Since early 2022, I have been writing about the chronic absenteeism of public school kids.
Chronic absenteeism occurs when a student misses 18 days of school, or approximately 10% or more of the school year.
Congress appropriated $190 billion for schools across the country to deal with post-pandemic problems, including trying to entice the 31% of kids who were chronically absent during the 2020-21 school year back to class. Results were uneven. While some states like Alabama saw their chronic absentee rate drop to 15%, Alaska's is at 43%. The average is 24%, far above the 15% pre-pandemic average.
The problem is worse in large cities. where the percentage of chronically absent students is well over 30%. “Our relationship with school became optional,” said Katie Rosanbalm, a psychologist and associate research professor with the Center of Child and Family Policy at Duke University.
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, some children may have suffered from anxiety in believing they had fallen too far behind. Others became discipline problems due to a lack of socialization.
“If kids are not here, they are not forming relationships,” said Quintin Shepherd, the superintendent in Victoria, Texas. “If they are not forming relationships, we should expect there will be behavior and discipline issues. If they are not here, they will not be academically learning and they will struggle. If they struggle with their coursework, you can expect violent behaviors.”
Reason Foundation's Senior Policy Analyst Jude Schwalbach points out that many states have reduced the consequences for missing that much time in the classroom.
He writes that "students from the so-called Covid Cohort have suffered fewer consequences for missing 10% or more of the school year than past generations, according to a 2025 analysis of 22 states by AEI researchers, Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon."
“Our most conservative estimates indicate that if attendance mattered as much as it once did, 100,000 fewer students would have graduated in 2022 alone. That’s more than the total number of 12th graders in New Jersey,” they wrote in The Washington Post.
Isn't there anything else that schools could have done besides shoving these half-educated children out the door with a diploma and a slap on the back?
Malkus and Hollon attribute this shift to a failure on the part of school administrators to roll back temporary policies implemented at the height of the pandemic to accommodate students, such as minimizing consequences for late or missed homework, allowing students to retake tests, or expanding access to online credit-recovery programs.
School administrators who want to improve student attendance desperately need to reverse course if policies like these are still in place. 50CAN’s Liz Cohen argued that if incentives fail to motivate students to attend school, then school officials should impose serious consequences, such as holding students back a year or requiring summer school if they fail to meet the minimum attendance requirements.
“Think this unfair? It’s hard to conceive of something more unfair to children than passing them from grade to grade without ensuring they accumulate sufficient knowledge and experience,” Cohen explained in The 74.
According to Mastermind Behavior, the number of homeschooled children nearly doubled from 2019 to 2021. Currently, almost 4 million children are homeschooled. Those kids aren't counted as absent, but they are counted as no longer in public school. Between 2019 and 2024, more than 1.2 million students left the public school systems across the country.
“The most fundamental thing for adults to understand is that avoidance feeds anxiety,” psychologist Lisa Damour told the New York Times. “When any of us are fearful, our instinct is to avoid. But the problem with giving in to that anxiety is that avoidance is highly reinforcing.”
In other words, the more kids skip school, the harder it becomes to get them back in the habit of attending.
I've called these children who are slipping through the cracks of the educational system "The Lost Generation." The long-term economic impact for the nation and these children and their future families will begin to come into focus in the coming decades.
