The Latest on Chronic Absenteeism (with Nat Malkus)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Latest on Chronic Absenteeism

Podcast: The Report Card with Nat Malkus
Host: Ellie Lucas (Producer, guest-hosting) & Nat Malkus
Release Date: July 15, 2026
Duration for summary: Content only (ads, intros, outros omitted)

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Overview

This episode of The Report Card reverses the usual roles: producer Ellie Lucas interviews host and education researcher Nat Malkus about his extensive work on chronic absenteeism in American schools. The conversation dives deeply into what chronic absenteeism is, why it rose so dramatically during and after the pandemic, its persistent consequences, who it impacts most, and potential solutions. Drawing on recent national reports and research (including Malkus' own), the episode provides a comprehensive, data-driven exploration useful for educators, policymakers, and parents alike.

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Key Topics and Insights

1. Defining Chronic Absenteeism

• Definition: Chronic absenteeism refers to K-12 students missing 10% or more of the school year—about 18 days in most districts.
• Significance: Every missed day matters; effects are linear, with each absence correlating with lower academic achievement and higher dropout risk.
• Notable insight: The 10% threshold is arbitrary—a measure of convenience, not a magic cut-off.
  • "It's not a magic number...on average, each absence is associated with a slight dip in test scores." — [03:47, Nat]

2. Pre-Pandemic Context

• Baseline Rates: Pre-pandemic, roughly 15% of students were chronically absent.
• Implications: Already a "substantive problem" and bigger in some schools and subgroups.
  • "15% of all kids missed 18 days of school. That does not seem—that's not a great baseline." — [07:39, Nat]

3. The COVID-19 Disruption

• Pandemic Data Gaps: Spring 2020 attendance data is unreliable; definitions of absence changed with remote learning.
• Immediate Impact: By 2021-2022, reported absenteeism soared to nearly double the pre-pandemic rate (~28.5%).
  • "It went up about 85% over the pre-pandemic baseline." — [08:30, Nat]
• Persistent Effects: Despite falling COVID rates, absenteeism remains elevated, with slow and stalling improvements:
  • 2023: modest drop (~3 points)
  • 2024: further modest progress
  • 2025: less than 1 percentage point improvement
  • "If it keeps slowing at this rate, we’re going to be somewhere in the 21 to 22% range—up from 15% before the pandemic. That's not a place we should be comfortable coming to rest." — [12:28, Nat]

4. Why Isn’t Absenteeism Receding?

• Norms Disrupted: Pandemic messaging normalized absence for safety—and there’s been no equally strong campaign to rebuild pre-pandemic attendance habits.
  • "We interrupted norms and didn't build them back...” — [09:51, Nat]
• Behavioral "Stickiness": Students, families, and even some educators have adopted more casual attitudes toward regular attendance.
• Structural Causes Overstated: While factors like homelessness and transportation are real, they're not the main drivers of the post-pandemic surge. The rise is population-wide and seen across subgroups.

5. Trends, Demographics, and Distribution Shifts

• No Sharp Inflection Point: All absences matter; increases are seen across the entire student distribution, not just those crossing the chronic threshold.
  • "The entire distribution of absences shifted.” — [34:44, Nat]
• Demographics: Disadvantaged, Black, Hispanic, low-income, and special-ed students remain most impacted (both in rates and increases), but every demographic saw similar proportional increases.
  • "It still affects disadvantaged students more... but the change... is incredibly proportionally similar." — [33:03, Nat]
• Early Grades Hit Hard: Absenteeism spiked more for young children; unfortunately, even pandemic-era kindergarteners—who weren’t in school during COVID—now show the same high rates as others.
  • "The kids who never experienced the pandemic are showing about the same increase in absenteeism as other kids..." — [27:00, Nat]

6. Popular Explanations: Myths & Realities

• Patterns Unchanged: Popular explanations like more vacations, Monday/Friday absences, or more weeks-long absences don’t explain the increase; these patterns look similar pre- and post-pandemic, but frequency is higher.
  • "Absence patterns look roughly the same." — [55:31, Nat]
• Excused vs. Unexcused Absence: Recent research shows unexcused absences matter more for achievement—and have increased most sharply. Excused absences mirror illness rates; unexcused don’t.

7. Institutional Effects and Attitudes

• Reduced Norms: The post-pandemic climate saw a system-wide loosening of attendance expectations.
  • "There's a diminishing intensity that we ask students to bring to school..." — [57:42, Nat]
• Teacher Absence: Teacher absenteeism is also up (though less in proportion), but there’s no causal spillover to student absenteeism.
• Institutional Weakening: Chronic absenteeism is emblematic of waning trust and commitment to schools as foundational public institutions.

