Students Are Moving Schools and Skipping Class in the Pandemic
In October, we began to have a better understanding of how public school enrollment nationwide was impacted by the 2020 shift to remote instruction and the ensuing battle to keep schools open in the face of COVID and the Delta variation. A startling tendency that was overlooked in the discussion of attendance was that, even with the reopening of campuses, a concerning percentage of students had been labeled as “chronically absent.” All of which adds to worries about prolonged COVID learning losses, which would exacerbate the findings from the country’s report card this month that, even prior to the pandemic, student performance was falling at an unprecedented rate.
The number of kids who skip at least 10% of a school year nationwide, known as chronic absenteeism, increased from 15% in 2018 to 29% in the previous year. The magnitude of this shift is startling and difficult to understand. Less than 1 in 4 pupils attended school districts with chronic absenteeism below 19% by the previous year, compared to 3 out of 4 in 2018.
COVID-19Students from poor backgrounds experienced the greatest learning loss and persistent absence (19). According to district-level data nationwide from the American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn Tracker, which I oversee, chronic absenteeism rose 10 points—from 10% to 20%—in the third of school districts with the highest academic performance between 2018 and 2022, but it increased 17 points—from 19%—in the third with the lowest academic performance.
Comparable differences were observed for districts with high and low levels of poverty, indicating that over one-third of pupils in both high and low levels of poverty missed over a month of school.
Neither students nor schools can overcome learning loss with this recipe. Although it should go without saying that excessive absences from school hinder pupils’ ability to learn, there are more serious issues at hand. Everyone’s learning progresses more slowly in a classroom when a significant portion of students miss class frequently. Instructors divert their time and attention from students who attend more regularly by revisiting old material rather than introducing new material.
