Sam Hollon, Nat Malkus, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, and Jeremy Singer examine recent school attendance data for the American Enterprise Institute. The researchers find troubling results linger in the nation years after the COVID pandemic ended.
Concern over student attendance has intensified since the pandemic, when chronic absenteeism rose sharply and has now only partially receded. Using daily attendance records covering all students in Rhode Island (2016–24) and Indiana (2020–24), we examine attendance patterns beneath headline rates, specifically regarding seasonality and holidays, day-of-the-week variation, multiday absence streaks, and the acuteness or persistence of missed days.
We find that absence rates remain well above pre-pandemic levels, but after the pandemic, the shape of attendance looks strikingly familiar to pre-pandemic patterns. Before and after the pandemic, absences tend to build through the fall, peak in winter, and tick up at the school year’s end; Monday and Friday absence rates are higher than those of days in the middle of the week (what we call the “weekend effect”), and single-day absences, rather than long streaks, account for most missed days.
Crucially, none of these patterns—alone or together—credibly account for the post-pandemic surge. Holiday-adjacent absenteeism remains elevated, but it shows little change from what it was before the pandemic. The weekend effect explains a meaningful share of absences that is similar to pre-pandemic absence behavior. Long absence streaks account for roughly one-fifth of missed days before and after the pandemic, and “weeklong vacation” patterns are modest and proportional pre- and post-pandemic. Interestingly, peak pandemic years temporarily changed several of these patterns, but by 2024, they largely reverted to pre-pandemic norms even as total absences stayed higher. These results suggest a broad shift in attendance behavior rather than a single, dominant driver, and they point to some pragmatic strategies that might improve attendance today.
