School attendance and persistence

Before making investments in school attendance and persistence interventions, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in school attendance interventions. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Effective public education: Average per-grade change in English Language Arts achievement between the third and eighth grades. These data are available from Stanford University’s Education Data Archive.
• Preparation for college: Share of 19- and 20-year-olds with a high school degree. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
• School economic diversity: Share of students attending high-poverty schools by student race or ethnicity. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal.
• Just policing: Number of juveniles arrested per 100,000. High rates of juvenile arrests provide a strong indicator of overall system involvement and over-policing. These data are available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer.

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

Several indicators in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in school attendance interventions. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Consistent attendance: Percentage of students who are present for more than 90 percent of their enrolled days, excluding students enrolled for fewer than 90 days.

• 6th grade on track: Percentage of students in grade 6 with passing grades in English language arts and math, attendance of 90 percent or higher, and no in- or out-of-school suspensions or expulsions.

• 8th grade on track: Percentage of students in grade 8 with a GPA of 2.5 or higher, no Ds or Fs in English language arts or math, attendance of 96 percent or higher, and no in- or out-of-school suspensions or expulsions.

• 9th grade on track: Percentage of students in grade 9 with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, no Ds or Fs in English language arts or math, attendance of 96 percent or higher, and no in- or out-of-school suspensions or expulsions.

• High school graduation: Adjusted cohort graduation rate (the percentage of first-time 9th graders who graduate with a regular diploma within four, five, and six years of entering high school, regardless of whether they transferred schools).

• Institutions’ contributions to student outcomes: Schools’ contributions to student outcomes, including achievement, attendance, social-emotional learning, college enrollment, and earnings, using value-added models.

Given the range of interventions that may support school attendance, key design attributes vary widely by intervention type. Expert opinion suggests considering the following attributes for any attendance-related intervention:

• Integrate interventions seamlessly into a student’s day: School-wide interventions should be built into a student’s normal school day. This both reduces stigma that may be associated with the service and minimizes effort on the part of the student. For example, one jurisdiction that provides free public transit to students created a “kid lane” at subway entrances, which allows students free entry with or without their transit pass. Similarly, experts noted that “breakfast after the bell” programs that are delivered in the classroom versus another location in a school yield higher participation rates by alleviating the need for specific action by the student.

• Ensure interventions are voluntary and focused on trust: Participation in attendance-based interventions should generally be voluntary for students and families, particularly when they require high-touch approaches like parent-teacher home visits. Experts emphasize the importance of collaborative partnerships between school staff and caregivers in achieving the best learning and developmental outcomes for students, which tend to be more feasible when rooted in trust versus mandates.

• Provide teacher training and support: Many attendance interventions, like parent-teacher home visits or culturally relevant instruction, require active participation and expanded duties of teachers. Teachers should be provided with the training and resources that allows them to feel confident in implementing new interventions, and adding additional support staff can help prevent teacher burnout and maintain high-quality academic instruction. Teachers should be compensated for any work outside of normal school hours.

• Automate communication where possible and communicate through multiple channels: Selecting interventions that require little day-to-day staff time may yield gains without imposing a burden on resources. For example, automated digital messages to parents and caregivers regarding attendance is low-cost and low-effort, but has been shown to yield improved attendance. Research also found paper notices to have a longer-lasting effect when compared to text messages, likely due to the overwhelming amount of digital communication many people receive.

• Focus on building long-term relationships: When students have long-term, continuous relationships with adults at school, including mentors, they are less likely to be chronically absent and see the greatest improvement in academic and behavioral outcomes. Interventions that include a mentoring component should screen for mentors able to commit to long-term relationships and offer them the training and support needed to be successful.

• Reframe attendance: Implementing interventions to improve attendance and persistence often requires culture change within schools and changes in attitudes among staff. School leaders should emphasize that attendance should be seen as an indicator of challenges in a student’s life that needs to be investigated and addressed. This helps avoid a punitive reaction that may further discourage attendance and engagement by the student.

