No one was surprised when education suffered at elementary and high schools all over the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With schools initially shut down and then resorted to distance learning that proved substandard, the learning loss was predictable.
What is concerning, though, is how hard it has been in many places for students to catch up, even with the bundles of money that the federal government has thrown at the problem.
One major hurdle has been the apparent resistance of students and their families to get back into the school routine. They have gotten out of the habit of coming to school every day. Until they get back into the habit, catching up may be impossible.
USA Today shared the disconcerting data on chronic absenteeism released last week by the U.S. Department of Education. It shows that 2 out of 3 students attended schools with high or extreme levels of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent one for which national data is available. Overall, 30% of U.S. students were chronically absent that year, defined as missing at least 10% of the school year.
Within a batch of troubling numbers, one trend stood out as particularly worrisome: Chronic absenteeism is now on average worse at the elementary schools than at the high schools.
Before COVID-19, absenteeism was directly proportional to grade level. The higher the grade, the greater the likelihood that kids would skip school, either because they had lost interest, were doing poorly or were working in addition to going to school.
But something has changed dramatically. Maybe it’s ongoing parental worries about their children being exposed to the virus, even though COVID-19 has been shown to be much less of a health threat to the young than to adults. Whatever the reason, chronic absenteeism in elementary schools has soared from 7% in 2017-18 to 38% in 2021-22.
Missing school is a good predictor of academic failure, in part because it compromises a child’s ability to learn how to read, one of the fundamental building blocks of all education that follows afterward.
One note of optimism, though, is that the national data is a little dated. Mississippi’s more recent data released in September for the 2022-23 school year showed progress, with the chronic absenteeism rate improving from 28% to just under 24%. If the rest of the nation is showing anything like that improvement, that would be a hopeful sign, even while recognizing it may take several more years to get back to the pre-pandemic absentee rates.
