Education Research Report: The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

Education Research Report: The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools:

The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

ATTENDANCE COUNTS!

Just one day. That’s what we think when we skip school or pull our child out. It can’t really matter that much. But add up those one days and you get months of missed learning time. We’ve created a tool that allows you to chart the effect of missing school. Check it out, share it and read more about the issue.

• MIDDLE SCHOOL
  
  
• HIGH SCHOOL

Students need to attend school daily to succeed. The good news of this report is that being in school leads to succeeding in school. Achievement, especially in math, is very sensitive to attendance, and absence of even two weeks during one school year matters. Attendance also strongly affects standardized test scores and graduation and dropout rates. Educators and policymakers cannot truly understand achievement gaps or efforts to close them without considering chronic absenteeism.

Chronic absenteeism is not the same as truancy or average daily attendance – the attendance rate schools use for state report cards and federal accountability. Chronic absenteeism means missing 10 percent of a school year for any reason. A school can have average daily attendance of 90 percent and still have 40 percent of its students chronically absent, because on different days, different students make up that 90 percent.

Data from only six states address this issue: Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island. How these states