The rise in chronic absenteeism is linked to a host of problems, including mental-health issues and juvenile crime.
The rise in chronic absenteeism is linked to a host of problems, including mental-health issues and juvenile crime.
S ince the pandemic, K–12 schools across the country have seen a dramatic increase in chronic absenteeism.
While millions of American students missed out on in-person learning during Covid-19, the number of students back in class after the pandemic did not rebound as expected. Instead, according to the latest data, over two-thirds of students in the U.S. attended a school with 20 percent or more of its students chronically absent in 2021–2022. Both the clear identification of this issue and the enactment of a swift response should be top priorities for school districts across the nation.
“Chronically absent” refers to students who miss 10 percent or more of instructional days in a year. Unlike truancy, which refers to a summation of unexcused absences, chronic absenteeism includes both excused and unexcused absences.
The startling increase in chronic absenteeism that began during Covid-19 can be attributed in part to the vast school closures and move to remote learning across the country during the pandemic. Children fell out of the habit of attending school every day — and their parents fell out of the habit of ensuring that they were in school. While going to school was once an unquestioned norm, the pandemic colored it with optionality.
Chronic absence and truancy were, of course, problems before the onset of Covid-19. The pandemic exacerbated an already-existent problem.
“Chronic absenteeism is the No. 1 problem in education right now,” Nat Malkus told National Review. Malkus, the senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “This is not a new problem, but COVID shutdowns turned it into a crisis.” Before the pandemic, in 2019, about 15 percent of students nationwide were chronically absent. By 2022, that number had nearly doubled to 28 percent. However, even after Covid-19 spikes subsided, the number of chronically absent students did not. In 2023, 26 percent of students were still chronically absent.
“I don’t think that it’s a simple situation where policies changed behaviors. I think it’s more that culture changed behaviors really widely,” Malkus said.
In short, the social breakdown of communities during the pandemic — a breakdown that amplified the isolation and atomization of Americans today — has contributed to lower incentives for kids to go to school. If students do not feel connected to their peers, known by their teachers, or understand that they belong at school, they are much less likely to show up in the first place.
Chronic absenteeism affects not only the students who are themselves absent, but all of their peers as well. The constant rotation of classmates inhibits the teacher’s ability to organize the classroom and limits the other students’ ability to feel familiar with their classroom.
In certain school districts, the numbers are particularly staggering. In the District of Columbia, for example, 60 percent of high-school students missed 10 percent or more of the 2022–2023 school year. One-quarter of D.C. high-school students missed 30 percent or more of class in the same period.
There are major splits along demographic lines as well. In D.C., economically disadvantaged students were 2.9 times as likely to be chronically absent as students without economic disadvantage in the 2022–2023 school year. While chronic absenteeism is certainly higher at disadvantaged school districts, it remains a near-universal issue.
Malkus told National Review, “The increases are pretty much across the board, and they just got proportionally worse. And that’s a key factor, because what a lot of people want to say is, ‘Well, chronic absenteeism is so much worse in disadvantaged schools so it’s a disadvantaged-schools problem,’ and that is the wrong conclusion to draw. It is a widespread problem. It is everywhere.”
Hedy Chang, the founder of Attendance Works, recognized this problem before the pandemic amplified it. She told National Review that, in the 2000s, “No one even knew that they needed to collect attendance data. . . . We had to figure out ways to provide tools for people to, first and foremost, understand that they had a chronic absence challenge. Most people said they didn’t.” Most schools just looked at truancy but ignored collective absences. However, by 2018, the majority of states in the U.S. collected and publicized their chronic-absence data.
Most of the students who are severely chronically absent — those who miss one-third or more of instructional days — feel disengaged, isolated, and purposeless. The students who face the most barriers to attending school tend to be the same students who feel the most disengaged at school. This atomization was heightened during Covid-19 and continues to harm students and their communities.
Chang said that “cultivating a sense of belonging, connection, and support for every student and family” is key to turning chronic-absence numbers around. “When kids and families feel that they’re going to be physically and emotionally healthy and safe, when they feel academically challenged and engaged, and when the adults invest in relationships with the students, that’s what really gets kids to school.”
