Key Points

• Chronic absenteeism spiked during the pandemic and remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic and only 2 percentage points lower than they were in 2023.
• Disadvantaged districts’ absenteeism rates were higher, and increases were larger, over the pandemic. However, in proportional terms, districts of all types—high- and low-achieving, affluent and poor—experienced a nearly 90 percent increase in chronic absenteeism rates in 2022 and have had similarly modest declines since.
• Chronic absenteeism rates are not falling fast enough. Only about one-third of students are in districts on pace to cut 2022 absenteeism in half by 2027, a target 15 states have officially adopted.
• Chronic absenteeism rates improved more slowly in 2024 than they did in 2023, raising the very real possibility that absenteeism rates might never return to pre-pandemic levels.

Introduction

It has been over five years since the US shut down for COVID, and in many ways, the country has moved past the pandemic. For US schools, however, the pandemic’s toll has not passed so quickly. Student aca­demic achievement remains depressed, and chronic absenteeism continues to hover substantially above the pre-pandemic baseline.

Measured as the percentage of students who miss 10 percent or more of a school year, chronic absenteeism was a serious concern even before the pandemic. In 2018 and 2019, about 15 percent of K–12 public school students in the US were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the US Department of Education labeled it a “crisis.”¹

Then the pandemic struck and took this crisis to unprecedented levels. In January 2024, I issued a report, Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic, which documented these post-pandemic changes in absenteeism.² I found that during the 2022 school year, 28.5 percent of students were chronically absent, an increase of about 90 percent (or more than 13 percentage points) over pre-pandemic rates. (In this report, I refer to school years by the spring year—for example, “the 2017 school year”—instead of “the 2016–17 school year.”) The data then available showed that by the 2023 school year—the first fully post-pandemic school year—that rate had fallen, but only to 26 percent. Now, more complete data for the 2023 school year show that rate was 25.4 percent, with the difference due mostly to rounding.

Read the entire report here.