School districts still struggling with stubbornly high chronic absenteeism would do well to take a granular look at their students’ attendance data, specifically their numbers of unexcused vs. excused absences rather than absences in the aggregate, says a new report.
Using data from Indiana students for the 2015-16 through 2023-24 school years, researchers at the American Enterprise Institute found that differentiating between types of absences revealed unique patterns and characteristics that could help school and district leaders catch students at risk of becoming chronically absent before missed classes pile up, said Nat Malkus, one of the report’s authors and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, a right-leaning think tank. Sam Hollon, a data analyst at AEI, coauthored the report.
Among the AEI report’s key findings: Unexcused absences were more common among students from historically disadvantaged groups. And the missed days of students in the top 20% for absences were primarily unexcused, meaning that chronic absenteeism—when students miss at least 10% of school days—was disproportionately driven by unexcused absences.
Also, the timing of unexcused and excused absences differed.
Unexcused absences rose during the spring while excused absences did not; instead, those absences were more common before and after weekends. An absence was more likely to be unexcused if a student had already accumulated several absences.
The findings suggest traditional absence tracking—which generally groups all absences together without differentiating between type—“papers over important distinctions between kinds of absences,” the report concluded.
The findings offer a tool for districts to consider as many work to address chronic absenteeism that skyrocketed during the pandemic and has, in many places, stayed high ever since. Nationally, chronic absenteeism peaked at about 28% in the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the Return to Learn tracker maintained by AEI. Of the 41 states that have reported data from 2024-25, 34 have shown declining rates of chronic absenteeism, but none have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the tracker.
“This makes clear that unexcused absences is a place that—when schools say they don’t know what to do about absenteeism—we can really dig in,” Malkus said. “We believe if you push hard on those absences, have strong rules and expectations and get people to take unexecused absences seriously, they’re probably going to start taking all absences more seriously.”
Malkus noted that Indiana schools may categorize or define absences differently. For example, one may allow a parent note to excuse an absence for a family vacation, while another may document that absence as unexcused.
Still, the state education department offers guidance, and most districts will excuse absences for illness, funeral attendance, and other civic or military-related events. Typically, the schools studied defaulted to categorizing absences as unexcused unless students and families provided a valid excuse.
Even though districts may not apply the rules uniformly, Malkus said, the study assumed generally “that attendance practices are reasonably consistent within districts over time.”
Most absences are concentrated among historically disadvantaged students
Most students in the study had relatively few absences, but those who had the most had many more—not just a few more—than their peers, the report found. Students who racked up the most absences had mostly unexcused absences. In fact, the 10% of students who were absent most often had, on average, more unexcused absences than other students had total absences.
Typically, those with the largest share of absences were students of color or students in poverty—groups who might find it harder to have their absences marked as excused, even if the reason for missing class was legitimate, Malkus said. For example, students in poverty may have a harder time securing a doctor’s note to justify an absence, or they may have less reliable transportation to get to class.
The share of unexcused absences was higher among students in poverty compared to their peers (49% of their absences were unexcused vs. 32% for their peers) and among Black and Hispanic students (67% and 52% respectively) compared with their white peers (32%).
The data show that students were less likely to have their absences marked as excused as the total number of absences increased. In other words, students were more likely to have unexecused absences if they already had many missed classes up to that point.
The day of the week also made a difference in schools’ overall absence rates, the report found.
The total absence rate in the 2023-24 school year was 10% higher on Monday than the middle of the week and 22% higher on Friday.
“The most obvious explanation is that students and families more often choose to take off the week’s last school day to extend their weekends,” the report said.
“We’re still very much in the middle of this post-pandemic absenteeism struggle, and we cannot leave the fight—there’s more improvement that we really need to make,” Malkus said. “Being able to sharpen the focus on unexcused absences seems like a key way to do that.”
