Nearly four years into America’s learning-loss crisis, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the country’s schools is a basic one: getting students to show up. Rates of absenteeism have surged since the start of the pandemic, across nearly all regions, income levels and age groups. School leaders need to act now to solve the problem, or risk seeing millions of students lose any chance of recovery.
By every measure, US students are missing huge amounts of school. During the 2021-22 academic year, 28% of schoolchildren were “chronically” absent — defined as missing at least 10% of the 180-day school year, or three and a half weeks. That’s up from a rate of 15% in the last full year before the pandemic. The problem is most acute in urban public school districts: Chronic absenteeism topped 40% in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago; in Detroit, the rate…