Why School Absences Have “Exploded” Across America

Today’s guest is Nat Malkus, a former teacher who is the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. We talk about why school absences have exploded across the country; why some people think this just doesn’t matter; why we think it might matter quite a bit; and what teachers, parents, and lawmakers should do about it.

In the following excerpt, Derek and Nat Malkus describe chronic absenteeism in schools and its effect on learning outcomes.

Derek Thompson: The other day, I read a statistic about my hometown of Washington, D.C., that knocked my socks off.

In D.C. high schools this year, 60 percent of students were chronically absent. That means they missed one day of school every two weeks. Among ninth graders, it’s even worse. One-third of D.C. ninth graders were absent for the equivalent of six full weeks of school in one school year, but many listeners have probably heard about the so-called learning loss problem in American education, the idea that the pandemic set back student progress in math and reading by two decades and widened the achievement gap between poor and rich students. That’s been widely reported. A lot of listeners might also have heard about the surge in disruptive behavior in schools. There’s been a surge in disruptive behavior just about everywhere, by the way, but what they might not know about, or at least what I didn’t know nearly enough about until this week, is that these crises of learning and behavior are nested within a much more basic and, in many ways, much more fundamental problem.

Many students just aren’t going to school anymore, or at least not nearly at the rate that they did before the pandemic. Nationwide, one-quarter of public school students are now chronically absent. Again, that means they miss one in 10 days of school, which in a five-day school week means one missed day every two weeks. That figure of chronic absenteeism has doubled, practically doubled, since before the pandemic, and it’s doubled across all sorts of districts—rich districts, poor, liberal, conservative. It’s not just the students, by the way. Teachers are also missing more school. The New York Times reports in the 2022-2023 school year in New York City, “Nearly one in five public school teachers were absent at least 11 days.”

There are a lot of reasonable explanations for this increase in truancy, absenteeism. There’s been a pandemic, of course, and even for people who face minimal threat from COVID today, we’ve still faced waves of flu and adenovirus and RSV. Maybe people are just sicker than they used to be, maybe, but the full explanation for all these students not showing up to school, I think, might be a little bit deeper than just illness. As one psychologist, Katie Rosanbalm, told The New York Times, “Our relationship with school has become optional.” It seems like there’s been a fundamental change in the value that we place on going to school, a fundamental change that in some ways mirrors the vibe shift in, say, going to the office, with the important distinction, I must add, that people can actually work from home.

I’m literally working from home as I record this open, but an 11th grader who misses one-third of his classes is probably not deeply engaged in remote school from his basement. Today I’m talking to Nat Malkus, a former teacher who is the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in empirical research on K-12 schooling. Since the pandemic, he’s been tracking its various impacts across schools. I’m Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

Thompson: Let’s start before the pandemic. Chronic absenteeism is something that you guys have been tracking for a while. The definition of chronic absenteeism is when students miss 10 percent of school days, which is about 18 days a year or roughly one day out of every two weeks of school. Tell me what kind of a problem was chronic absenteeism in 2017, 2018, 2019, before COVID.

Nat Malkus: We collected all this data. In 2017, it wasn’t universally available, and not everybody was collecting it. In 2018 and ’19, we have better data. In those two years, it was at 15 percent. So, that’s one in six kids, that’s K-12, missed 10 percent of the school year. That then was characterized as, “This is a problem. This is a lot of kids missing a lot of school.” It’s not that complicated. Missing a lot of school, not good for school kids. So, it was a problem before the pandemic, and it was just getting started.

Thompson: Even before most people understood what learning loss was, what were the problems associated with chronic absenteeism in 2018, 2019?

Malkus: It’s worth asking that, because we have a different level and maybe different kind now. So, a lot of what we know about chronic absenteeism is based on research done pre-pandemic, and that’s important. Chronic absenteeism is not great for kids, not surprising. If you miss a lot of school, it’s not good for your academic outcomes. So if you’re missing a lot of school in ninth grade, it’s not good for your ninth grade scores. It’s not good for your high school scores. Chronic absenteeism in eighth grade is one of the strongest predictors of whether you’re going to graduate high school or really whether you’re going to not graduate high school. Then there’s other research that connects this to long-term outcomes.

