One in 10 American students miss a month or more of school a year, according to a study by the Everyone Graduates Center at the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University and the Get Schooled Initiative, sponsored by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Based on data from Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon, and Rhode Island—the only states that track chronic absenteeism—the report estimates 5 million to 7.5 million students nationwide miss a month or more of school annually. Rates of chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent of school days in a year, ranged from a low of 6 percent in Nebraska (in 2010-11) to nearly one in four students in Oregon (based on 2009-10 data.)
