The Latest on Chronic Absenteeism (with Nat Malkus)

So at the risk of boring listeners who keep up with your work, a basic question to start with, what is chronic absenteeism?

Chronic absenteeism is the percentage of K-12 students who miss more, 10% or more of the school year.

So when some people first hear the term chronic absenteeism, they imagine students missing days of school right and left.

When they then hear that chronic absenteeism simply refers to students who miss 10 percent or more of school days, they may think, oh, that's actually that actually doesn't sound too terrible.

So is it actually that terrible? Is 18 school days

actually a lot? So 18 school days is a lot, but it's not a magic number.

So there's a couple of things to pull apart here.

The first is, is that chronic absenteeism is a measure of all absences.

That's unexcused and excused.

And when you get to 10% of the school year, you might want to compare this to a job, right? If you miss 10% of the days that you are working, you are likely to be in trouble with your boss.

I think in the same way, if you miss a day every two weeks at a regular pace, it's going to knock you off of a continuous learning trajectory.

Indeed, that's what we find.

There's a bunch of things that are negatives, net negatives that are associated with chronic absenteeism.

So in some studies, it's one of the greatest predictors of not completing high school.

It's negatively associated with academic achievements and other indicators of engagement in school.

And, you know, the other thing to just point out here is that it's a threshold, right? You cross 10 percent, all of a sudden you're chronically absent.

But Most of these things are denominated in days absent, and every day matters.

So it's always important, and I can't end this question without saying that chronic absence is a marker of a number of absences, and a few absences are fine, but each one actually matters.

Right.

So I think when many people hear like 10 percent, like one day every two weeks may sound like a lot.

But 18 days is also like over three and a half weeks of school.

If you miss that continuously, I think everyone would agree that that's like a huge chunk.

And many chronically absent students are missing way more than that.

So you said in your response that there's nothing magical about that 10 percent threshold.

Is the relationship between absences and the negative consequences of absences continuous? Does it suddenly take off around that 10 percent threshold?