Why Children Are Missing More School Now
The raw data looks inarguably bad: The share of American children missing at least 10 percent of school days nearly doubled over the course of the pandemic, leaving perhaps more than six million more students “chronically absent” than had been in the 2018-19 school year.
And this spring, as we trudged into our fifth year with Covid, the absenteeism crisis succeeded pandemic learning loss and the mental health of teenagers as a new touchstone in what are now yearslong arguments about the wisdom of school closings in 2020 and 2021. Almost everything about school performance and the well-being of children and adolescents now seems to orbit the duration of remote learning in one school year, which lives on years later as the gravitational center of our retrospective universe. But before the link between those closings and absenteeism hardens into a new conventional wisdom, I want to offer a few notes of additional context, which together suggest, I think, that we are doing ourselves a disservice by fashioning every aftereffect of those years into a weapon to be used in an ideological crusade.
First, as it was with learning loss, chronic absenteeism does not appear to be a uniquely American problem arising from the specific way we handled school closings during the pandemic but something of a global phenomenon. It can be seen almost everywhere you look, in the aftermath of Covid, including a lot of places that took quite different approaches to school during the pandemic.
How can I say that? The most recent available national numbers show that 26 percent of American students missed at least 10 percent of school in 2022-23. In Sweden, reports from the National Agency for Education showed considerable increases in student absences across the first two years of the pandemic. In Britain, chronic absenteeism jumped from 11.7 percent of children before the pandemic to 23.5 percent in 2022-23. In Belgium, the problem has grown by 90 percent, and in New Zealand, more than 45 percent of children missed at least 10 percent of school days. In Japan, where schools reopened for good in June 2020, there had never been a year in the prior decade when more than 300,000 children registered “prolonged absence,” and most years in the 2010s the number hovered around 200,000. In 2021, it crossed 400,000, and in 2022, 450,000.
Second, in the United States, the relationship between how long schools remained remote and how much absenteeism they later experienced looks pretty modest — perhaps one slice of the story, but only one slice of it. In a high-profile study published in January, Stanford’s Thomas Dee found that the length of remote schooling at the state level explained only about 20 percent of the variation in increased absenteeism. In another paper published the same month by the American Enterprise Institute, Nat Malkus crunched the numbers at the district level and found a slightly smaller relationship: Chronic absenteeism in those districts with the most in-person schooling grew by 12 percentage points, while in those with the most remote schooling, rates had grown by 14 percentage points; in the districts in between, the rates had grown by 13 percentage points. The differences, in other words, were negligible, especially given the large increases observed everywhere. When The Times updated some of his analysis, Malkus summarized it like this: “The problem got worse for everybody in the same proportional way.”
Malkus believes that absenteeism is the biggest problem facing American schools today, but he’s quite firm that we shouldn’t see in those numbers a morality play about remote learning. “If I could have drawn a neat line between the two data sets — school closures and chronic absenteeism — I would have. But I can’t,” he told me. “The districts that were closed longer do have a marginally higher problem. But how much of the difference does it explain? Not very much.”
