It is easy to think of truancy as a law enforcement issue – a problem of willful teenagers. Enforcement of attendance is a common area of cooperation between municipalities and school districts.

But most "truancy" is better thought of as "absenteeism" or just students who miss school. It involves elementary school children whose parents or caregivers fail to get them 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. School is compulsory for children in California beginning in first grade.

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

A growing body of research suggests that early absenteeism is a strong predictor of later problems, including failing to graduate high school. Districts need to address absenteeism early and often. In part, they need to address it for funding reasons: districts don't receive money for students who miss school.

To draw attention to attendance, chronic absenteeism rates were added to the California School Dashboard in 2018, but only for students through grade 8.

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris (now a US Senator) began shining a spotlight on elementary school truancy with an annual report "In School + On Track." It's a trove of hard-to-get information assembled from local data systems. For example, the 2016 report found that "Over the past six years, school districts in California have lost an estimated $7.3 billion in funding due to student absences... even small investments can make a large difference in improving student attendance and recapturing previously lost funds. (D)istricts that reported investing in attendance programs indicate an average school district investment of $71,831 in programs to improve attendance yields an average return of $112,936 in increased funding."

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss school 10 percent of the days they have been enrolled. Chronic absence is different from truancy, which counts only unexcused absences and indicates a violation of California’s compulsory attendance laws.

Nearly 700,000 California students are chronically absent, meaning they miss school more than three weeks of the school year. These absences are concentrated in a small number of school districts and schools but they reflect about 10 percent of the school population. This level of absence from school correlates with all kinds of bad outcomes, including failure to finish high school. According to the Attorney General's office report, 82% of those in prison in America are high school dropouts.

To find out the absence rate in your school district, check this database from EdSource. 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 AttendanceWorks, 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; each missed day, regardless of the cause, costs the district about $75.

Suspended

For older students, sometimes missing school is a result 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.

Johnny's not in class
a canary in the mind
empty chairs can pass
a silent warning sign

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.

The school finance system in California creates a powerful incentive to keep students in school: it funds school districts on the basis of Average Daily Attendance (ADA). This is also a part of the reason why schools take attendance every day. Districts take this very seriously.

School district 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.

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 pre-school, 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, Dec 2017, Jan 2018, Oct 2018