There’s no single, silver bullet intervention for improving student attendance, a new large-scale study finds. But some seem to be more promising than others, and all should be deployed within , a coherent strategy that fits the school community and meets students’ needs.
The study, released Tuesday by the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research at Wayne State University, identifies some promising practices related to “deep family engagement,” including regular home visits and frequent personalized messages to families about their children’s attendance.
“You don’t want attendance strategies to just be piling on a bunch of new initiatives,” said Jeremy Singer, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Flint who co-authored the study. “They should be created very carefully and thoughtfully. Pick things that will make a difference and do them well.”
The findings come as schools continue to grapple with rates of chronic absenteeism that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 41 states that have reported data from 2024-25, 34 have shown declining rates of chronic absenteeism, but none has returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the the Return to Learn tracker maintained by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.
The researchers paired survey responses from administrators at 1,100 Michigan schools with data on absenteeism, achievement, and student demographics collected from the 2021-22 through 2024-25 academic years to explore whether schools that used certain practices appeared toshow greater effects on improved attendance than those that did not.
Assessing schools’ effects on student attendance
To determine how much each school’s approach appeared to affect student attendance, the researchers used a value-added measure to control for factors including students’ race, prior year attendance rate and test scores, poverty levels, special education and English-learner status, and movement between schools. Such models are typically used in education research to isolate the effect of a single factor, such as teacher quality, on student performance.
The researchers found notable differences between schools that added up. A student moving from a school in the 25th percentile to one in the 75th percentile would attend about seven more school days, they found. That’s significant because students are generally considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of days in a 180-day school year.
Researchers also found that some high-poverty schools with low overall attendance rates had high value-added scores, suggesting that those students’ absenteeism would have been even worse if they attended a lower-scoring school. That’s a reminder that schools alone can’t address barriers to attendance that may require broader approaches like safety net supports, access to healthcare, and other community programs, Singer said.
“You have to be careful not to just look at the attendance rates alone and think that tells you how good or bad of a job a school is doing,” he said.
To determine what made some schools more successful at affecting attendance than others, researchers compared each school’s value-added score to survey results about attendance interventions and school conditions.
Frequent, personalized interventions deemed more effective
In many cases, the distribution of scores for schools that had a given intervention, such as the use of attendance incentives, closely matched the distributionof scores for schools that did not. That suggests schools get only limited effects from deploying a single strategy. But there were some outliers.
Schools with frequent home visits generally had higher scores than those without home-visiting programs and those with infrequent home visits, the analysis found. And schools that sent frequent, personalized attendance messages to families through text messages or school apps had a higher range of scores than those that sent less frequent messages or did not send them at all. Frequent use of interventions to address out-of-school barriers, like homelessness and transportation, also proved effective.
Other factors had measurable but more modest effects: well-implemented attendance teams, higher levels of school leader engagement with attendance initiatives, and district attendance guidance that administrators deemed helpful.
Singer had some cautions about interpreting the results. The analysis measures existing relationships and doesn’t identify causation like a controlled study of a given intervention would. The results also don’t measure how overlapping use of multiple interventions might affect schools’ value-added scores. The surveys also asked administrators about conditions and programs directly related to attendance and didn’t account for broader factors linked to strong attendance, like instructional quality and students’ sense of belonging.
“You don’t want to think of these things narrowly; they are all interconnected,” Singer said. “It’s another reminder that, just as much as you want to focus on attendance-specific initiatives, you also want to focus on the things that make a school the kind of place where kids want to be.”
