School attendance is mandatory for children in California beginning in first grade, but huge numbers of kids miss an awful lot of school. Chronic absenteeism is a corrosive problem in education, and the COVID-19 Pandemic made it a lot worse.

There’s a lot to know about school attendance, and this lesson breaks it down. Why is attendance important, and how do we know? How is attendance measured? What is chronic absenteeism? Why is attendance a bigger issue in California than in most other states? What can be done to improve it?

Why is school attendance important?

Let’s start with the obvious: when kids miss school, they fall behind. The resulting problems are cumulative — and contagious. It’s difficult for teachers to move a class of learners forward together under the best of circumstances. It’s extra hard to do so while also catching students up on lessons they missed.

The connections between learning and attendance have been exhaustively studied. AttendanceWorks, a non-profit organization focused on this issue, has collected mounds of evidence about it. Over time, kids who regularly miss class become more and more at risk of failure, which comes with huge costs.

Most kids don't drop out of school as a sudden, dramatic, rebellious choice. Something causes them to miss a day or two. Then maybe they show up less, then even less, and at a certain point the prospect of trying to catch up is too demoralizing.

When kids miss class, it’s serious. Alarm bells should go off.

What is chronic absenteeism?

25% of California students missed more than three weeks of school in 2022-23

Students are officially deemed chronically absent if they have missed 10% or more of instructional days since the beginning of the school term. The term is intended to be non-judgmental — there can be many reasons for kids to miss school, including prolonged illness. At the end of a 180-day school year, a student is deemed chronically absent if they missed at least 18 school days, the cumulative equivalent of more than three weeks of school.

To state the obvious, that’s a lot of missed school.

Even before the Pandemic, chronic absenteeism was a huge problem. In a typical pre-COVID year, about 750,000 California students (12%) were chronically absent. Let that sink in, because those were the good old days. In the Pandemic, chronic absence rates skyrocketed — and in 2023 they were double the pre-COVID norm. 25% of California students were chronically absent in 2022-23, with big variations:

Edsource.org provides outstanding analysis of state data about education. Click the chart above to find the data for your county, district, and school.

Predictably, kids fell behind. Of course! Test scores in California slumped.

Edsource.org visually summarizes state test scores over time with detail for student subgroups. Click the image above to find the data for your county, district, and school.

What is truancy?

Many absences fall under the broad meaning of truancy — missing school without a defensible reason. In California, students are officially truant if they miss more than 30 minutes of instruction on three days of school without an excuse. Families are supposed to receive a notification of some kind if a student misses enough school to meet this nip-it-in-the-bud threshold.

Many dislike the term truant because it implies that the student has done something wrong. As a practical matter, most kids rely on help from a parent or someone else to get to school. Because truancy is a warning signal for child neglect, it can serve as a basis for a referral to Child Protective Services.

Parents and legal guardians in California can be fined for failing to get their kids to school. When Vice President Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California, she spoke often about enforcing school attendance laws.

How does California count students differently from other states?

In all states, funding flows to school districts in some proportion to the number of students to be educated. But the particulars differ from place to place.

For the purpose of allocating funds, most states count students on the basis of enrollment — the number of students who are supposed to show up to school. California and a few other states count students on the basis of Average Daily Attendance (ADA), which includes only students who actually show up. It’s a very significant difference: If kids don’t come to school in California, the district doesn’t get money for them.

How is attendance counting different from enrollment?

Some argue that it is essential to fund schools on the basis of attendance, because it creates a financial incentive to get every kid to school every day. Because the incentive is massive, it makes financial sense for school districts to invest in technology, staff, programs and interventions that can boost attendance. Technology investments that help districts increase attendance can pay for themselves quickly — if they work. For example, effective attendance management systems enable school office staff to call parents if their students aren’t in school by a specific time.

Others argue that attendance-based funding is fundamentally unfair and excessively punitive. In wealthy communities it’s pretty easy to get kids to school consistently — should they be financially rewarded for it? If so, by how much? Should the incentive be 100%, as it is now, or something less, or zero? During the COVID-19 pandemic, school attendance counts became meaningless. With temporary federal support, California funded school districts with a system of bubble gum and chicken wire.

At the time of this writing (November 2023) it seems very likely that California will consider dumping attendance-based school funding in favor of a membership-based model, like most states use. (Membership is basically jargon for enrollment.)

What is an excused absence?

California law defines specific reasons why a school district might consider a student absence excused. The reasons include attending a medical appointment, a funeral, or an educational conference for student leaders, such as the SABLE conference offered by the California Association of Student Councils.

It’s important to understand that from a revenue perspective, there is no distinction between an excused absence and an unexcused one. In California, funds flow to districts on the basis of attendance, not attendance-plus-excused-absences. When a district excuses an absence, it doesn’t receive monetary compensation for doing so.

Are students counted absent if they are suspended from school?

Yes. In an attendance-based school funding system like California’s, districts (LEAs) receive funding only for students in attendance. When schools suspend students from attending school, they sacrifice the daily attendance funding for that student. Schools, districts and county offices of education can formally encourage and enforce school attendance through organizations known as School Attendance Review Boards (SARBs).

The topic of school discipline is addressed in Ed100 Lesson 5.13, including alternatives to suspension, the meaning of willful defiance and more.

What can schools do to improve attendance?

Maybe your school already has the goal of ensuring that all kids attend school, every day. If so, bravo — but consider a slightly more personal framing: think of it as a goal for each student, each day.

The things that keep students from showing up at school can vary wildly. Each student and each family has to solve for the things that get in the way. With focus, love and firmness, schools can help address those barriers. The challenge, of course, is the sheer volume of absences: how can schools address massive absenteeism effectively?

Attendance Works, a national non-profit organization, offers a treasure trove of strategies and materials for parents and school districts to combat chronic absences. The California office of the Attorney General, which also focuses on reducing absenteeism, recommends a three-tiered intervention strategy:

When communicating about school attendance, schools are wise to choose their words with care. Research demonstrates that small, cost-free changes in wording can make a big difference, and that scolding parents doesn’t tend to work nearly as well as encouraging them.

Next Steps

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. PTAs can help parents learn about the importance of getting to class on time and not missing school. Attendance Works provides useful web-based handouts for preschool, elementary, middle and high school in several languages.

PTAs can also help improve attendance by making schools welcoming for everyone. In 2023, the National PTA released a set of multicultural guides in English and Spanish to support local PTAs in this work.

This lesson concludes chapter 4 of Ed100, which examined the use and importance of time in education — the when of learning. Chapter 5 addresses the where of learning.

Updated November 2023