An essential and common sense strategy for improving outcomes for students in low-performing schools in low-income neighborhoods is ensuring that students show up for school every day, starting as early as preschool and kindergarten.
The Bloomberg Administration has already made student attendance and the reduction of chronic absence (when students miss 10% of the school year for any reason, excused and unexcused) a priority for community partnerships. A new administration committed to reducing educational inequities should not only maintain this important focus but expand it to all schools district-wide.
Schools alone do not have the resources to ensure students and families, especially those living in poverty, have the supports they need to get to school. City government is in a unique position to leverage resources to address key barriers to school attendance, such as little access to health services, unreliable transportation, unsafe neighborhoods, unstable housing and lack of awareness about the importance of going to school regularly starting in the early grades. To do that, cities must ensure schools monitor and share attendance data with community partners and public agencies so they can consider the implications for resource allocation.
Research backs up the common sense notion that good attendance is essential to student success. This insightful high school cohort analysis found, like other studies, that 9th grade attendance is a key predictor of whether students will graduate. This cohort research, along with other studies, also suggests that attendance may be affecting educational outcomes far earlier than most realize.
An especially compelling finding is that only one out of 3 students who failed to meet third grade English Language Arts (ELA) standards eventually graduated in four years from high school. By contrast, 90% of the students who met or exceeded the 3rd Grade ELA standards did graduate. Yet we know that poor attendance is a key contributor to students failing to learn to read by the end of 3rd grade.
A study by the University of Chicago found that students chronically absent in preschool had lower 2nd grade reading scores. In fact, if a child was chronically absent every year from preK to 2nd grade, they needed intensive reading intervention by 2nd grade.
Similarly, Attendance Works conducted an analysis following a cohort of students from Oakland Unified School District in California from 1st through 6th grade. We found that students who were chronically absent in 1st grade were nearly six times more likely to have higher chronic absence rates, lower test scores and higher suspensions in 6th grade. If a child was chronically absent any three years– then they had 18 times higher levels of chronic absence
Attendance in 6th grade is a proven risk factor for drop-out. But the results of our work suggest that for the students who are hardest to serve in middle and high school, the problems may start at the beginning of their school careers.
Unfortunately, chronic absence strikes particularly hard among low-income children who most depend upon school to learn to read. In the early grades they are four times more likely to be chronically absent. They are also more likely to experience the systemic, poverty-related barriers that lead to multiple years of chronic absence.
We can miss the opportunity to interrupt chronic absence if we focus only on truancy (unexcused absences.) Young children do not usually miss school without an adult being aware they are at home, and the absences are often excused.
The good news is a new administration can leverage and build upon the work that is already underway through the Mayor’s Interagency Task Force on Truancy, Chronic and School Engagement. The task force has reduced chronic absence in 100 target schools, giving students who benefited from the program thousands of additional days of instruction. Key components of include:
But these supports still only reach a fraction of the chronically absent students – close to one out of 5 students district-wide – who need support. The Success Mentors program, for example, currently targets 100 out of 1700 schools in New York City. It’s time to expand the work to the entire district. While reducing chronic absence will not, by itself, solve the dropout crisis, it is a critical first step to ensuring all students have an equal opportunity to learn, thrive and go on to college completion and successful careers.
Hedy Chang directs Attendance Works, a national and state level initiative aimed at advancing student success by addressing chronic absence. A skilled presenter, facilitator, researcher and writer, she co-authored the seminal report, Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, as well as numerous other articles about student attendance.
