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Dear Colleagues,

Among the dire educational consequences of the pandemic, the impact on student absenteeism stands out. The pandemic’s long months of remote learning, hybrid schedules and repeated quarantines frayed bonds among students and between students and educators and fractured routines of attending school. Chronic absenteeism soared to a pandemic peak of 30 percent—more than one in four American public-school students missing more than 10 percent of the school year.

Educators have been working hard to get students back in school, leveraging home visits, text messages to parents, community schools, improving the quality of school buildings, and more. One state—Rhode Island—has gone further.

Under the leadership of Governor Daniel McKee, the Ocean State has built a statewide coalition of mayors, business leaders, hospitals and other stakeholders beyond the state’s education ecosystem to get students back to school—a comprehensive strategy that is yielding impressive early results.

[link removed] profile the ambitious Rhode Island initiative—and explore the lessons it holds for policymakers and practitioners nationwide—in Team Sport: Rhode Island’s Statewide Strategy for Reducing Chronic Absenteeism ([link removed]) , a new FutureEd report researched and written by FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen. It’s an encouraging story, and a testament to the power of political leadership, data, and community-wide collaboration to address challenges in the education sector.
Read the Report ([link removed])
Other FutureEd Work on Chronic Absenteeism

As the 2024-25 school year kicks off around the country, we’ll be watching other state and district efforts to improve attendance. In the coming days, we’ll launch our 2023-24 state absenteeism tracker, compiling the most recent state-level absenteeism rates nationwide. Rhode Island is again a leader, today becoming the first state to release 2023-34 absenteeism results. You can see states’ 2022-23 results here ([link removed]) .

As we chronicled ([link removed]) last year, increasing data transparency and putting pressure on states to more rapidly release this information would go a long way to helping the education sector better understand what initiatives are working and what resources are required to get more students attending school every day.

[link removed]’s comprehensive Attendance Playbook ([link removed]) continues to be a widely used resource by states, school districts and schools as they explore ways to reduce chronic absenteeism.

[link removed] a while back we did a deep dive ([link removed]) on one effective and economical strategy: “nudging” ([link removed]) students and families on the importance of attendance through text messages, letters, and emails, often in multiple languages. The strategy plays an important role in the Rhode Island story.

The logic of the absenteeism challenge is simple: if students are in school, they’re likely to learn more and the return on the education sector’s investments in tutoring and other pandemic recovery strategies is likely to be higher. FutureEd will continue helping policymakers achieve those important goals in the months ahead.

Thanks and best wishes,

Tom

Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University
[email protected]
@thomas_toch
| @futureedgu ([link removed]) | www.future-ed.org ([link removed])

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