One in four students missed at least one day of school every other week on average in 2022, with only moderate improvement occurring in the following two years, according to NWEA’s July brief “Chronic absenteeism: A continued impediment to academic recovery.” Students in high-poverty districts were absent even more often.
National rates of chronic absenteeism have yet to return to their pre-pandemic baseline and academic recovery has been slow and uneven across local educational agencies, the brief found. Researchers considered data on 2,000 LEAs serving grades 3-8, looking at connections between chronic absenteeism, district-level poverty and academic recovery between 2019 and 2024.
Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10 percent of school days during the academic year. The trend peaked in 2022.
“Chronic absenteeism rates were consistently higher for all districts post-pandemic, and differences between high- and low-poverty districts have become more extreme,” according to the brief. “High-poverty districts experienced the largest jump: from 20 percent to nearly 35 percent (over one in three students) from the pre- to post-COVID period. By 2024, approximately 30 percent of students in high-poverty districts missed at least one day every other week of school.”
Researchers compared districts with a consistently high rate of chronic absence (defined as a rate greater than 20 percent) to those that never met that threshold in the period from 2022 to 2024, and found that math and reading performance remained further from pre-pandemic levels in districts where there was persistently high absenteeism.
“For all subjects and absenteeism groupings, achievement in 2024 remained significantly below pre-COVID averages. However, districts that experienced consistently high chronic absenteeism rates in recent years face a longer road to recovery,” the brief states. “In math, districts with consistently high absenteeism rates were about 50 percent further from recovery than districts that never experienced high absenteeism. Differences in reading recovery were smaller but also point to chronic absenteeism as an important area for district leaders to consider as part of recovery planning.”
Among high-poverty districts, recovery was stronger in those with lower chronic absence “while recovery did not vary by absenteeism levels in low-poverty districts,” according to the brief.
The brief concluded that “improving attendance should be part of the academic recovery strategy in most districts, rather than seen as a distinct issue. These efforts may be especially impactful in high-poverty districts, where absenteeism is both more prevalent and more strongly associated with unfinished academic recovery. For district and state leaders, the findings point to the importance of identifying where persistent absenteeism and academic recovery gaps overlap, then ensuring those communities have the support needed to help students attend school consistently and regain lost academic ground.”
