Last year, Townhall covered how the Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines after news broke that 50,000 students in the district were marked absent on the first day of school, which accounted for 11 percent of the students. However, this was still considered an improvement from the previous school year.
Now, new figures released this month show that absenteeism among students in the United States has nearly doubled since before the COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon, known as “chronic absenteeism,” is defined as students missing more than 10 percent of the school year.
According to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), this figure went from 15 percent of students in 2018 to 29 percent of students in 2022 (The Hill):
The problem is particularly prominent in districts that already have a history of trouble with student success, such as low-achieving schools, ones with high poverty rates and districts with a high minority population.
“We’re able to see that there are really big increases, much larger increases in traditionally disadvantaged districts,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of the Education Policy Studies at AEI, who worked on the tracker.
Between 2018 and 2022, there was a 17 percentage point jump in chronic absenteeism among low-achieving districts compared to only 10 points in high-achieving ones, according to the tracker. In high-poverty districts, chronic absenteeism jumped 16 percentage points compared to 11 points in low-poverty schools.
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Among the states with the biggest rises is Wyoming at 35 points, according to the tracker. Arizona, Vermont and New Mexico had increases of 23 percentage points.
Last month, the Biden White House released a statement addressing the rise in chronic absenteeism.
“The increases in chronic absenteeism are large enough that they could be a substantial contributor to declines in post-pandemic test scores,” the administration said. “Given the magnitude of test score declines and extent of chronic absenteeism, pandemic recovery efforts require an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ response.”
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The latest figures from the Nation’s Report Card, which Townhall covered, show that math and reading scores among 9-year-olds fell across all race and income levels in the past two years, though they were significantly worse among low-ranking students. Those in the 90th percentile showed a 3 percent drop in math scores, while students in the 10th percentile fell 12 points. Average 9-year-old scores declined the most on record for math (seven points) and reading since 1990 (five points).
“We need to both make it clear to parents that it is good for their kids to be in school regularly and consistently and that they need to make that happen and to remind them that they have a legal obligation to send their kids to school,” Malkus said. “It’s not OK to have a cavalier attitude towards school attendance, because it affects their students but it also affects the schools that the kids go to.”
