What we have heard from some states is that too many of their schools, and particularly their high schools, would not meet this standard. So why shouldn’t states adopt a standard of 95 percent as satisfactory attendance? This is because research suggests that low risk students attend, on average, 95 percent or more of school days. ![]() It’s important to understand that, while chronic absence can reliably identify students at high risk of failure due to absences, its inverse should not be considered a reliable indicator of students at low risk of academic failure due to absences. This type of metric won’t distinguish between students who just met the measure-missing 17 days-and those who had much better attendance such as missing 5 days out of an entire school year. Take for example the most obvious positive metric: the percentage of children who are not chronically absent, or those that attend more than 90 percent of days. However, choosing an effective, appropriate positive indicator is not so simple. Our resources are chock full of positive messaging, student and family engagement strategies and other approaches to improving student attendance in this way. Using a positive indicatorĪ second approach that is surfacing in a few states is the use of a positive metric, one that attempts to measure the percentage of students who have good attendance, rather than the percentage chronically absent. We recommend that states adopt this particular definition for two critical reasons: first, it has a proven ability to identify students who are at very high risk of academic failure due to absences and, second, using it will allow for comparisons across states and districts nationwide, even if the lengths of their school years differ. One of the most promising developments is that ten of the states with formally submitted ESSA plans have chosen to define chronic absence as missing 10 percent of school days. We believe that some of these differences are critical because the choices states make may determine how powerful attendance and chronic absence are as measures of school quality and student success. While many states have added, or are considering including, attendance measures to their accountability systems, the nature of the indicator and definitions of chronic absence differ, as do their attendance goals and intervention points. Yet chronic absence can be reversed and, when attendance improves, student achievement is likely to improve. Several high quality research studies show that the impact of chronic absence leads to lower achievement, disengagement and often dropout. National data from the Office for Civil Rights shows that at least 6.8 million public school students missed 15 or more days of school in 2013-14, and it affects at least 89 percent of the nation’s school districts. We now know that excessive student absences are a proven, widespread, and consequential problem in American schools. As this chart shows, the majority-14 out of the 17 officially submitted ESSA plans-includes some variant of chronic absence as an accountability indicator and many other states with plans in preparation seem likely to follow suit.Īttendance Works is excited by the opportunity that the increased focus on chronic absence provides because it has the potential to increase student achievement substantially. The recently submitted state plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) show that chronic absence is gaining traction as an indicator of school quality and student success.
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