• Monitor the broader community context: Recent events in a student’s broader community may drive spikes in absenteeism. For example, immigration enforcement actions may make undocumented students or students whose parents are undocumented afraid to engage with public institutions. School leaders and staff should be cognizant of such occurrences in order to provide culturally-sensitive support to students and families.

• Evaluate disciplinary and truancy policies and practices: Disciplinary methods–and in particular, those that result in temporary exclusion from school, tend to exacerbate absenteeism. They are also disproportionately imposed on students of color. While distinct from discipline, truancy similarly disproportionately impacts students of color and has been shown to be ineffective in encouraging attendance. It is crucial that both truancy and disciplinary policies be evaluated to ensure they are not only in line with efforts around attendance, but that their effect on students of color is accounted for when designing interventions around attendance. This may include the use of trauma-informed practices or other school-based supports that can address the needs of students from racially marginalized communities. Proper support for teachers should be provided in the event that classroom management policies change.

• Ensure accessibility and culturally competent design: Provide fliers, notifications, enrollment forms, and other materials in the languages most relevant to students, families and caregivers. Hire staff that have both the language skills and cultural competency that allows them to engage positively with students and parents. Accommodate varying levels of digital literacy and access by providing materials and communications digitally, on paper, by phone, or in-person.

• Principals and superintendents: Addressing school attendance can be both time and resource intensive, so leadership is crucial in prioritizing and allocating staff and resources to address it. They also can play a pivotal role in reframing how the school views attendance and establishing it as a schoolwide priority.

• District data teams: Existing staff with data competency can be critical in successfully monitoring attendance and rapidly identifying emerging issues. They also are vital in establishing data-sharing agreements and other mechanisms that facilitate automated notices to families regarding attendance.

• Teachers, parent liaisons and other school staff: School staff with existing relationships and rapport with families and caregivers can act as an initial point of outreach to parents to raise awareness of absences and understand underlying factors that may be contributing to poor attendance.

• Local elected officials: Elected officials can support attendance-focused efforts by naming school attendance as a priority across the community and serving as a centralized point of coordination across city or county departments. Some local governments organize a task force, staffed by the executive office, to coordinate agencies who may need to be involved in implementing particular solutions, such as social services, transportation, and public safety agencies.

• Community organizations: Organizations that are deeply embedded within communities can help schools understand current context or recent events within particular communities that may be affecting student attendance, as well as implement culturally-relevant solutions to barriers students are facing.

• Utilize varied methods for understanding drivers of absenteeism: Monitor absences daily or weekly and rapidly investigate to determine the cause by speaking to the student or their parents. Alternatively, schools can pick a single day in a given month or semester and conduct a more intensive audit of absences, followed by immediate outreach to and engagement with students and parents.

• Employ a tiered approach when addressing absences: Interventions selected to address absences for individual students can scale in intensity depending on student need and frequency of absence. For example, after a single absence, the school may send a notification to caregivers, and a second absence may spur a phone call to parents. Developing this type of protocol can streamline actions taken by school staff who are tasked with promoting school attendance.

• Dedicate time and cultivate buy-in among staff: Build attendance monitoring, investigation, and remediation into the responsibilities of school staff roles. Provide training to staff on the importance of attendance and the school’s approach to addressing it to generate the necessary buy-in to the school’s approach to boosting attendance.

• Foster collaboration and formalize partnerships with other public agencies: District leaders should utilize their networks to determine if other local agencies are already providing services, like discounted transportation or mentoring programs, that could be used to address barriers to school attendance.

• Attendance: Monitoring student attendance at the aggregate and individual level is the primary metric that indicates success of attendance interventions. Patterns in absences may be seen on certain days of week, times of year, or within certain sub-groups of students.

• Chronic absenteeism: Students who are absent or are on track to be absent 10% or more of school days are often those in need of the most targeted support and intervention.

• Student engagement and school connectedness: Student engagement and connectedness are foundational enablers of attendance. Drops in these indicators often serve as a warning that attendance issues may arise. They are frequently measured via student surveys.