What Can We Do About Chronic Absenteeism? Ask Detroit.

Chronic absence, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school or about 18 school days in a year, is a national crisis. It peaked in the pandemic, when about 31 percent of students nationwide — 14.7 million kids — were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.

The rate dropped only slightly for the 2022-23 school year, the latest for which national figures are available, to about 28 percent.

The effect of missing that much school is severe, especially for the youngest learners. Research shows that children who are chronically absent from preschool through second grade are more likely to be reading below grade level by third grade. It has lasting effects through the upper grades, too. A 2007 study led by Robert Balfanz at Johns Hopkins found that chronic absence in middle school and high school is often a leading predictor of dropping out.

Experts stress that chronic absenteeism measures all absences, excused and unexcused. Most absences among the youngest learners are excused, and relate to health issues such as asthma, diabetes and mental health. Or they could arise from inadequate community systems such as poor bus service and unsafe neighborhoods, or the pressures of poverty, such as food insecurity.

While many districts have grappled with high absentee rates since the pandemic, the city of Detroit has been wrestling this problem for far longer, as researchers Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer detail in their compelling new book “Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve It Alone.”

Detroit’s long experience with school absenteeism derives from several problems related to the city’s economic decline and poor management of the school system after a state takeover. Things got harder in the 1990s, when, as the authors put it, state policy led to a “wild west” of school choice. Today, 40 percent of Detroit’s students attend the Detroit Public Schools Community District, about 25 percent are spread out among some 80 charter schools, and another 25 percent go to schools outside the city.

Lenhoff and Singer point out that though Detroit is an extreme example by many measures — with roughly one-third of the population in poverty, a dearth of public services, an excess of school closures, and even the weather being harsh, with an average monthly temperature of 49 degrees — the city’s experiences with chronic absenteeism are universal and prove the need to reframe the problem.

“Since 2012,” the authors write, Detroit’s community leaders, educators and politicians, “have tried citywide messaging campaigns and community pledges; phone calls, home visits, and parent contracts; church buses and afterschool programming; data-driven tiered support systems; and court-run diversion programs.”

Some efforts worked for a while and for certain students, but nothing worked long term or at scale. More than a decade later, in 2023, Detroit’s chronic absenteeism rate remained one of the country’s highest at 66 percent.

“This isn’t a silver-bullet story,” they write. “Instead, it’s a story, documented in dozens of research studies, meetings, conversations, and observations, about how schools came to be held responsible for a problem largely outside their traditional purview.”

In short: “Schools were not designed to solve a problem like chronic absenteeism.”

Lenhoff and Singer are director and associate director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research at Wayne State University. They researched the city’s absenteeism problems for about seven years, beginning in 2016.

EdSurge spoke to them about their book and the challenges of solving chronic absenteeism today, as schools and social services face cutbacks and the weakening of the Education Department. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: Let’s talk a bit about Detroit’s position as a model of the absenteeism crisis. Given the city’s many attempts and failures to solve chronic absenteeism, is this problem unsolvable?

Sarah Winchell Lenhoff: We certainly don’t think that this problem is impossible to solve. We see Detroit as a useful model not because they’ve figured it out necessarily, but because they really drew on the kind of typical resources and strategies that schools across the country have available to them.

And we see that now in the post-pandemic context with chronic absence sky high across the country, that those strategies and resources and approaches are the common things that schools go to first. Detroit is a good model because they went to those things too, but a decade ago.

So we see that as really useful because, essentially, we don’t want schools to be wasting their time on a bunch of efforts and strategies and initiatives that are unlikely to succeed.

I think what we learned from the community coalition is that they really focused on communication and information to parents as an initial strategy. [They approached it] with the theory that parents don’t know that missing school is a bad thing. We found that that largely didn’t align with what parents were actually telling us. Parents did know that it was important for their children to be in school. They felt bad when their kids had to miss. This messaging around the importance of attendance made parents feel worse, without actually improving the conditions so that they could get their children to school. So that’s one big lesson.

And then, the big strategies at the district level had to do with identifying a person, the attendance agent, in this case, who was responsible for designing the attendance strategy and then adapting this tiered approach to aligning strategies with the number of days that students had missed.

The models rely a lot on numbers. But as you say in the book, numbers don’t really tell you very much. They don’t explain the many different reasons why kids are missing or tell how to address the particular needs on a particular day; a kid may be missing one day because he’s sick, the next day it’s because his mom’s car broke down.

Jeremy Singer: Schools have immediate access to how much school their students are missing, but they don’t know the reasons. And that’s one of the things that’s so difficult about addressing this issue is that there are many varied reasons why students miss school.

You have to speak to students and their families in order to understand those [reasons]. And you have to speak to them in a sustained way to keep track of how their situation might change over time. It takes a lot of work in order to accommodate and address those barriers.

So not only is that a challenging and taxing thing for schools, but there’s also a very strongly embedded way of approaching educational problems in schools that has only become stronger and more foundational over the last couple decades — and that is the data-driven approach.

The tiers framework is very common in other domains. Just like data-driven approaches are common in instruction or in managing student behavior, so is a tiered model where you think about where students are at in terms of their achievement or their behavior or their attendance, and you slot them into these categories, and then you address their problems based on that.

The problem we found there is that you’re treating students who have a certain amount of days that they’re missing as having a similar set of solutions that are going to work for them. But the truth is the reasons that they’re missing school — whether it’s some school or even more school or a very severe amount of school — might not be implicit in the amount of school that they’re missing.

[Conversely,] they could be missing five days a year because of health reasons, they could be missing 15 days a year because of health reasons, they could be missing 30 days of a year because of health reasons. Those are students in different tiers, but they all have a common root issue.

Lenhoff: And where can you potentially develop systemwide solutions? One of the things we identified is that [by focusing] on the individual student, there was a lot of spinning wheels at the school level with a single attendance agent or an attendance team figuring out, OK, how do we strategize around this one student?

Having a system that’s able to collect better data about why students are missing helps the system to potentially learn and create systemwide solutions so that the schools and individuals in the school aren’t having to do it. Transportation is a good one. But also things like identifying gaps in health care, for instance, or in certain areas of a city where you’re seeing higher rates of asthma or you’re seeing even potential outbreaks.

This is an area where technology could play a bigger role in helping to collect in real time why kids are missing. So that you can learn more quickly and build systems to support schools.

Lack of transportation was a common obstacle to school attendance in Detroit. Families reported that public buses, for instance, were late or didn’t come at all or they were unsafe. But lack of transportation could also be a problem in rural areas.

Singer: Yeah, definitely. The nature of the resources that are available and also the gaps in access are different. But we do feel like a lot of the foundational issues — health and transportation, conflicting schedules, economic insecurity, neighborhood conditions and, then, family relationships, students’ experiences in school — are all applicable to other contexts as well.

Do you think a barrier to solving the issue is that people still think of school absenteeism as truancy — that is, just kids skipping school?

Singer: We have seen a really promising shift where the emphasis is a little less on truancy in many contexts, and it’s more on chronic absenteeism. So that means we’re starting from a perspective of: We’re concerned about the impact that this is having on your students, outcomes on their achievement and their attainment. And we want to make sure that we’re supporting them to improve their attendance, to improve their learning experiences.

But that being said, those truancy-based mechanisms remain in place and are often at least used as a last resort. And I would say more broadly they have crept into the usual way that people think about the issue. So even beyond whether there’s an educator or a district administrator who decides, OK, it’s time to make a court referral, just the ideas that families are irresponsible or are not holding up their end of the bargain are sort of in [the back of people’s minds].

They influence the way that educators respond to the issues that they’re seeing, and can often relate to the fact that some really extreme cases take up a lot more room in educators’ minds and color the way that they’re looking at the whole issue.

A lot of these problems you looked at were during a period when the Education Department and grant systems for poorer families were still intact. Today, we have a situation where the Education Department is being dismantled, and programs for families at risk are threatened or already eliminated. What happens now?

Lenhoff: It’s a really good question.

Singer: We see the ripples of that here in Detroit. The attendance agent position, for example, they’re trying to figure out, can we sustain this position? Do we need to reorganize it or potentially reduce it in some way in order to be able to afford it?

In this fiscal environment, it seems even more difficult to figure out how to get the funding to support experimentation. [Yet] even with all that said, it doesn’t change the bottom line for us, which is that even if there’s additional money for schools, the solution will never be just what schools do.

At the federal level, there’s legislation being considered to roll back social services. If families have less access to health care or less access to food nutrition assistance, or if there’s less money to support housing affordability, if there’s a recession and that creates a job downturn — these are all things that are going to impact families negatively.

Lenhoff: Bottom line, economic instability. We know that’s a key driver of absenteeism. Also, the immigration [pressure] in certain communities is really important here, too. In Detroit, we actually historically have seen better rates of attendance among our immigrant communities. I suspect that that may change in this context. We’ve already seen some evidence of lower attendance in schools in those communities.

A fundamental thing we understand is that a positive, trusting relationship between families and schools is really important to laying the groundwork for positive attendance. A climate that gets in the way of families wanting to share what’s going on with them could raise more problems in certain communities.