing. He wasn’t saying the teachers were so nice and accommodated him amidst hardships in his life. He was implying that the standards were really low and he got by with the bare minimum, and that bare minimum was coming to school less than half the time.

Obviously, he was getting by just fine as an electrician, but I have been thinking about this comment amidst the media coverage about chronic absenteeism and how absences have exploded in America since COVID-19. According to Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris in the New York Times, chronic absenteeism has increased significantly across America, from 15% in 2019 to 26% in 2023. They have increased in poor and rich, urban and rural, big and small school districts. They have increased in majority White and majority non-White districts, so chronic absenteeism in school has exploded across all demographic and economic groups in America, which is incredibly alarming.

Mervosh and Paris explain that wealthier parents are having their children not go to school when they go on vacation. Working-class teenagers may have to work or take care of younger siblings. They may also have transportation issues. One guidance counselor said teachers are still expected to post work online, which gives families the false impression that their kids missing a lot of school are still keeping up. Across the board, students who struggle with mental health, which is more students than before, are staying home.

“Our relationship with school became optional,” Katie Rosenbaum, a psychologist at Duke University said.

The reporters state that daily attendance has not been back to normal since remote options and quarantining. For teachers, this is frustrating because excessive absences force teachers to slow down to keep the majority of their students on track. Some parents interviewed lost trust in their school system after virtual learning, with some school districts (including my own) being closed for more than a year to in-person learning. Students, as a result, suffer from more anxiety from the pandemic. Schools are also seeing a major rise in student misconduct and behavior issues due to the pandemic. I have seen numerous teachers quit because of these increased behavioral issues, personally, given the trauma so many experienced during the pandemic.

One solution educators have found that has worked to ameliorate student absences has been home visits. They establish relationships with disengaged students and families and show families the school cares, and notices, that their child is not in school.

The New York Times then interviewed students themselves on why some of them have been missing so much class during COVID-19. The first student, from Pennsylvania, told the Times that there were two contributors to missing so much school — first, online school made missing school easy, and students learned that they could miss school and suffer no consequences. There was little to no homework, and you could be caught up very easily through work online.

Another student from Pennsylvania stated the same conditions but framed it from a lens of student empowerment. The student could just mute their class and do whatever they wanted, and school would just be a lot easier to pass. The student said students were in for a shock when they came back to in-person learning, and “the easy way” was not possible. Absences increased since the “easy way” wasn’t as possible anymore, and there were few consequences to missing school if you felt any semblance of illness.

Some students feel like expectations are a lot lower, and students don’t need to work as hard as a result, and they can catch up on their classes through online assignments if they do not attend school. This makes schools “feel” optional, especially as some schools let kids opt out of testing. Some students feel like they’ve fallen out of their routine. Some students are just less motivated and struggle more getting to school. Some students have struggles that have nothing to do with the pandemic, like personal and mental health problems. Some students feel like schools can do more, including making attendance part of a student’s grade or not setting minimum grades at 50%.

Beyond what the experts say, I have been seeing these trends in student attendance for the past five years in the school system. I have seen students miss school for a plethora of reasons they didn’t miss school for prior to the pandemic.

The past two years, when students tested positive for COVID-19, they would have to miss ten days during the 2021–2022 school year or five days during the 2022–2023 school year. There would usually be mechanisms to ensure these students were not identified and their confidentiality would not be compromised. Missing 10 days to satisfy quarantine procedures, however, would put a student at 10 days of absences and make them chronically absent. One commenter on the New York Times piece talked about how her Kindergartener child missed 15 days of school due to RSV, COVID-19, and Hand Foot and Mouth Disease, which the parent attributes to decreased immunity from quarantine.

I believe the health complications from the pandemic might constitute a sizeable amount of the chronic absenteeism that has arisen from COVID-19, as it is seen as more responsible these days to stay home while sick. Since school closures, immunity may be lower than it was before and may be more encouraged by health care professionals and society at large.

I have also seen kids miss school for reasons like being genuinely sick and getting COVID-19, but also for other reasons for being disengaged from school, including mental health and academic gaps.

I would often realize in my line of work, and in my excessive outreach to students and participation in some home visits, that there is always a reason why a child does not come to school. Some of it is very mental health-related, and anxiety or depression was often the most common reason. Sometimes, there is a lot going on at home. A lot of students may have transportation issues and issues with public transportation in particular. As someone who manages the special education department in my school, I have seen students who just feel like school is too hard, like they were passed along too many years without learning essential reading, math, and writing skills.

Whether this last reason is an indictment on schools is a complicated picture, but you have to see it from the teacher’s perspective. Ever since No Child Left Behind, the 2001 statute that emphasized increased accountability on teachers through test scores, academic progress, and report cards, teachers are always under the microscope, often being told they’re doing something wrong when they fail a child, but that they’re also doing something wrong when they pass a child who isn’t meeting grade level expectations. This is most certainly a product of a school getting in trouble when too many kids are failing, and someone dinging the school for too many students being unsuccessful.

You get in trouble if too many kids in your class are failing — and it’s hard not to feel like you’re doing something wrong as the teacher in that instance, too. Being in the middle of these competing demands of high standards and increased accountability can often make it feel very punitive when you fail a child.

It’s really difficult to know what the right thing to do when a kid is just on the cusp of passing and failing. This has been exacerbated by many school districts, recently, adopting policies that the lowest grade a child can achieve on an assignment, even if it’s missing, is a 50 instead of 0. If a child automatically receives a 50 for doing nothing and not coming to class and they only need a 60 to pass, there isn’t much the kid needs to do to get their grade up to a 60.

