TOP TASKS

Focus on the “unexcused” to solve chronic absenteeism

“School districts still struggling with stubbornly high chronic absenteeism would do well to take a granular look at their students’ attendance data, specifically their numbers of unexcused vs. excused absences rather than absences in the aggregate,” reports Caitlynn Peetz Stephens for Ed Week, drawing on the work of AEI’s Nat Malkus. “Among the AEI report’s key findings: Unexcused absences were more common among students from historically disadvantaged groups. And the missed days of students in the top 20% for absences were primarily unexcused, meaning that chronic absenteeism—when students miss at least 10% of school days—was disproportionately driven by unexcused absences.”

Malkus’ research suggests that the traditional way that the majority of American schools track absences isn’t sufficient to curb the problem of chronic absenteeism, which deepened during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. “Of the 41 states that have reported data from 2024-25, 34 have shown declining rates of chronic absenteeism, but none have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the tracker,” Stephens writes.

Nat is urging district and state leaders to focus their attention on unexcused absences, particularly for low-income students, where 49% of absences are unexcused, compared to 32% of their higher-income peers. Black students’ absences are unexcused at over twice the rate of white students, 67% vs 32% respectively.  “We believe if you push hard on those absences, have strong rules and expectations and get people to take unexcused absences seriously, they’re probably going to start taking all absences more seriously,” Nat shared. 

To help district leaders in the process, AEI and Malkus have launched a new absence forecasting tool, which models predictive factors to identify the students most at risk of chronic absenteeism.

Call out the fallacies of test blind admissions in higher ed and test blind accountability in K-12 

“To throw out the SAT and ACT because they show demographic gaps is akin to canceling the government’s publication of the unemployment rate because it shows similar gaps,” chides The New York Times Editorial Board, in advance of the California Board of Regents’ July 14 vote on whether to bring back the SAT and ACT. “Trying to deny a problem rarely helps solve it. The University of California is now rejecting students who would excel there, including low-income and minority students, and accepting growing numbers of students who flail.”

The Times’ editors offer a brief history of how this problem was created in the first place: from the national anti-testing push that claimed standardized testing–both in college admissions and in K-12 school accountability–was racist and classist, to the 2020 Board of Regents’ meeting where state leaders ultimately “succumbed to the fad of the moment.”

And the Times pulls no punches when summing up where the road of test blind admissions has led us:  “The results have been terrible. At the University of California, San Diego, a faculty group last year reported ‘a steep decline in the academic preparation’ among entering students. Last fall, for example, nearly 12 percent of first-year U.C.S.D. undergraduates were not qualified to take precalculus, a low-level class — up from only 0.5 percent in 2020. ‘The key problem is that many of the students coming in do not know algebra,’ said Mina Aganagic, a Berkeley physics professor. More than half of entering Berkeley students who took a math placement test incorrectly answered basic questions (such as solving for x in x²> 4).”

For those of us in the K-12 education sector, this debate is deja vu of the last decade, where an anti-testing coalition made up primarily of union-affiliated groups spent tens of millions of dollars to undermine standardized testing and to undercut their role in evaluating districts, schools and individual classrooms. In Massachusetts, the union spent $15 million to successfully rollback the state’s long-standing high school graduation exam. The California and New York unions have poured tens of millions more into infrastructure for the “opt out” movement.

The consequences are now apparent: students paying tuition for remedial education they should have received for free in middle school and high school, parents with limited insight into how their children are actually performing academically, and a system that is more opaque and less equitable.

Key Resources

On July 22 at 1:00 pm ET, DFER is holding a panel discussion on the state of microschools in America, with focus on funding, regulatory and accountability questions.

Linda Jacobson at The 74 Million reports that language in the federal regulations has Don Soifer of the National Microschooling Center and others alarmed that some states will attempt to exclude microschools from the federal scholarship tax credit.

Half of teachers in Georgia are using AI, with the majority of AI-use being directed to lesson planning and classroom preparation, reports The 74 Million.

Brookings provides a new tracker of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive actions related to K-12 education, from withholding federal funds to inter-agency department moves.

New America reviews education budgets for states in New England, examining student funding models, external and internal risks and safeguards that should be put in place before the next economic downturn.

Foster care students and students in the criminal justice system could benefit from expanded apprenticeship programs, and the WorkRise Network at Urban Institute offers a roadmap to doing so.

Michael Horn and Joe Ross, writing for Education Next, argue that with college attendance rates dropping, undergraduate programs should reinvent themselves as career-connected learning that takes best practices from apprenticeship programs.