Chang emphasized that while many students, particularly those from low-income families, face material barriers to attendance (e.g., access to transportation or health care), connectedness and belonging must come first. If students simply have no interest in going to school, there are no material instruments that will get them there.
Daniel Princiotta at the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, told National Review that the way to help get kids back in school is to focus on “agency, belonging, and connectedness.” “That means making schools places where students can engage in activities that are meaningful to them, where they feel welcome for who they are, and where they have peer groups and adults in school who support them.” According to a 2022 report from the American Psychological Association, “71 percent of parents said the pandemic had taken a toll on their child’s mental health, and 69 percent said the pandemic was the worst thing to happen to their child.”
Another 2022 study on student mental health during the pandemic found that those who did not feel close to others at school, compared with those who did, had a consistently higher prevalence of poor mental health during the pandemic (45 percent versus 28 percent) and after (38 percent versus 24 percent). The study also observed persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness among disconnected students (53 percent versus 35 percent), more serious considerations of attempting suicide (26 percent versus 14 percent), and actual attempted suicides (12 percent versus 6 percent).
The study ultimately called for “comprehensive strategies that improve feelings of connectedness with others in the family, in the community, and at school” to improve mental health among students.
The necessity of connectedness is echoed by those seeking to address chronic absenteeism. According to a 2023 report from the Everyone Graduates Center, “Increasing School Capacity to Meet Students’ Post-Pandemic Needs,” the most effective mechanisms to getting students back on track are at the personal level. High-intensity tutoring, mentoring, and “success coaching” have a “strong track record of improving attendance and helping students do better in school.”
In short, students are more likely to succeed when given personal attention and support by the adults in their lives. This, of course, starts in the home but must be reinforced at school. Students who lack supportive parents are doubly in need of support and mentorship from adults at their school and in their community.
In an article for the National Association of School Boards, Chang observed Connecticut’s success in raising attendance rates by establishing a program focusing on positive engagement and relationship-building. Attendance increased nearly 15 percentage points for students served during the 2021–22 school year after they had been in the program for six months.
The same disincentives to attend school — disconnectedness, isolation, and a sense of purposelessness — act as incentives for worse pastimes. While the rise in chronic absenteeism has not on its own caused a rise in juvenile crime, the increase of the two are significantly correlated.
In Washington, D.C. — where the mayor declared a juvenile-crime emergency last year — the majority of those arrested for crimes such as robbery and carjacking are juveniles. Carjackings have skyrocketed in recent years: The rate of incidents nearly doubled in 2023. The average age of suspects arrested for carjacking is 15 years old. Guns are used about half of the time.
Marcelles Queen, who founded Representation for the Bottom — a charitable organization committed to supporting at-risk youth in Washington, D.C. — described to CNN how the path toward carjacking and other violent crime starts early, particularly when students start to miss school regularly. “It’s definitely a crisis. I’ve never seen 12-year-olds do the things that they do.”
Queen noted extreme chronic absence as a warning sign before more serious trespasses. “Every single case (of a child facing criminal charges) you see 100 days missing school, no food in the household. Why does it take something so major to see, oh, we’re failing our kids.”
According to a local news outlet, “District carjackings have climbed 350 percent since 2019. As of September 2023, there were 706 incidents. However, police made only 102 arrests. Of those, 65 percent were youth. . . . From 2021 to 2023, youth made up an average of 66.66 percent of those arrested for carjackings.”
Jawanna Hardy, who works to prevent youth violence in D.C. through her organization Guns Down Friday, said, “Kids can miss school and nothing is done.” A Washington, D.C., police officer observed during a public-safety walk that most of the carjackings are “not done for any motive except just having fun. I mean, they’re not stealing cars to sell parts, they’re just stealing cars to steal cars,” the officer said.
When students no longer feel connected to their communities, chronic absenteeism is one of the many consequences. Schools must be communities, not just information factories or student warehouses. Simple gestures — such as faculty and staff members learning the names of all their students, greeting them personally every morning, and checking in on them individually and regularly — help build a culture of belonging.