Dive Brief:
- A new, unpublished study conducted by UC Santa Barbara professor Michael Gottfried and the California Attorney General's Office's Truancy Reduction Pilot Projects initiative looked at data from the U.S. Department of Education related to 14,000 kindergartners, finding that those who took the school bus were less likely to be chronically truant or absent.
- According to the study, “Linking Getting to School with Going to School,” students from families of all income levels are positively impacted by taking the bus.
- Previous research has shown that chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% of school annually — has serious consequences on academic readiness and later student success, and is linked to lower achievement in future math and reading.
Dive Insight:
California Attorney General Kamala Harris has made combatting truancy and chronic absenteeism a priority for her office, a goal that also reflects a new federal push to tackle the problem.
Her office has released a free online toolkit designed to spread awareness around the impacts of chronic truancy and absences. Her office has also released three annual editions of a report called "In School + On Track" that evaluates elementary schools in the state. For 2015, the study found that 230,000 California elementary school students missed more than 10% of the school year.
The Obama administration's own approach is focused on mentoring. The new initiative, called the My Brother's Keeper Success Initiative, will be piloted in 10 cities: Austin, Boston, Columbus, Denver, Miami-Dade, New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, San Antonio, and Seattle. The program will pair mentors with students three times per week.
