Any notion that school attendance would rebound to pre-pandemic levels with little or no effort was dashed after the 2022-23 school year ended.
2023 saw rates of "chronic absenteeism" at 71% above their national pre-pandemic average. James Scimecca, Mary Trimble, and Grayson Logue of the Dispatch write that the reasons why "are many and complex, and researchers and policymakers are still struggling to understand why attendance hasn’t rebounded."
"Chronic absenteeism" is defined as kids missing at least 10% of the school year or 18 days in a 180-day academic year. Chronic absenteeism includes both excused and unexcused absences, which is different than "truancy," which relates only to unexcused absences.
According to teachers, administrators, and policymakers, 10% absenteeism is a benchmark for academic achievement being negatively affected by a student staying home. Data-wise, the 10% benchmark affects standardized test scores in reading and math. Those scores are at historic lows. The 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, "revealed a four-point decline in reading and a nine-point decline in math as compared to the 2019-20 school year." according to the Dispatch.
Kids aren't going to school because they don't like school. But that's been true since the Greeks. Perhaps the students sense they aren't being "instructed" as much as they are being "propagandized."
Think back to your K-12 experience. Weren't the very very best teachers those who engaged your attention, fired your imagination, and most importantly, allowed you to think for yourself to discover the answer?
I don't care whether a teacher is left or right. It doesn't matter. Formal education is about teachers guiding students down the path to knowledge. Socrates was famous for getting his students to ask questions. He was all about his pupils finding the answers themselves by asking and answering an endless series of questions.
Not every teacher can be Socrates. But they can be a heck of a lot better than the union flunkies who can't be fired no matter how bad they are.
Then again, it's not entirely the teachers' fault.
But absences don’t just affect the students who aren’t in the classroom, said Sarah Crittenden Fuller, a research associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill currently investigating the effects of COVID-19 on schools in her state. “Having this really elevated rate of absences is impacting all of the students,” she told TMD. “So even the students who are there—how is it impacting the dynamic of the class if you have two or three kids out almost every day? Teachers are spending a lot more time going back and reviewing.”
Although not all states collect chronic absenteeism data or report it publicly, a Stanford analysis of 40 available states (plus Washington, D.C.) found that, during the 2018-2019 school year—the last one fully uninterrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic—the national average of students who were chronically absent was around 15 percent. During the 2021-2022 academic year, when schools were largely open again following pandemic closures, that figure had jumped to 28.3 percent—a roughly 90 percent increase.
Is it just a matter of a changing culture about sickness and school? Sending a kid to school with the sniffles is no longer considered "toughing it out."
“The importance of showing up to school every day was relaxed for very good reasons when COVID was raging,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It was extended by some school districts—for what I would call not very good reasons—but for reasons which certainly […] shape behaviors in the school districts where those closures extended," Malkus continued. "The same can be said of quarantines and the attitude that was, ‘Well you know, pre-pandemic we don’t go to school if you’re really sick.’ And now you miss school if there’s a worry about it.”
I'm not entirely buying that explanation simply because most parents have already assessed the danger of COVID-19 and have factored in the relative danger of their children being exposed. If they hadn't, there wouldn't have been the huge pushback against school districts staying closed.
Less proselytizing, less instruction, more development of critical thinking skills, and better teachers along with outreach to the most at-risk kids might start turning the absenteeism problem around. It's not going to happen soon because the damage has already been done, and many school districts are doubling down on policies that got them in this mess in the first place.
