Thirty-one states showed improvement in rates of chronic absenteeism, or the number of students missing 10% or more school days, in the 2023-24 school year, our FutureEd tracker shows. This is good news, though none of those states have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels of student attendance. Without continued improvement in attendance, schools will struggle to raise academic achievement, especially among lower-performing students, as the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress results make clear.
Before fourth and eighth graders took the 2024 NAEP math assessment, they were asked how many days of school they had missed the previous month. Forty-nine percent of fourth-graders who would score at the 75th percentile or higher on the test had missed no days the previous month, compared with 26% of those scoring below the 25th percentile.
Equally striking, 45% of students in the bottom quartile reported missing three or more days of school in the previous month compared with just 20% of students in the top quartile. And at the extreme ends of the absenteeism spectrum, 7% of the lowest-performing eighth graders on the NAEP math test reported missing more than 10 days of school in the previous month, compared with just 1% of top scorers.
Correlation strongly suggests causation. It’s impossible to prove that students performed better because they were in school every day, but it’s the logical conclusion.
A detailed comparison of state test scores and student absenteeism by Rhode Island education officials suggests as much. They found that just 10% of students who had been chronically absent for three consecutive years scored proficient on Rhode Island’s own standardized math tests in 2024, and 13% were proficient in reading. In contrast, 40% of students who attended regularly were proficient in math and 38% were proficient in reading. As described on the state’s dashboard, “long-term chronic absenteeism has a compounding negative impact on student performance.”
Attendance influenced achievement significantly even among students facing the many challenges of poverty. While it’s hardly surprising that only 18% of Rhode Island’s low-income students who attended school regularly were proficient in reading and math last year, just 11% of those who were chronically absent were proficient in reading, and only 9% met that bar in math.
The upshot is there needs to be a relentless focus at the state and district levels — beyond the work of individual schools — on getting every student in school every day. Transparency is essential to progress. Rhode Island is the only state that publishes detailed, real-time attendance data for every one of its public schools, allowing officials to correlate state test scores and absenteeism. More than a dozen states have yet to release attendance data from the 2023-24 school year, making it difficult for policymakers to even know which absenteeism problems they need to solve.
The quality of instructional materials, tutoring programs or new technology tools can’t make much of a difference if students aren’t in school.
This piece originally appeared in The 74.