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Edited by: James Desio and Hannah Bowen

Happy Thursday! In today’s newsletter, we examine the connection between chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates, notable attendees of Russia’s Victory Day parade, and China’s coal consumption. 

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1. Graduation Rates and Chronic Absenteeism

Topline: The COVID-19 pandemic created massive shifts in the US education system—including pushing chronic absenteeism rates to unprecedented heights in 2021–22. AEI’s Nat Malkus finds that the COVID-19 pandemic also weakened the relationship between chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates. While chronic absenteeism spiked from 2018–23, graduation rates held steady, and even increased slightly.

Absent Students Achieve Graduation: According to estimates, 108,000 fewer students would have graduated in 2022 alone if the relationship between chronic absenteeism and graduation rates had remained the same as before the pandemic. So why has attendance become less important for graduation? Policymakers and administrators made it easier for students to get through the new challenges of online schooling. Asynchronous lessons and materials, expanded credit-recovering programs, retests, and late-work forgiveness became popular, and graduation requirements loosened, making it easier for students to graduate without actually being present.

Is There Value in School Attendance? In most districts, these pandemic changes have never been adequately rolled back, despite the pandemic emergency being over. Today’s students are falling behind and achieving less academically, but are still being allowed to graduate—leading to more students being unprepared for college and work after high school. School attendance is an invaluable piece of a student’s education; it is imperative that policymakers, administrators, and educators reboot graduation requirements to reflect its value.

“The onus is now on policymakers, administrators, and educators to determine how important attendance ought to be. If we believe that attending school should be valuable and necessary to students’ success, it is time to make it so again.” —Nat Malkus

2. Guest List for Russia’s Victory Day Parade 

Topline: Vladimir Putin hosted dozens of world leaders in Moscow on May 9 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. However, AEI’s Leon Aron points out that only three of these world leaders won their leadership through free and fair elections. The other attendees came from countries that Freedom House classifies as “partially free” or “not free.”

Putin’s Guest List: Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mongolia’s Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico were the three leaders representing free countries at Putin’s May 9 parade. The reasoning behind their attendance likely lies in a need to appeal to domestic nationalist and anti-Western constituents. They may also have sought to pressure the West to appease them, lest they be pushed closer to Moscow’s influence.

The Company You Keep: Apart from those three attendees, the Victory Day parade was attended primarily by authoritarians from poor countries that are either dependent on or afraid of Russia. China, Iran, and North Korea—war allies of Russia—were represented, as well as current and would-be Russian client-states in Africa and South America, and former Soviet republics. This celebratory event only stands to highlight Russia’s continued isolation from democratic nations and the obvious split in world politics.

3. China’s Coal Consumption

Topline: Opaque assumptions make interpreting climate projections difficult. To clarify climate forecasts, AEI’s Roger Pielke analyzes different climate scenarios by focusing on the specific energy mix predicted from today until 2100—a key factor in global temperature change projections.

Coal Consumption: China’s energy mix in 2023 is the closest resemblance we have to the 2100 global energy mix estimated in SSP3-7.0—or the “high” energy consumption scenario calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. China’s energy mix is distinct because coal is the majority of China’s total energy consumption. If the global energy mix in 2100 resembles that of China in 2023 as SSP3-7.0 predicts, it would mean unmitigated global coal consumption triples in absolute terms.

The Global Forecast: Climate scenarios assume a close relationship between coal consumption and overall carbon dioxide emissions and a close relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and projected global temperature change. Pielke asserts that although it is unlikely the global energy mix in 2100 will look like China’s in 2023 as SSP3-7.0 assumes, phasing out coal is an essential component of mitigation policy.

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