A new school year is beginning, and students are returning to school, but the question this year is how many will return to attending consistently. Chronic absenteeism, the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year, nearly doubled during the pandemic, surging from 15 percent of K–12 students in 2019 to 28 percent in 2022. During the 2022–23 school year, the first full post-pandemic year, that rate fell, but only to 26 percent.

That very modest change is very concerning. As we move farther away from the pandemic, post-pandemic routines will become more entrenched, and it will become harder to bring chronic absenteeism rates down. That is why I have argued that chronic absenteeism is the top issue facing schools this year and have called on states to commit to cutting chronic absenteeism rates by 50 percent over five years.

To fight chronic absenteeism effectively, it helps to have current information. However, because states take time to gather numbers, the most recent school year for which we have reasonably thorough national data is the 2022–23 school year. In other words, we don’t yet have national data for the 2023–24 school year, and likely won’t for a while. Did rates budge last year? Or did they stay the same?

Fortunately, I recently managed to get 2023–24 data for eight states, and it seems to be a glass-half-full-glass-half-empty situation. On the one hand, states are making progress. On the other hand, states are making less progress than I would like, and I worry that progress will come more slowly in future years. (I also worry that most of the other 42 states might have made less progress than these early reporters: Typically, states with more encouraging data will release that data earlier.)

Of the states that have released data so far, New Mexico made the biggest strides last year, cutting its chronic absenteeism rate from 40 percent during the 2022–23 school year to 33 percent during the 2023–24 school year—a huge drop, but one that still leaves chronic absenteeism rates in the Land of Enchantment far higher than the national average two years earlier.

Rates in Colorado and Rhode Island fell by three percent and four percent, respectively, which is encouraging, but both states made slightly larger strides the previous year. Likewise, Connecticut brought its chronic absenteeism rate down by two percent, which is a meaningful decline, but just half of what the state was able to do the previous year. Indiana and Idaho also shed two percentage points each last year, but chronic absenteeism rates in Mississippi didn’t fall at all.

There are some more positive signs as well, though. Virginia’s chronic absenteeism rate fell by three percent last year, which is a much bigger improvement than the previous year. Likewise, although chronic absenteeism rates in Colorado fell less last year than they did the previous year, chronic absenteeism rates in Colorado are now within five percentage points of Colorado’s pre-pandemic baseline—which, to be sure, wasn’t exactly great.

Since these data come from only eight states, it is important not to read too much into them. More telling will be the national average 2023–24 school year.

Some researchers have provided estimates of the 2023–24 national average, but it is hard to predict just how accurate these estimates are. For instance, RAND estimates that 19 percent of students nationally were chronically absent during the 2023–24 school year (which is probably too optimistic), Panorama Education estimates that it was 25.1 percent (which seems high), and SchoolStatus estimates that it was 23.4 percent (which could be correct). Those three figures are pretty different—up to three million students different.

Regardless of how different those numbers are, though, I think all the data and estimates are clear on one thing: Chronic absenteeism is still a major problem. And so, as we begin another school year, it’s important that schools don’t take their foot off the accelerator. Maybe they can even push it down a little harder.