This isn’t totally surprising, right? I mean, it’s part of the behaviors that not only go toward learning, but also negotiating schools, the systems, and what’s rewarded in the workforce.

Thompson: Right. It seems like it would connect not only to achievement, but also to underlying values like conscientiousness, just showing up to work, just showing up to relationships, just showing up to school. Tell me about the geographical variation here. I thought this was interesting. So in 2017, or still before the pandemic, students were most likely to miss school in Alaska and Arizona. Colorado was also pretty high when it came to absenteeism. What factors across the country, and you can fold in rural versus urban, we can talk about class, we can talk about race, what factors did you find to predict chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic?

Malkus: You see very different rates across states, and you really got to be careful making cross-state comparisons because these aren’t uniform data. So just as an aside, in California, districts can decide whether missing half a day counts as a day absent or as half a day absent, and in other districts ... So when you make these basic building blocks that’s like, “What is an absence?” Some people will count an hour, and other people will count the whole day. You can get to very different standards based on decisions made at a state legislature level that didn’t really have anything to do with measurement. So when you ask like, “What’s the difference between states,” I can’t see it from the data, but there are a bunch of other differences that we can see across the board that are more like the type of districts and the types of students. There, we see some variation that I think we can be pretty confident actually exists.

Thompson: Well, tell me about that variation. I mean, I would guess that you’d see higher absenteeism among lower-income districts, among non-white students, maybe among students in single-parent households. Are those assumptions borne out by the data, or are those assumptions wrong?

Malkus: No, those are right. To be technical about it, we only have the kinds of districts nationwide, but the lower-achieving districts have much higher chronic absenteeism, higher-poverty districts, higher chronic absenteeism. We do have some data at the student level. Black students, Hispanic students have much higher, and this is all the case before the pandemic. These differences existed. Asian students, quite a bit lower in the inverse correlation with academic achievement patterns.

Thompson: So, then the pandemic hits, and schools are shut down for a variety of reasons. There are some districts where the school leaders are the ones that seem to be pushing the school shutdowns. In other districts, it seems to be parents that are demanding that schools are shut down. In other districts, you have teachers joining the fray and saying, “We don’t want to put ourselves in harm’s way, and put our family in harm’s way by showing up to schools that might be transmitting the virus.” There’s so much to describe here. Obviously, there’s no such thing as American education policy as a singular noun. There are thousands of districts and schools that determine their own policies, but how, in the biggest picture, would you describe what happened during the pandemic?

Malkus: There’s a few key parts to get right here. One is, well, what happened right when the pandemic struck? That was pretty universal. We shut down schools for the rest of the year, and so that’s a big chunk. So when we talk about learning loss, we often handicap it as like the percentage of a year. Well, most kids spent a lot of that basically quarter of a year left, thereabouts, in a very not good educational environment. So, that’s the first thing, and that was across the board. The next year, we had and we tracked weekly closures at the district level, and have a lot of data about what went on that year and the next year in masking. Look, there’s big differences in the length of time that schools were closed.

Some were not closed at all. A lot of them were sort of quasi-closed. We have some people part of the week, that sort of thing, but those differences cleaved strongly across red and blue lines, and also along cosmopolitan lines, right? So, urban districts tended to be closed longer. There were a lot of large differences there. But the other key thing to remember here is because we love to throw stones about, “What did you and yours do during the pandemic? Me and mine did it right,” but understanding what happened to kids and schools, you need to understand that remote schooling was not good for kids, and I don’t think it was good for schools, but being in school didn’t mean everything was smooth.

In fact, it was a super bumpy year on all kinds of things—quarantines, kids being out sick, staffing problems, masking, wars and fights, and more actually involved with just the culture war stuff that was going on. So, that ’21 school year, that was a bumpy ride across the board. I think that we see that bumpiness across the board in the numbers on chronic absenteeism that came later.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Nat Malkus
Producer: Devon Renaldo

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