Heard in the Forum: New Study on Significance of Attendance and School Readiness

This week in the Early Ed Forum, Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, writes about a study of children in California and how their readiness for kindergarten and attendance, or lack of attendance, affected their performance on math and English language arts assessments third grade.

The results suggest that both readiness for kindergarten and regular attendance in kindergarten and first grade matter a lot. Chang writes that the study underscores the need for longitudinal databases that track early attendance and identify students who are chronically absent in pre-k, kindergarten and first grade and for pre-k programs to begin electronically tracking daily attendance data.

Is your state or school district identifying chronically absent students in pre-k and the early grades? What are you doing to help reduce young students’ absences?

Join the discussion! Also, check out the Forum’s Resources page for new reports and studies on promoting children’s learning from birth through third grade.

We hope to see you online.