A Culture of Absence?

School Attendance Suffers as Parent Attitudes Shift by Evie Blad
Education Week, August 28, 2024

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In this Education Week article, Evie Blad discusses a new study on chronic absenteeism from the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. While this study analyzed data from 190 public school districts and interviews with 12 district leaders, the issue of student attendance and increased chronic absenteeism persists in the independent school world, as well. Attendance remains a challenging issue for many reasons, one of which is a cultural shift around parental attitudes regarding school attendance. This change has been observed across family income levels, so while common barriers such as poverty, lack of transportation, and chronic health issues continue to persist, it is much more likely now for parents to allow their students to miss school for family trips, less severe illness, and general disengagement from school. School leaders in the study posited many possible reasons for this cultural shift including systemic problems in schools (i.e., long-term substitute teachers), confusion about how to handle less severe sickness caused by stricter rules at the height of the pandemic, and families growing accustomed to remote days and the seeming ease with which students could make up missed work. Unfortunately, many of the schools involved in the study reported that no one intervention saw broad support across the study. In addressing truancy, should it arise, schools will therefore need to tailor their approaches and messaging to families as opposed to using a one-size-fits-all approach.