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Credit: Flickr; US Dept. of Education
Education Dive
Conditions for learning' impact chronic absenteeism
A new report and interactive map displays school and community factors that affect student attendance rates.
Linda Jacobson
Sept. 10, 2019
Educators often say frequent absences are a symptom of another issue in
a student’s life. Those issues involve students’ health and safety, a
sense of belonging, academic engagement, and students’ and adults’
social and emotional skills, according to a new report from Attendance
Works and the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
These “conditions for learning” — whether positive or negative — are
intertwined with students’ attendance patterns, and they especially
matter for children in poverty, students of color and those with
disabilities, the authors said.
“Unfortunately for students who face challenges in the community,
inequities often intensify when students encounter negative conditions
in school, which may undermine their motivation to attend class and
learn,” they write.
Accompanying the report is a nationwide, interactive map that displays
data points related to these conditions for every school and ZIP code
in the nation.
The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution created the resource
with multiple data sources, including the American Community Survey,
Civil Rights Data Collection and state school report cards. Teacher
attendance rates, suspension and expulsion rates, teacher-student
ratios and poverty rates are among the indicators available along with
chronic absenteeism rates.
The map can be used to get a “preliminary sense of the relative level
of chronic absence for schools compared to nearby schools and then to
quickly take a look at how those levels compare to the community
demographics of the surrounding community,” said Hedy Chang, the
executive director of Attendance Works. "I should say, however, that
before the district jumps to any conclusions about what is happening,
it should make sure to find the most recent data it can to see if the
chronic absence situation has stayed the same.”
She noted that the map will also be useful to “outside stakeholders,”
and David Osher, vice president and an institute fellow at AIR, added
that gathering data on “community assets” can also help schools and
districts find solutions to high absenteeism rates.
Not just 'an accountability challenge'
The report also includes examples of how a state and a district are
working to increase attendance and monitor chronic absenteeism data —
which all states are now required to collect under the Every Student
Succeeds Act. A majority of states are also using chronic absenteeism
as a non-academic indicator in their school accountability systems.
In Georgia, for example, multiple initiatives have come together that
address absenteeism in the early grades. First, creating positive
school climates is one goal of the Get Georgia Reading campaign, which
focuses on making sure students are reading on grade level by 3rd grade.
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