Which States' Kids Miss the Most School?
Not everyone is going back to class this fall.
| Tue Sep. 2, 2014 6:00 AM EDT
September is upon us, and American kids are filling up their backpacks. But lots of kids won't be going back to school—at least not very much. The map above shows the results of a national report released Tuesday by non-profit Attendance Works, which zooms in on a statistic called "chronic absenteeism," generally defined as the number of kids who miss at least ten percent of school days over the course of a year. The measure has become popular among education reformers over the past few years because unlike other measures like average daily attendance or truancy, chronic absenteeism focuses on the specific kids who are regularly missing instructional time, regardless of the reason why or the overall performance of the school.
If you miss more than ten percent of school days, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower.
Several studies have shown that missing ten percent of school seems to be a threshold of sorts: If you miss more than that, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower. A statewide study in Utah, for example, found that kids who were chronically absent for a year between eighth and twelfth grades were more than seven times more likely to drop out. The pattern starts early in the year: A 2013 Baltimorestudy found that half of the students who missed two to four days of school in September went on to be chronically absent.
The Attendance Works study, which used missing three days per month as a proxy for the ten percent threshold, categorized students missing school by location, race, and socioeconomic status. Here's what they found:
Oddly enough, the federal government doesn't track absenteeism. Seventeen states do, and, as David Cardinali wrote in the New York Times last week, states have found that school attendance often falls on socioeconomic lines: In Maryland, nearly a third of high school students who receive free or reduced lunch are chronically absent.
In order to work with a national dataset, Attendance Works looked at the results of the National Assessment for Educational Attainment, the nation's largest continuing standardized test, taken by a sample of fourth and eighth graders across the Which States' Kids Miss the Most School? | Mother Jones: