Dive Brief:
- Students who are chronically absent are defined as missing more than 15 school days per year, or more than 10% of the days school is in session, and new federal data from the Civil Rights Data Collection Survey reveals the scope of the problem.
- NPR reports about 12% of elementary and secondary students are chronically absent, though at the high school level alone, that percentage jumps to 20% of Latinos, 23% of blacks, 26% of Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders and 28% of American Indian/Alaska natives.
- Before the latest CRDC, many schools collected information about average daily attendance or truancy rather than chronic absenteeism, but the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will require schools to expand their reporting.
Dive Insight:
California Attorney General Kamala Harris has been particularly active in clarifying the stakes of school attendance. Her office created a free online toolkit helping parents understand what they call a "truancy crisis" in the state’s elementary schools.
Truancy refers to unexcused absences, while chronic absenteeism counts the number of days students are not in school, whether for legitimate reasons or not. In both cases, a parent education element may be useful. Parents willing to excuse their children from school regularly may not realize how important in-class instruction is for a range of metrics. As federal law requires tracking, a growing number of states may begin to use it for school evaluations.