School is required for children in California beginning in first grade, but huge numbers of elementary school children miss an awful lot of school.

The reasons are generally mundane. Parents or caregivers can fail to get kids to school for all sorts of reasons.

Children who miss school can fall behind quickly, and schools are generally not equipped to support family interventions that can make a difference.

Did a student miss school? Take it as a warning sign

Parents have a legal responsibility to get their kids to school. It is easy to think of truancy, which is defined as "missing more than 30 minutes of instruction without an excuse three times during the school year" as a law enforcement issue — a problem of willful teenagers. But most truancy is better thought of as absenteeism or just students who miss school.

The school system in California is set up to take attendance very seriously because early absenteeism predicts later problems, including failing to graduate high school. Districts need to address absenteeism early and often. School Attendance Review Boards (SARBs) work to enforce attendance.

Read more in the Ed100 blog.

Most kids never miss school, or miss it rarely. When districts focus on improving attendance, they need to focus on students or groups of students who miss school the most, especially in early grades. To help drive focus on this issue, in 2018 California began collecting data about chronic absenteeism in grades K-8 for the California School Dashboard. You can read much more about that in our blog post on Attendance and absenteeism.

Enrollment vs. attendance

The school finance system in California has been designed with a powerful incentive to keep students in school: it funds school districts on the basis of Average Daily Attendance (ADA), rather than on the number of students enrolled. This is also a part of the reason why schools take attendance every day. Districts take this very seriously. Most states base funding on enrollment, not attendance — California is one of only a handful of states that enforce attendance through the school finance system.

Because attendance directly affects school district finances, districts have a big incentive to boost it. Investments that increase attendance can pay for themselves quickly if they work. For example, effective attendance-management systems enable school office staff to call parents of absent students by lunchtime.

In 2018-19 about 750,000 California students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more school days (or 10% or more school days in the school year). This level of absence from school correlates with all kinds of bad outcomes, including failure to finish high school. According to a 2016 report of the State Attorney General's office, 82% of those in prison in America are high school dropouts.

To find out the absence rate in your school district, check out this interactive map. Chronic absenteeism data is also available on the California Department of Education (CDE) DataQuest web site. The reports indicate chronic absenteeism rates of schools and school districts and which student subgroups have the highest chronic absenteeism rates.

The infographic above, from Attendance Works, breaks down the risks of chronic absence from school for young students. (Click for full size to see the impact on reading for kids who miss many days in kindergarten and first grade.)

California's strict attendance rules are a hardship for student organizations and athletic groups. For example, even students that serve on school boards or as advisors in school accreditation teams need permission to attend meetings during school hours. School districts receive funding based on attendance; in 2018 each missed day, regardless of the cause, cost the district about $75.

Pandemic effects

In 2020, the pandemic threw a giant wrench into the connection between funding and attendance. Suddenly, the priority was no longer physical attendance, rather it was online engagement. Huge numbers of students lacked access to a computing device or stable internet. Even in normal times, students in poverty or living in rural areas generally miss school at higher rates, which in turn suppresses school funding in those areas. Attendance became a fixture of California's education finance system in the middle of the 20th century. In the context of the pandemic, leaders re-evaluated the long-discussed change of switching to using enrollment-based funding formulas, as a majority of states do. For the 2019-2020 school year, the state used attendance data to calculate school funding. With kids back in person, the state switched back to using average daily attendance, its pre-pandemic policy.

Suspended

Sometimes students miss school because of their behavior. Out of school suspensions and expulsions are a tool that schools use to punish students and maintain order in schools. However, these disciplinary approaches also keep kids from learning, especially those kids whose achievement is of the greatest concern.

The California Endowment has been a leading voice in creating a movement to find other ways to address student misbehavior. They argue that suspensions are largely counterproductive, and that it is better to "suspend" students in a way that keeps them in a learning environment. A study of school suspension practices by the ACLU in 2018 found that students in America miss about 11 million days of school annually due to suspensions. The rate of suspensions is significantly lower in California than in other states, but varies by county.

Next Steps

Parents and PTAs can help get kids to class on time and not miss school. From creating a regular bedtime routine to making sure backpacks are ready to go in the morning, time-proven strategies really work, if parents know about them. Attendance Works provides useful web-based handouts for preschool, elementary, middle and high school in several languages.

This lesson concludes the Ed100 coverage of the topic of Time as a lever for educational success. This is a good moment to reiterate the organizing framework of Ed100: Education is Students and Teachers spending Time in Places for Learning with the Right Stuff in a System with Resources for Success. So Now What?

The next series of lessons picks up the topic of places for learning, including primers about neighborhood schools, charter schools, and learning beyond the classroom.

Updated July 2017, December 2017, January 2018, October 2018, June 2019, May 2020, December 2021.