Dive Brief:
- School districts with persistently high chronic absenteeism rates after the COVID-19 pandemic struggled to return to pre-pandemic academic achievement rates, according to an analysis released Tuesday by NWEA, an assessment and research company.
- Districts with consistently high absenteeism rates were about 50% further from recovery in math achievement compared to districts that never experienced high absenteeism, NWEA found. The differences for reading achievement were smaller.
- While national chronic absenteeism levels have been improving in recent years, they are not falling fast enough, according to recent American Enterprise Institute research. Slow attendance improvements — without additional interventions — indicate that about half the level of the pandemic-related increase in absenteeism could become the long-term baseline, AEI said.
Dive Insight:
Chronic absenteeism's pace of improvement is "slowing dangerously," AEI found. The organization’s Return to Learn tracker shows that from its peak in 2022, chronic absenteeism in 44 states and the District of Columbia declined by nearly 3 percentage points in 2023, by just over 2 percent age points in 2024, and by just under 1 percentage point in 2025.
Chronic absenteeism is widely defined as missing at least 10% of a school year for any reason, or about 18 days of school. NWEA defines high chronic absenteeism as missing at least 20% of the school year. The company classifies a district as having consistently high absenteeism if it reported high chronic absenteeism rates across three post-pandemic years of 2022, 2023 and 2024.
In 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K-12 public school students were chronically absent — but by 2022, that number jumped to 28.5%, according to AEI.
In the 2024-25 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate among 39 states and the District of Columbia was 23%.
To help drive attendance rates up, Attendance Works, EdTrust and AEI have encouraged states and districts to set a goal of cutting their 2022 chronic absenteeism rates in half by 2027. Eighteen states have formally adopted this target, according to AEI.
"If the pandemic brought a shift in the culture of attendance among US students, families, and schools, then it may take nothing less than another cultural shift — back to the attendance norms that were in place just seven years ago — to fully counter the current crisis," wrote Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of Education Policy Studies at AEI and author of the report.
Malkus added that it would take "substantial, sustained effort to accelerate improved attendance to avoid normalizing or accepting half of the pandemic-related increase in absenteeism over the long term."
The longer chronic absenteeism persists, the greater its impact on student learning. NWEA’s research found that, generally, academic achievement in 2024 remained significantly below pre-COVID averages, but academic recovery was stronger for high-poverty districts with lower chronic absenteeism rates. For low-poverty districts, recovery did not vary by absenteeism levels.
High-poverty districts with high absenteeism rates were about 40% further from recovery in math compared to districts that never had high absenteeism rates, even during the pandemic, NWEA's report said.
“While educators have long understood that attendance matters, these findings add to our understanding of the complexities of academic recovery post-COVID and why it has been so uneven,” Sofia Postell, research analyst at NWEA and co-author of the study, said in a July 21 statement. “Considering attendance rates as part of a district’s overall academic recovery plan is critical to really address the learning gaps left behind by COVID.”
The NWEA analysis is based on its MAP Growth data for grades 3-8 from 2,000 U.S. school districts.
