Indicator: Consistent attendance

Definition

Students are present for more than 90 percent of enrolled days.

Recommended Metric(s)

Percentage of students who are present for more than 30 days who demonstrate:

  • Satisfactory attendance: Present for 96 percent or more of enrolled days
  • At-risk attendance: Present for 91 to 95 percent of enrolled days

Type(s) of Data Needed

Administrative data

Why it matters

Students must be consistently present to learn and succeed in school. Consistent attendance (attending 90 percent or more of school days) is a positive reframing of chronic absenteeism (missing 10 percent or more of school days), a metric which is widely used in the field and is negatively correlated with other measures of school performance. Research shows that absenteeism is related to reduced math and reading achievement outcomes, reduced educational engagement, and reduced social engagement.1, 2, 3, 4 Chronic absenteeism in middle school and high school is also related to lower rates of on-time graduation.5 As one specific example, Allensworth and Easton6 found that course attendance was eight times more predictive of failing a 9th-grade course than were 8th-grade test scores, and that attendance was the strongest predictor of overall grades. At the postsecondary level, attendance has a strong positive relationship with course grades and college grade point average (GPA).7 Attendance is also commonly used in college early warning systems to help identify students at risk of falling behind and improve retention and graduation rates.8, 9

Available data show significant increases in chronic absenteeism during and after the COVID-19 pandemic period.  An analysis of nationwide data from the U.S. Department of Education found that 29.7 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2021–2022 school year. Between the 2017–2018 and 2021–2022 school years, the percentage of schools with 30 percent or more of students chronically absent more than tripled, increasing from 13.7 to 42.5 percent.10  Although chronic absenteeism rates improved in 2023, they remain higher than pre pandemic rates (before the 2019–2020 school year).11 In addition, the pandemic created conditions that might have changed parents’ views of daily in-person school attendance as optional rather than mandatory given the availability of materials online, and might have led to continued changes in behavior, such as families keeping students home more often when they are sick, whether with COVID-19 or another type of illness or injury.12

What to know about measurement

Pre-K and K–12 schools regularly collect attendance data as part of their normal operations. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the importance of establishing a common definition of what constitutes a full day of attendance across all modes of instruction, including in-person, remote, asynchronous, and hybrid. At the postsecondary level, colleges with early warning systems often track student attendance,13 though the extent to which they track attendance and methods for doing so vary widely across institutions, making this indicator more challenging to measure at scale in postsecondary contexts.14, 15

We recommend measuring attendance above 90 percent at 91 to 95 percent of enrolled days as a minimum to reflect the inverse of chronic absenteeism, as well as attendance above 95 (that is, at 96 percent and above) to align with Attendance Works’ definition of “satisfactory attendance” (missing less than 5 percent of school days). However, data users might conduct further analyses of attendance data. For example, Attendance Works also recommends examining moderate chronic absence (missing 10 to 19 percent of school days), and severe chronic absence (missing 20 percent or more of school days).16  Attendance Works also suggests that districts and schools look more closely at attendance patterns, such as students who miss more school at the beginning of year17 and/or measuring school climate (the quality and character of school life and environment) along with school attendance.18

Although these thresholds are commonly used to determine whether students are chronically absent across grade levels, we encourage framework users to examine attendance by grade level, as students in later grades tend to have lower attendance rates, on average, than students in early grades.19 There might be differences in the causes and interventions to address chronic absenteeism by grade level.20

E-W Case Studies

Children smiling stock photo
California's Cradle-to-Career Data System
California is developing a data system that brings together data from early learning programs, schools, colleges, financial aid providers, employers, workforce training programs, and social services.
View Case Study

Source frameworks

This indicator appeared in 12 source frameworks reviewed for this report. As discussed above, our proposed measure builds on the commonly accepted definition of chronic absenteeism put forth by the P-16 Framework, Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) Birth to Grade 3 Framework, and the CORE Districts’ Improvement Measures.

References