As the nation’s educators ready themselves for the start of a new school year, they’re no doubt wondering how many students are going to show up after several years of sharply higher absenteeism rates postpandemic. In Rhode Island, where an innovative statewide campaign lowered absenteeism in 57 of 64 school districts in 2023-24 and closed absenteeism gaps between students from high- and low-income backgrounds, there’s reason for optimism. And there are important lessons in the Ocean State’s strategy of publicizing every school’s real-time attendance rates to mobilize educators, mayors, hospital systems, businesses and other stakeholders to get students back to school.
Gov. Daniel McKee’s commitment to community partnerships to improve outcomes for children started during his 12-year tenure as mayor of Cumberland, Rhode Island. Education remained a priority when he became governor in 2021, and when McKee realized that absenteeism had become a significant barrier to achieving the state’s education goals, he sought to create a statewide sense of urgency that matched his own. Last summer, he asked state Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Angelica Infante-Green if her team could create a public, online portal showing every school’s up-to-date absenteeism data.
The result was Rhode Island’s unique Student Attendance Leaderboard. It displays the percentage of chronically absent students in every public school in the state, with data updated every night — something no other state does. Principals began checking the dashboard every morning to see how their school compared — and using its built-in tools to monitor individual students’ attendance and communicate with families. With one click of a button, a principal can send a text message to a parent or caregiver, or have a letter printed to go home in a student’s backpack. With another click, a principal can see a student’s attendance history and find the answers to questions such as: Has she been chronically absent every year since kindergarten? Is this a new pattern of behavior?
The data spurred school leaders to think differently about how they work with students and families. Principal Jackson Reilly at Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence told me that while attendance has always been one of their biggest challenges, “this is the first time it’s truly been a data-driven approach.” In summer 2023, Reilly and his team met with families whose children missed more than 18 days the previous year, asking them to sign an attendance contract. Every administrator is responsible for five to 10 students, making calls, conducting home visits and working with families to overcome transportation hurdles. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, Nathanael Greene had a chronic absenteeism rate of 30%, less than 1 point away from its pre-COVID rate of 29.2. At the height of the pandemic, in 2020-21, it hit 54.2%.
Rhode Island’s approach also involves stakeholders outside of education. McKee recruited 38 of 39 mayors to sign his LEARN365 compact, an education policy blueprint that prioritizes attendance along with higher test scores and increased federal financial aid application rates. McKee believes that as each town and region across the state studies its absenteeism trends, understands where chronically absent students live and attend school, and responds to their challenges, communities will achieve stronger attendance. “What we can do,” says McKee, “is change the culture of a family’s decisionmaking. Schools can’t do that in the same way that mayors and municipal leaders can.”
Hasbro Children’s Hospital has begun showing parents videos on the importance of school attendance when their children are discharged, and business leaders are adding financial resources to the mix. The Partnership for Rhode Island, a nonprofit funded by Bank of America, CVS and other businesses, funded 25 public-service messages for a campaign called AttendanceMattersRI airing on local television and shared through municipal and other websites. Each video features a Rhode Island leader delivering a lighthearted but clear message about the importance of showing up for school every day. Participants include McKee and Infante-Green, as well as congressional representatives, a well-loved sports reporter, a respected pastor and the head of the Rhode Island teachers union. Audio versions play on the radio, and large billboards touting “Attendance Matters” line state highways.
McKee’s staff reports that the governor checks the state attendance leaderboard multiple times a day — it’s the default website on his computer — and he routinely begins meetings asking if those around the table know what the current chronic absenteeism rates are for schools in their communities. His mantra has become “every home, every day, learning matters” — and taking the fight against chronic absenteeism outside traditional agency boundaries has changed its very nature.
“When [the governor] started saying that this is not just the responsibility of the schools, that changed everything,” says Infante-Green, noting that cross-sector and cross-agency collaboration is rare in state and local government.
In the initiative’s first year, chronic absenteeism dropped from 28.9% to 24.7% and the gap between low-income and more affluent students decreased from 27 to 18 percentage points. And the number of parents who believe chronic absenteeism is a problem is increasing. In early 2023, just 55% of families responding to the state’s annual survey of public school parents believed that missing at least two days of school a month — the threshold for chronic absenteeism — reduced a student’s chance of graduating high school. By early 2024, the number was 57%. Now, McKee and Infante-Greene are waiting for the results of the state’s 2024 standardized tests to learn whether this increased attendance has translated into higher achievement.
The governor’s willingness to invest political capital to address chronic absenteeism, enlist a range of stakeholders in the work and create a widely publicized statewide attendance scoreboard demonstrates the often-untapped power of state leadership to galvanize school reform. It also highlights the fact that many school issues are best addressed by communities working across traditional agency boundaries — an often underappreciated concept in education policy circles.
This piece originally appeared in The 74.