I do see an attitude change. I see the attitude change among staff as well as students. It’s more common to call out when you’re sick, but also to take off if you need a mental health day. I think both trends are just more common in the American workplace, and those attitudes shifting away from “be at work at all costs” have trickled down to education and our youth as well. I’m not saying these are good or bad things, and I don’t judge people who take a lot of mental health days. In the 2022–2023 school year in New York City, nearly one in five teachers was absent for 11 or more days. On an even grander scale, the workplace for many white-collar professions has just gotten more flexible between remote and hybrid work.

But I think it’s a good thing we’ve gotten more accommodating. I think it’s a good thing more kids are staying home when they feel sick and when they are having severe anxiety or depression, which are both very legitimate reasons.

For a long time, there has been a more conservative, no nonsense approach to student attendance. I was a product of this mindset. Between sixth to 11th grade, I didn’t miss a single day of school. I didn’t miss a single day of school when I was sick, or when there was a lot going on at home. I also didn’t have the language for mental health at the time when I was struggling mentally.

That attitude has been very hard to break in adulthood. I spent my first two years only taking one personal day and then took off four days during my third year when I got a very bad cold with COVID-like symptoms. I have, in the last five years, accrued more than 50 unused sick days, and still am known for taking very minimal time off. I think being someone who shows up every day, even when I’m not at my best, is important, even if there’s nothing to quite be gained by it, as in education, there is a lot of pressure to just be a consistent presence for the kids by being there every day.

The rationale behind this old school approach is that the world is hard and does not care about how you feel — if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid, particularly in a society or workplace that does not have a robust safety net. I see this mindset. As much as I absorb this mindset on a personal level, I didn’t go to school in the middle of a pandemic and realize not everyone has had the same circumstances as I had.

The most popular teacher comment in the New York Times article about the attendance crisis documents parents in an affluent school district taking their children on week-long vacations when they should be in class. Many of these parents expect teachers to “give them the work” and help their child catch up when they come back. The teacher described that parents often put the blame on the teacher when kids’ grades drop. The teacher says administrators also puts the blame on teachers if grades drop, and behavior since the pandemic has gotten worse, as well. The teacher talks about kids who miss class all the time or who are always late to class but feel entitled to good grades.

However, right now, I am living on the other side and I am part of the school staff that is working with students just on the edge of graduation pending a couple of missing assignments. I am assisting these students with graduating and making up their assignments and want to see them get across the finish line after seeing what they’ve gone through the past four years with COVID-19, school closures, and often personal tragedy. Parents have thanked me for this intense effort to help their kids graduate and not have to go to summer school, and students have been very grateful too. To me, it feels heartless to fail a kid when they only need 1% or 2% on a grade, beyond what the student’s historical attendance trend is.

I do get the pushback and how it looks from the outside. What message do we send to kids when they only show up to school 45% of the time and still pass and graduate? What message will they adopt when they go to work? Maybe we have gone in a too liberal direction and part of the crisis in chronic absenteeism is just students seeing there are no consequences for missing class.

The common theme is none of these problems are new, but they have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The answer is that there is no simple answer or simple solution. No, not everyone is missing school because of taking an excessive amount of mental health days or mistrust after school closures during COVID-19. Home visits may help, but they’re not the answer to everything.

I empathize with teachers who have been frustrated that kids seem to just not take school seriously until the last minute or when their whole future is on the line. I have been that unsympathetic teacher, but usually, staring down the barrel of the kid’s future and what I am doing to that future if the kid is genuinely trying has been enough to change my mind. To me, there wasn’t that much of a difference between a 59%, which is failing, and a 60%, which is passing — it’s not like the kid earning a 60% after coming to class only half the time was a golden ticket to an elite college.

I have, like many, seen this increasing trend to blame the teacher when a kid is not making progress, from parents to administrators to people like me, who are teacher adjacent. I think it is an unfair burden to force teachers to be super accommodating, help kids make up for an excessive amount of missed days, and essentially become telemarketers to beg kids to do their work and come to school. A previous, more old-school generation would have been a lot more unsympathetic, pointing to the fact that if a student misses 50% of school on a given school year, they’re simply just not doing what they’re supposed to do. The real world won’t slow down for the kid.

I think it will get better the more we will rebound from the pandemic. We should do more home visits. We should emphasize the importance of attendance. We should, perhaps, emphasize that there are consequences if you miss the vast majority of school like there are if you miss the vast majority of days at work, even if the political winds are against these consequences.

In my capacity, I oversee around 115 students. On a given day, I have called 60 parents and reached out to leave voicemails or emails to monitor their progress. Some conversations have been me saying, “hey Ms. Smith, your child hasn’t been to school all week and is failing all his classes.” Sometimes, parents are very surprised — I hear tons of times that “I send him out the door at 7 a.m. every day” only for the parent to realize the kid isn’t actually going to school. This usually takes up my whole day at work and I know that, more often than not, I’m the bearer of bad news, telling a parent a bunch of things they don’t want to hear.

One mistake I think we so often make is isolating problems in the education system to just the education system. Students are struggling more since pre-COVID because parents are struggling more, because it seems like everyone is struggling more. The classroom is a microcosm of society, and so many things factor into whether a child attends school, including family, mental health, policy, transportation, infrastructure, etc. I empathize with the child who has to wake up at 5 a.m. and catch three buses, and bring their younger sibling to school, only to still be an hour late to school. The fact is that schools, teachers, students, and parents need help from all stakeholders instead of putting the blame only on schools and teachers.

We can blame it all on schools becoming too easy, not having enough consequences, or school closures. But we need to keep trying, every single one of us, each and every day to not only show parents we care when their kid doesn’t come to school. It’s not only to show how important attendance is, but to reinforce that we’re all in this together and we all have a shared interest: the success of every child and our nation’s future.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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