Chronic absenteeism in schools in 2021-22 was nearly twice as high in 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic

Chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools in the 2021-22 academic year was 91 percent higher than it was in 2018-19, the last year that was not affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a national study done at Stanford University with the help of The Associated Press.

"The large and broad increases in chronic absenteeism suggest many students are failing to re-engage in schooling as in-person instruction returned," writes Thomas Dee, the Stanford education professor who conducted the study.

"The data from 40 states and Washington, D.C., provides the most comprehensive accounting of absenteeism nationwide," AP reports. However, Dee's statistical analyses of the data were unable to find a pattern that explained the wide differences among the states. He found little if any correlation between chronic-absenteeism growth and a state's infection rate, its classroom masking policies, enrollment losses or differences in how "chronic absemteeism" is defined.

The Economist has some notions: "Having experienced remote learning, some students—and perhaps their parents—no longer think it essential or even worthwhile to sit in a classroom. 'It’s the same thing as in the workplace,' says a teacher in New Orleans. 'Once you’ve gone down to only being there two or three days a week, coming back all five is hard.' His classrooms are especially empty on Fridays, he says, so he avoids scheduling the most important lessons then. After the pandemic, people 'started catering to their mental-health needs,' says Tieshia Robinson, a principal at Chicago Collegiate, a public charter school in the city. For parents, that might mean allowing children who are unhappy at school to skip days. Pupils have also grown used to staying at home at the slightest sign of physical illness, says Greg Frostad of New Mexico’s education department."

The highest 2021-22 chronic-absentee rates, 49% and 48%, were found in Alaska and the District of Columbia, which also had the highest rates in 2018-19, 30% and 29%, respectively. The third-highest rate, 40%, was in New Mexico; that was more than double its 2018-19 rate of 18%. Arizona's rate also more than doubled, from 13% to 34%, the eighth highest in 2021-22. Most of those places have high shares of miniority populations. "The pandemic growth in chronic absenteeism exacerbated pre-existing inequalities," Dee writes, noting that the increases were larger "among economically disadvantaged students as well as Black students and Hispanic students."

Other states where the rate doubled or more than doubled: Washington, 15% to 33%; California, 12% to 30%; Mississippi and Massachusetts, 13% to 28%; Texas, 11% to 26%; Iowa, 13% to 26%; and Connecticut, 10% to 24%. Dee reports that figures for 2022-23 from Massachusetts and Connecticut show continued high absenteeism, and The Economist reports a like pattern in England and Australia.

Graph adapted by The Rural Blog from "Higher Chronic Absenteeism Threatens Academic Recovery from the Covid-19 Pandemic," research paper published by OSF Preprints, Center for Open Science.