Key Points
- Chronic absenteeism soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, but counterintuitively, graduation rates over the same period also rose.
- Our conservative estimates show the relationship between chronic absenteeism and graduation weakened by about half during the pandemic.
- More likely a side effect of pandemic-era changes than a deliberate policy choice, the national graduation rate might have been three points lower—amounting to over 100,000 fewer graduates—if not for its weakened relationship with absenteeism.
- Educators and policymakers must purposefully contend with whether emergency pandemic policy changes have enduring effects on students and their outcomes.
Read a brief with the research highlights.
Executive Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic and schools’ responses to it resulted in learning loss that reversed two decades of progress on student achievement and drove chronic absenteeism to unprecedented heights. Yet graduation rates did not fall over the same period— instead, they rose. How could this be? This report investigates how chronic absenteeism, graduation rates, and the relationship between the two have changed since the years before the pandemic. We find that the relationship between chronic absenteeism and graduation rates weakened by half during the pandemic. That is, a district’s chronic absenteeism rate seems to matter less to its graduation rate than it did before the pandemic, controlling for other important factors. If the relationship had not weakened, we estimate the national graduation rate would have been almost three points lower in 2022, equating to over 100,000 fewer graduates in that year alone.
Our findings regarding the weakened relationship between absenteeism and graduation raise two pressing questions: Was this change by design? And is this change good for student achievement? We believe that the answer to both questions is no. The most plausible explanation for the weakened relationship is that—by no one’s conscious design, but rather as a side effect of other pandemic-era decisions— states, districts, and schools created new avenues for students to learn less and still graduate. The onus is now on policymakers, administrators, and educators to deliberately determine how important attendance ought to be. If we believe that attending school should be valuable and necessary to students’ success, it is time to make it so again.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic was the greatest disruption to American schools in a century. School closures affected all students in spring 2020, and for many students, remote schooling continued the following school year. Even for those who returned to in-person instruction early, factors like social distancing, extended quarantines, and masking mandates exacerbated the chaos of pandemic schooling.
Against this backdrop, students’ dramatic pandemic learning losses—reversing about two decades of hard-won progress—are lamentable but unsurprising. Likewise, the post-pandemic surge in chronic absenteeism—nationally, chronic absenteeism rates rose to unprecedented heights in 2021–22 and remain stubbornly high today—is understandable. What is surprising, though, given falling academic achievement and elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, is that high school graduation rates did not fall during this period. Instead, they rose.
Missing a lot of school should make it harder for students to graduate. Research from before the pandemic showed that students who are chronically absent (i.e., miss 10 percent or more of the school year) are less likely to make academic progress,1 pass courses,2 and complete high school.3 This is hardly counterintuitive: If high school graduation requirements are set to ensure students complete an academic course of instruction at a certain level of rigor, missing a large fraction of that instructional program should make it harder to meet those requirements. How is it, then, that during and after the pandemic, graduation rates held steady while many students stopped attending school as regularly as before the pandemic?
It is possible that the nature of absenteeism changed over the pandemic—or differed for the newly chronically absent students—such that absenteeism did not cause decreases in graduation in the same way or for the same kinds of students as it did before the pandemic. It is also possible that districts have eased de facto graduation standards to keep graduation rates high despite higher absenteeism.
Regardless of which explanation one suspects, if the relationship between graduation rates and attendance has weakened unintentionally (i.e., not as a result of carefully considered changes to policy or practice), that is a problem worth addressing. To date, however, the extent of this shift remains unknown. In this report, we examine the relationship between chronic absenteeism rates and graduation rates and document how that relationship shifted over the course of the pandemic.
Notes
1. Michael A. Gottfried, “Chronic Absenteeism and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 19, no. 2 (2014): 53–75, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1045001; Michael A. Gottfried, “Evaluating the Relationship Between Student Attendance and Achievement in Urban Elementary and Middle Schools,” American Educational Research Journal 47, no. 2 (2010): 434–65, https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209350494; and Seth Gershenson et al., “Are Student Absences Worth the Worry in U.S. Primary Schools?,” Education Finance and Policy 12, no. 2 (2017): 137–65, https://doi.org/10.1162/ edfp_a_00207.
2. Michael A. Gottfried, “Chronic Absenteeism in the Classroom Context: Effects on Achievement,” Urban Education 54, no. 1 (2015): 3–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085915618709; Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes, “The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools,” Education Digest: Essential Readings Condensed for Quick Review 78, no. 2 (2012): 4–9, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1002822; Gottfried, “Chronic Absenteeism and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes”; and Martha Abele Mac Iver and Matthew Messel, “The ABCs of Keeping on Track to Graduation: Research Findings from Baltimore,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 18, no. 1 (2013): 50–67, https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/271754128_The_ABCs_of_Keeping_On_Track_to_Graduation_Research_Findings_from_Baltimore.
3. Elaine Allensworth and John Q. Easton, What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public Schools: A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Attendance in the Freshman Year, University of Chicago, Consortium on Chicago School Research, July 2007, https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/What%20Matters%20for%20Staying%2On-Track- Jul2007-Consortium.pdf; Jason A. Schoeneberger, “Longitudinal Attendance Patterns: Developing High School Dropouts,” The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 85, no. 1 (2011): 7–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2011.6037 66; and Elaine Allensworth et al., Looking Forward to High School and College: Middle Grade Indicators of Readiness in Chicago Public Schools, University of Chicago, Consortium on Chicago School Research, November 2014, https://consortium. uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2018-10/Middle%20Grades%20Report.pdf.