Thirty-one states showed improvement in rates of chronic absenteeism, or the number of students missing 10% or more school days, in the 2023-24 school year, our FutureEd tracker shows. This is good news, though none of those states have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels of student attendance. Without continued improvement in attendance, schools will struggle to raise academic achievement, especially among lower-performing students, as the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress results make clear.

Before fourth and eighth graders took the 2024 NAEP math assessment, they were asked how many days of school they had missed the previous month. Forty-nine percent of fourth-graders who would score at the 75th percentile or higher on the test had missed no days the previous month, compared with 26% of those scoring below the 25th percentile.

Equally striking, 45% of students in the bottom quartile reported missing three or more days of school in the previous month compared with just 20% of students in the top quartile. And at the extreme ends of the absenteeism spectrum, 7% of the lowest-performing eighth graders on the NAEP math test reported missing more than 10 days of school in the previous month, compared with just 1% of top scorers.
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