Urging Solutions on ‘Chronic Absence’ in Elementary Schools

Earlier this week, an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times made a strong argument about how to address a hidden but real problem in elementary schools in California and around the country: the fact that many young children, particularly those in poverty, are missing multiple days of school throughout the school year.

The answer, as with so many things, is to intervene early and get hard numbers on exactly what is going on. The op-ed urges the state of California to do a better job collecting data on exactly which students are missing school. Only with that data can a school district figure out what is keeping these young children from showing up. Is it illness? Transportation problems? A parents’ misunderstanding about the importance of school even in these early years? If districts can pinpoint the root of the problem, they can start to solve it.

The op-ed was written by Hedy N. Chang, who directs the Chronic Absence Project, and Yolie Flores, a member of the LAUSD Board of Education and a senior associate at the Chronic Absence Project. In 2008, Chang co-authored a report titled “Present, Engaged, and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades,” published by the National Center for Children in Poverty.

“The effects are profound,” Chang and Flores write in this week’s op-ed. Their research has found:

• Students who miss a month or more of kindergarten are more likely to perform poorly in first grade, an effect particularly pronounced in reading among Latino children.
• Among children living in poverty, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts low academic achievement in fifth grade. By sixth grade, a pattern of absence is a sure-fire predictor of high school dropout rates.
• The classmates of frequent absentees can also be adversely affected, because teachers have to spend time reviewing work for the students who missed class rather than presenting new material.

As the authors point out, data collection on absenteeism should be part of California’s  application for a Race to the Top grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The state needs to include this data in its longitudinal database, CALPADS, that tracks students’ progress as they move through their school years.

We agree. In our report released in October — “On the Cusp in California: How PreK-3rd Strategies Could Improve Education in the Golden State” — one of our 13 recommendations zoomed in on the problem of children not showing up for school. We recommended that the state “use data to identify schools with high rates of chronic absenteeism in pre-K, kindergarten, and the early grades, and target these schools for interventions to reduce early absenteeism.”  And we urge other states to follow suit.