It remains fairly uncommon for school districts to have rebounded from significant increases in chronic absenteeism experienced during the pandemic, according to new research published by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
In fact, just 13% of districts studied had reverted to their pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism levels by the 2024-25 school year, the research showed.
Researchers defined “substantial increases” in chronic absenteeism for districts as a more than 10 percentage-point increase between the 2017-18 or 2018-19 school years and 2021-22.
If a district’s chronic absenteeism rates returned to within 2 percentage points or less of its pre-pandemic levels by the 2023-24 or 2024-25 school years, it was deemed to have bounced back.
The study, conducted in collaboration with the The GRAD Partnership and the Partnership for Student Success, examined chronic absenteeism data in 8,586 school districts across 34 states and the District of Columbia. Among those districts, 4,503 experienced substantial increases in chronic absenteeism in 2021-22.
Those figures alone, the study said, “illustrate how widespread increases in chronic absenteeism were from the pre-pandemic to the 2021-2022 school year.”
Here are the key findings on districts’ recovery from pandemic-era chronic absenteeism.
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