Chronic Absenteeism: A Generational Catastrophe

When you put kids last, they listen.

The White House has decided that chronic absenteeism amongst the nation’s public school students is a crisis that needs addressing.

In a particularly galling statement, Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, has said: “Students have to be present if they are to learn.”

Yeah we told you that almost 4 years ago.

Average attendance in public schools is at 90%.

That means only 90% of students showed up for school on a typical day this past fall. That may not sound so bad. But that means on any given day 10% of students aren’t in class. That’s 5 million students not showing up for school each day. That’s a lot of students not coming to school.

In some schools it is way worse. At Malcolm X Academy — an elementary school in the San Francisco Unified school district — close to 90% of kids were chronically absent in the 2021-2022 school year. That is more than double the absenteeism rate before closures.

At Malcolm X Academy, 88% of the students are economically disadvantaged. 98% of the students are non-white.

As it turns out, disadvantaged students were harmed the most by prolonged school closures. And they continue to face the repercussions of school closures with high absenteeism rates and greater learning loss than their wealthier peers, increasing the learning gap between high and low income students.

Some estimates show that 15 million students are chronically absent. That is 30% of public school students. And those absent are concentrated in high poverty districts, with 70% of these schools experiencing chronic absenteeism, almost triple what it was pre school closures.

When people say to me: what’s the big deal about school closures? That’s like years ago. My kids are fine. Most kids are fine.

I say: Yours may be. But too many aren’t. (Turns out the selfish people were the We’re all in this together people — Stay home stay safe! people.)

15 million kids not going to school, not learning the basics, not being able to read and write and do basic math when they graduate — if they graduate — is a catastrophe.

That’s 15 million children — not learning, not engaged in the structure of school, thinking their responsibilities are optional.

That’s 15 million children who will enter the world as adults utterly unprepared to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

That’s 15 million young adults who will be unable to support themselves, more likely to use drugs, get in trouble with the law and go to prison.

That’s 15 million young adults more likely to live in poverty.

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If you think, meh there were always kids who struggled!

I’ve got news. It’s way worse than ever before.

Two-thirds of the country’s schools are dealing with severe chronic absenteeism. Before covid and prolonged school closures that number was 25%. Now it’s over 65%.

This is a generational catastrophe. And now it’s our problem. All of us.

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My favorite thing people like to say when they either suffer from total amnesia or willfully lie so as not to have to think about what they’ve done — what we have done — to this generation of children: Schools were closed two weeks! It was nothing.

I say: Really? You can’t be serious? What planet do you live on?

Half of America’s public school students were in full time virtual or “hybrid” (i.e. not real school; in some instances just 2 hours/week qualified as “hybrid”) for a full year and a half. And then, the year schools did open (2021-2022) was totally messed up with weird rules and protocols that served no one (e.g. eating outside in the cold, no talking during lunch, distancing, no talking at all . . . no learning.) It’s like educators tried to make school as unpleasant as possible for kids and guess what? They didn’t want to go!

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Or, another favorite idiotic thing people who were pro school closure like to say: On-line school is (was) school!

Ok, then why the learning loss? And why the more than doubling of chronic absenteeism now? Why the change if on-line school was just the same?

Because virtual school wasn’t school. Kids didn’t go. If they did “go,” they didn’t pay attention. They watched Netflix or scrolled TikTok or both. Or sought peer engagement elsewhere in less productive ways. They went out, they met friends, they got into trouble. Some of them went to work to help support their families and just never went back to school at all.

School wasn’t real. Why bother? School wasn’t a serious undertaking. Kids passed whether they went or not. There were no repercussions for not going.

And something about living in the virtual world makes everything matter less.

I spoke with a student named Scarlett from Oakland, California for the documentary film I’m making and she told me:

“Everyone gave up, no one was doing the work [. . .] I got F's for the first time [. . .] that was a lot for me, but also not a lot because I shouldn't care because it's all online. It's not real life. Why should I care?”

And once you stop caring it’s hard to start caring again.

Todd Rogers, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who has studied attendance issues, said: “The daily norm of going to school broke during the pandemic. And it hasn’t gone back to normal — that norm seems to be really hard to rebuild.”

No shit. We warned you.

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We kept half of America’s public school students out of school for a year and a half. Long after bars opened and adults attended sporting events in stadiums packed with 50,000 people, children were kept out of school. We sent the clear message that their education mattered less than anything.

This is what we warned about. This is what we said would happen. This is what we were censored for. This is what we lost friends over. This is what we lost jobs over.

When you put kids last, they listen. When you tell them school isn’t a priority — that they are not a priority — they hear it loud and clear. When bars and strip clubs are open but schools are closed, children understand where they fall within the societal hierarchy. And they give up on themselves too. Because, frankly, we told them they didn’t matter enough not to give up.

I wrote this in February 2021:

“As we are nearing the one-year anniversary of schools being closed in many districts, we persist in telling kids their lives don’t matter. We send a consistent and very strong signal that they don’t even rank amongst adult priorities. Their hopes, their future prospects, are insignificant. Worse yet, not only are we indicating to them they don’t matter, but we are also telling them that if they dare express their suffering, they are selfish. Contemptible. If they yearn for school, friends, activities, guidance from a trusted adult, hope, they are putting their petty needs above the lives of their elders.”

Now we are living with that. And no one really wants to talk about it, let alone focus on it.

But if you don’t think this is society’s problem, you’d be wrong. It’s everyone’s problem now, but suddenly we aren’t all in this together. We’re leaving it to those most impacted to sort it out.

We have two 80-ish year old Presidential candidates — both utter failures on the covid front — having the gall to run on their covid records! Biden says he got schools open. He did no such thing. He pledged to get all schools open during his first 100 days in office. He took office in January 2021 and about 50% of schools were already open (the ones in red states); the final 50% didn’t open until Fall 2021. (Trump is touting Operation Warp Speed yada yada yada.)

Biden literally did nothing except establish new opening protocols in February 2021 through the CDC (which were heavily influenced by Randi Weingarten, the union head of the American Federation of Teachers) that would have made it harder for schools to open. In fact, approximately 90% of schools would have needed to stay closed based on these new CDC guidelines. Thankfully the red state districts that were already open ignored Biden’s CDC protocols and remained open.

Journalists ask almost no questions of either candidate on this front. DeSantis tried but no one wanted to pursue the thread. Why? Because journalists would be implicated for fear mongering about kids and schools and kids as super spreaders and on and on. No one wants to touch this one. And we will live with the consequences.

But I won’t stop talking about it and ringing the alarm bells. Imagine if we put a modicum of effort towards correcting this disaster. Imagine if school districts deployed local teams like those who work for Zero Dropouts, to go door to door to find absent students and bring them back? And then worked with those students to get them back to grade level reading and math? To recover lost credits in high school so that these students can graduate? Imagine if we deployed tutors to low income districts, introduced longer school days or years or both, did a Teach for America like program to get young people into teaching and maybe some deserved student loan forgiveness for doing a 3 year stint in impacted districts?

I’m no expert. But it’s not hard to come up with ideas. And maybe use some of that covid school money that was supposed to go towards “school readiness” but never got spent.

We are watching a generational catastrophe unfold in real time and no one seems to want to touch it because so many people and institutions across public health, government and journalism are implicated.

But whether we discuss it or not, we will all live with the impacts for many years to come. So it’s time to admit where leaders and institutions were wrong, hold them accountable and get to work fixing the problems.