Chronic absenteeism—missing over 10 percent of school days—remains a persistent challenge for too many districts. Reducing it is complicated but badly needed.
Our organization, EveryDay Labs, partners with districts comprised, in total, of more than 1.5 million students in 15 states to use attendance data to tailor and target absenteeism interventions. To date, we’ve reduced absenteeism by millions of days. We’ve uncovered three insights about student absenteeism that have profound implications for how to help students thrive. Each of them can inform what educators do, for whom, and when.
1. Every single missed school day matters for achievement.
Every additional absence is associated with decreased academic performance, especially for those not yet chronically absent.
The chart illustrates a clear trend: Students who miss more school end up with lower standardized-test scores in math and in language arts. For instance, students who miss no school score around the 50th percentile in language arts and the 60th percentile in math. In contrast, those missing 15 days score just in the 31st percentile in language arts and 41st percentile in math. This trend is consistent with similar data collected from 1st and 2nd graders in the district in 2020-21.
There are two implications of this insight.
First, every additional absence is associated with students performing a little worse academically.
And second, the decline in test scores with each additional absence is sharpest before students become chronically absent. Preventing students from reaching the chronically absent threshold by missing 10 percent of school days is an important and worthwhile goal. It’s also essential to broaden our focus beyond only those students, though.
2. Focus more on students who aren’t yet chronically absent.
Districts often concentrate the bulk of their efforts on students with the highest absence rates. But a recent analysis we conducted on absence patterns suggests we should reconsider this approach. A majority of school and district staff (51 percent) report spending most of their absence-focused time on students who are severely absent, despite those students representing less than 20 percent of all absences.
Most absences come from students missing less than two days a month (students with absence rates less than 10 percent) and students missing two to four days per month (students with absence rates between 10 percent to 20 percent), yet those students receive little of our absence-reduction efforts. To effectively reduce absenteeism, we must also focus on this larger group, which represents approximately 84 percent of students. Implementing lighter-touch interventions, such as personalized family-communications programs, can be highly effective for these students.
In our organization, we have found that a program of repeated, personally tailored, data-informed mail and text nudges sent to parents and signed by district leaders consistently reduced chronic absenteeism districtwide by 11 percent to 15 percent. People are surprised to learn that printed mail is much more effective than digital text messages. Districts increasingly report parents complaining about “text overload,” which may contribute to why printed mail has proved so much more potent.
Additionally, chatbots can provide low cost, 24/7 support in multiple languages, connecting families with the resources they need to overcome attendance barriers. For example, our chatbot connected families to resources over 200,000 times during the 2023-24 school year, providing information about transportation, the school calendar, and attendance policies, among other topics. This is beneficial both for the families who receive the support they need and the school staff who otherwise would have fielded those questions.
3. It’s never too late in the year.
The graph illustrates a clear trend: Absence rates increase as the school year progresses, suggesting that the need grows for targeted interventions to help students get back on track. Communicating early in the year about the importance of attendance can undoubtedly be helpful, but we must continue that communication and our absenteeism-reduction efforts throughout the year.
To reduce chronic absenteeism, we have to move beyond focusing almost entirely on students with extreme absences. There are many more students who are moderately absent, and they miss many more total days. Expanding our focus like this will mean expanding the interventions and strategies we typically use to reduce absenteeism. One especially useful and proven intervention approach that should be more widely deployed is repeated, personally tailored, targeted, data-informed, low-touch interventions such as mail or text nudges. Broadening our focus from students with extreme absenteeism to students with moderate absenteeism can improve overall attendance and academic outcomes for all students.
