New evidence from the Ford School's Education Policy Initiative (EPI) shows absenteeism may hurt student's academics long before it is considered a chronic pattern. These findings, published in a January working paper, were recently featured in EducationWeek.
The researchers, led by EPI post-doctoral fellow Tiffany Wu, found that absenteeism negatively affects K-8 students' academic performance, particularly in math and reading, before it reaches the threshold of "chronic absenteeism." The phenomenon, widely defined as missing 10% or more of school days, has become the focus of education research after the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed student attendance patterns.
The relationship between chronic absenteeism and poor academic performance is well documented. Wu and her colleagues Christina Weiland, EPI co-director and Ford School professor, and Thomas Staines, an EPI data analyst, sought to uncover whether researchers are actually measuring absenteeism in a useful way.
"There has been relatively little empirical evidence to justify that cutoff [of 10%]," Wu told EducationWeek. "We wanted to know how well a given attendance measure correctly flags students who are truly at academic risk without flagging students who are not."
Using the attendance and achievement data of nine thousand students in the Boston Public School system from 2007-2010, the researchers found that absence rates of anywhere between 3%-7% are an indicator of poor academic performance on state level standardized tests, a pattern which becomes increasingly clear as students grow older. Additionally, overall absences are linked to poor academic performance in math classes, given that math classes build upon each other and are therefore harder to catch up in.
Although the results are limited in application beyond Boston's large, urban setting, the team encourages other researchers to explore the effects of absenteeism on academic performance.
Read the feature in EducationWeek here.
Read the full working paper here.
