Here's what working in schools to reduce chronic absenteeism: building family engagement, fostering student connectedness, having dedicated attendance teams and implementing comprehensive responses.
Here's what's not working as effectively as those methods: vigorously using truancy laws to get students back in classrooms and conducting surveys to better understand why students are chronically absent.
These are the conclusions of two reports released today, one of which was based on research into evidence-based practices to tackle attendance problems.
Despite progress made over the past few years to reduce chronic absenteeism, most schools still have students missing class at above pre-pandemic levels, according to the attendance experts behind the reports.
In 2019 — the year before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — the chronic absenteeism rate was 15.4%. That number rose to 28.3% in 2022 and then fell to 22.6% in 2025, according to a 45-state analysis by the American Enterprise Institute. Student chronic absenteeism is broadly defined as missing 10% of the school year, or about 18 days for any reason, including excused and unexcused absences.
The joint release of the two reports is meant to help education leaders and their partners commit to proven strategies to increase attendance, which education experts say benefits students' engagement and learning.
What principals say is working
School leaders pointed to the use of multiple evidence-based strategies to boost attendance as an effective approach to tackling absenteeism, according to the analysis of principal surveys. That analysis was conducted by the Everyone Graduates Center, Partnership for Student Success and the GRAD Partnership. The groups analyzed two surveys of principals during the 2024-25 school year about why some schools continue to struggle with chronic absenteeism while others have made attendance improvements.
The survey findings show that substantial reductions in chronic absenteeism are more common in schools that have multiple effective attendance strategies that are aligned with the root causes of why their students are absent. These schools also have the capacity to implement these strategies at scale.
Principals who said their school had four or more effective attendance strategies were more likely to report substantial reductions to chronic absenteeism (77%) compared to school leaders reporting just one effective strategy (41%).
One approach, however, was at the top of the principals' list of effective attendance strategies: focusing on school connectedness. That includes improving student-teacher and student-peer relationships in addition to creating supportive school environments.
“The nation’s school principals show that reducing chronic absenteeism is a challenging task but it can be done," said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, in an Oct. 26 statement. "Doing so requires weaving together and successfully implementing multiple evidence-based strategies aligned to the specific reasons driving absenteeism in each school.”
What researchers say is working
In the second report, published by FutureEd and Attendance Works, researchers provide a collection of more than 30 evidence-based strategies to address students’ various barriers to attendance, including those that focus on early childhood education and social-emotional supports.
Some of these attendance barriers are unique to a post-COVID school environment, such as the shift in parental attitudes to keep their children home from school due to potential illnesses or the assumption that schoolwork can be done at home digitally.
Meanwhile, some traditional attendance barriers remain challenging to schools, such as chronic illnesses, transportation struggles and family demands, the report said.
The report, known as the 2026 Attendance Playbook, organizes suggested inventions into tiered levels of support, including universal prevention measures for all students at the first tier and intensive interventions for individual students at the third and top tier.
The first tier of interventions, for example, focus on preventing absenteeism by building engagement with students and families and through rigorous and relevant instruction, in addition to other measures like effective communications, and safe and reliable transportation.
Offering access to summer and after-school programs is one approach to improving attendance during the regular school day and year, the report said.
The third tier, which provides most intensive support, could include customized interventions to meet each student's housing, health and other needs. Suggested strategies for addressing student housing needs include outreach to local education foundations for resources and the use of Title I, Part A homeless set-aside funds to increase staff capacity and services.
“To reduce today’s elevated levels of chronic absence, educators and their partners can accelerate their progress by building off what works and not reinventing the wheel," said Hedy Chang, CEO and president of Attendance Works, in an Oct. 26 statement.
