Summer Reading: Reducing Chronic Absenteeism

The slow-motion train wreck in American education

It feels odd to think about school attendance during summer holidays. But as we start to think about next school year, taming chronic absenteeism needs to be a serious priority.

There is no one in America who has done better work on this issue in recent years than AEI’s Nat Malkus. In June, he published a new paper with the most up to date picture of chronic absenteeism in America. While there are some glimmers of hope, the overall outlook is still pretty bleak.

Let’s hit the key data points.

First, the main headline: For the 2025 school year, the rate of chronic absenteeism (the percentage of students missing at least 10% of the school year) was 22.6%.

Chronic absenteeism peaked during the pandemic at 28.3%, so it has come down. However, as the paper’s helpful figure shows, it remains well above pre-pandemic averages.

Second, there is substantial variation between states.

Alaska, DC, Oregon and New Mexico all exhibited chronic absenteeism rates of greater than 30% in 2025. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Alabama, Virginia, New Jersey, Idaho, Iowa, Delaware, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Tennessee, and Indiana saw rates of 18% or less. The states clustered at both the top and bottom of the distributions seem quite different from one another, so this state-by-state variation in chronic absenteeism rates frustrates simple or obvious explanations.

Perhaps the most important data point, though, is that no state has returned to its pre-pandemic rate.

Third, we turn to a small silver lining. Some districts are making progress. Nat and others devised the “50% Challenge,” a goal of cutting the 2022 rate of chronic absenteeism in half by 2027. The paper finds 29% of districts on track to hit that goal. It also calculates the percentage of districts on track to return to 2019 levels of chronic absenteeism by 2027. That number is also 29%.

Lest you think there is more good news, there isn’t. In fact, the paper then reveals its most interesting (and frustrating) finding. Nat reports elevated chronic absenteeism rates amongst students who were too young to experience the pandemic in school!

I’ll let Nat give the analysis himself:

“Overall, these grade-level patterns have clear implications for what is driving persistent absenteeism after the pandemic. Absenteeism is still up for all students, not mainly, or even disproportionately, cohorts that were in school during the pandemic. This strongly suggests that the pandemic has changed how American families and schools approach school attendance and that this change is affecting the post-pandemic generation of students who did not experience remote learning, school closures, or any of the other disruptions of 2020 and 2021.”

So, what does this all mean? I’d like to offer three thoughts:

First, it appears that there has been what the kids call a vibe shift in American education. Attending school is simply not seen in the same light that it was before the pandemic. Prolonged school closures may be to blame, subtly telling families that being physically present in the classroom isn’t as important as it used to be. Changing attitudes towards disease could play a role as well, encouraging children with more mild conditions to stay home to prevent spreading illness. There are also the knock-on effects of chronic absenteeism to contend with, like more chaotic classrooms, disjointed instruction, and fractured school communities—all of which make attending school a less desirable proposition. Whatever the cause, the effect is clear.

Second, while there are states and districts making progress, it is a minority that appear poised to return back to 2019 levels, which weren’t that great to start with! Reducing chronic absenteeism from one in four students to one in five or six is not nothing, but that still means a substantial percentage of students are simply not in school enough. If we imagine a classroom with 20 students, that is still 3 to 4 students regularly missing class. That is bad for students, teachers, schools, and families.

Third, there may be limits to what policy can do to fix this problem. Culture eats policy for breakfast, as the saying goes, and this could be a large-scale demonstration of that fact. As a school choice guy, I hope we can provide a stronger incentive for parents to get their children to school by giving parents more say in where their children go to school. Giving parents an opportunity to align themselves with likeminded educators could also encourage attendance. But these trends might be bigger than any policy can solve. If that is true, we might need to take an altogether different approach to solve the problem of chronic absenteeism.

Hope your day is sunnier than this post was! And I hope that everyone is resting up this summer, because when school starts back up, this is one of the big problems we all need to get to work on.