It’s a well-known fact by now that kids are missing school more than they were a few years ago. It’s a problem that is top of mind for educators and researchers, and increasingly for families.
But there’s one important group that doesn’t always see chronic absenteeism as a big problem: students. And that view among the young people whose attendance is tallied every day could be hindering districts’ ability to cut down on absences.
One-quarter of students do not think missing three or more weeks of school in a single academic year is a problem, according to a new survey administered by the RAND Corp. between March and May. RAND surveyed about 1,300 young people, ages 12 to 21, who are enrolled in K-12 schools, as well as administrators in 245 public school districts.
Educators and parents have more commonly been surveyed on the topic.
Forty percent of district leaders who participated in the RAND survey said reducing chronic absenteeism was among their top three most pressing challenges in the past school year. Nearly 60% of parents of school-aged children think chronic absenteeism is a problem, according to a 2024 poll by NPR and Ipsos.
“This quarter of kids who think it’s mostly OK [to miss three weeks of school] is really concerning,” said Melissa Kay Diliberti, an associate policy researcher at RAND who worked on the survey. “You can imagine that if you have a quarter of kids who think that, it’s very concerning, and it’s easy to see why you could have very high chronic absenteeism rates.”
Students’ perceptions did not depend on gender, ethnicity, or age. However, students whose parents’ highest education level was high school graduate or less (33%) were more likely to say that missing three weeks of school is “mostly OK” than peers whose parents had at least some college education (24%).
Chronic absenteeism has long been a thorn in districts’ sides, but has swelled since the pandemic and remained high, slowing students’ ability to recover academically from the time they spent out of school. Teachers tend to view chronically absent students less favorably, and teacher morale suffers when students are consistently out of class, adding more layers to an already complex problem.
How students feel about missing three weeks of school
RAND estimated that about 19% (9.4 million) of American students were chronically absent—defined as missing at least 10% of school days for excused or unexcused reasons—in the 2023-24 school year. That estimate increased for the 2024-25 school year to about 22% (10.8 million students).
In roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent—a far higher share than in rural or suburban districts, according to the RAND report.
The RAND researchers cautioned that the estimates were based on “district leaders’ best recollections of their student absenteeism rates.” As a result, the report said, “they are subject to some degree of uncertainty.”
Still, the estimates are far higher than pre-pandemic estimates of around 15% of students chronically absent each year and have often resulted in big challenges in helping kids regain ground in math, reading, and other subjects.
While 26% of kids said they felt missing three weeks of school is “mostly OK” and that they can make up what they missed either online or in person, the other 74% saw missing that much class time as a problem and said it would be hard to catch up from so much time away.
In total, 82% of students reported missing at least some school in the 2024-25 school year.
The three-week measure was an “arbitrary threshold” RAND set for the survey, Diliberti said, and it’s possible that even more students would have said missing one or two weeks of class was OK.
“I think there’s a lot more to unpack about kids’ attitudes,” she said.
Why kids say they miss school
The most common reason by far that kids identified for missing school was illness (67%). Other reasons included feeling down or anxious (10%), oversleeping (9%), and being uninterested (7%). About 4% said they missed school to care for a family member, 3% lacked transportation to school, and 1% reported work conflicts.
The results support the hypothesis that many absences are attributable to kids and families taking illnesses more seriously since the pandemic. But it’s also possible that students say they are sick because it is “more socially acceptable” than other reasons or because their interpretation of sickness could include mental health struggles, leading to an overrepresentation of “sickness” as the primary reason for absences, according to the report.
Regardless, schools and and districts should reopen conversations with parents about the benefits of in-person schooling and clearly define—especially to parents of younger students—when they should keep their kids home for illness and when it is appropriate to send them to school, even if the child is not feeling perfectly well.
“Some district leaders said they believe schools and families had overcorrected when it came to dealing with children’s sicknesses by encouraging children to stay home for even mild symptoms, so there’s probably some need here for districts to help reset parents’ expectations about how sick is too sick to come to school,” Diliberti said.
“It’s kind of challenging because during COVID, there was this effort to keep kids home whenever they weren’t feeling well, so it’s undoing a lot of patterns and habits that were created during the pandemic.”
