Marc Oestreich writes for National Review Online about the continuing problem of chronic school absenteeism.
This is the season when schools begin counting the missing.
Not the children who vanished entirely, though there are some of those. But the ones who slipped just far enough away to become a statistic. The black sophomore boy in a failing city school who has spent ten years being told, in the polite language of interventions and learning plans, that he is behind. The white senior in a struggling rural school who has already learned that his diploma may be less a ticket to adulthood than a receipt for time served. They missed the bus, then the lesson, then the point.
Soon the numbers will come in, and they will tell us what we already know. Chronic absenteeism is still alive and well. It is down from its pandemic peak, but nowhere near gone. The latest data from 39 states and Washington, D.C., show that 23 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2024–25 school year, still far above the pre-pandemic rate. And with those numbers will come the familiar adult-focused performance: reports, hearings, dashboards, task forces, and another round of top-down solutions for fixing these children and their supposedly broken families.
Last year, state lawmakers introduced dozens of bills aimed at chronic absenteeism and attendance. This year, they have kept going. …
… The official story is clean, simple, and politically useful. Children are absent. Parents are negligent. Schools are helpless. Government must act.
It may also be almost exactly backward. …
… The story is not that American children suddenly vanished. It is that many of them drifted. They learned, during the pandemic and after it, that school is often remote, optional, negotiable, or simply not worth the trouble. And once families have begun to treat attendance less like an obligation than a preference, the question is not merely how to drag them back, it is: What taught them to think that way?