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Solutions & Strategy

1. Early Intervention and Prediction Tools

• AEI Tool: Free, open-source program using early-year student data can predict chronic absentee risk, enabling schools to target interventions before patterns set in.
  • "You can get predictions before the first day of school that are pretty darn good.” — [69:16, Nat]

2. Targeted Interventions

• Communication: Texts and alerts to families help, but impact is modest.
• Resource-Intensive Approaches: Home visits work but are expensive.

3. Clear Expectations and Consequences

• Importance of Norms: Re-establish high expectations, exert reasonable authority, and provide consequences for casual absence—especially for the median, not just most-troubled, students.
  • "If we really need to do something, I would encourage us to figure out what are reasonable consequences...” — [71:22, Nat]
• Institutional Backing: Teachers and administrators must be empowered and supported in enforcing attendance policies to avoid ‘broken windows’ institutional slip.
  • "There's something of a lack of authority...oftentimes we don't equip teachers or administrators with enough authority...” — [77:27, Nat]

4. Avoid Oversimplification or Overcomplication

• Different solutions for different students: Marginal cases (just over 10%) may respond to norms and consequences; severe chronic absenteeism (missing 40+ days) will need heavier support.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the lingering rise:
  "We interrupted norms and didn't build them back." — [09:51, Nat]
• On the definition's inadequacy:
  "It's not a magic number...average, each absence is associated with a slight dip in test scores." — [03:47, Nat]
• On institutional decline:
  "Chronic absenteeism is indicative of sort of a checking out of the importance of these schools. We got to shore that up." — [67:13, Nat]
• On interventions:
  "Any idea that we're going to get out of this attendance crisis by not using every tool at our disposal is trying to fight a difficult fight with one hand tied behind our back." — [72:50, Nat]
• On system-wide nature:
  "It’s not just those students right? Like, if you're in a class and...many students are missing days, that’s going to interrupt the coherence of that classroom altogether." — [06:27, Nat]

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Key Segment Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | Content Description | |-------------------------------|-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | What is chronic absenteeism? | 01:15–03:15 | Definition; why 10% matters; analogy to job attendance, negative impacts | | Is 10% threshold meaningful? | 03:47–05:08 | Linear relationship between absences and outcomes | | Pre-pandemic rates | 07:32–08:20 | 15% rate; substantive problem even before COVID | | COVID impact explained | 08:20–09:51 | Data gaps; 2022 spike; uncertainty on initial increases | | Why persistence post-pandemic | 09:51–12:15 | Norms never reset; messaging shifted, but habits didn’t | | Latest absenteeism trends | 12:15–13:46 | Year-by-year progress; improvements have stalled | | Demographic impacts | 31:20–33:03 | Gaps worsen, but proportional increases were similar across subgroups | | Excused vs. unexcused absence | 36:18–39:00 | Unexcused absences more harmful; patterns by day of week/illness | | Solutions and interventions | 69:16–77:13 | Targeting, prediction tool, communication, consequences | | On consequences and norms | 77:13–80:25 | Resistance to "law and order" in education; lack of institutional authority | | The case for urgency | 80:35–81:49 | Absenteeism as foundational problem; need to act before moving on |

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Final Takeaways

• Chronic absenteeism has shifted dramatically higher since the pandemic and is not simply a byproduct of other, smaller problems (like transportation or holidays).
• The solution is not simple, but early identification, expectations, and strategic (not punitive) consequences for avoidable absences—coupled with major institutional effort—are all required.
• This is a foundational, not peripheral, issue for American schools. If schools cannot reestablish regular attendance as the norm, other efforts at improvement will likely fall short.
• The episode encourages a dual focus: robust policy action, and a cultural shift to revalue the importance of daily school attendance.

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For more on discussed research, visit the AEI "Carwig" website, where free tools and reports are available. Further resources and papers cited in this episode can also be found in the show notes.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Report Card with Nat Malkus, the education policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute. In case you couldn't tell, no, this is not Matt Malkus. Rather, this is Ellie Lucas, the producer of the Report Card. And on this episode, I will be interviewing Nat. For the past few years, nat's research has focused on chronic absenteeism, but the Report Card has never covered this topic in depth. With another school year just around the corner, though, and with NAT's annual report on national chronic absenteeism having been published just recently, I thought now would be a good time to correct the state of affairs. So without further ado, Nat Malkus, welcome to the Report Card.

[B]

This is strange, but I'm glad to be here.

[A]

I would say, how does it feel to be on the other side of the table? But you're at the normal side.

[B]

It's not really hard to arc.

[A]

But yeah, okay. So, at the risk of boring listeners who keep up with your work, a basic question to start with. What is chronic absenteeism?

[B]

Chronic absenteeism is the percentage of K12 students who miss more 10% or more of the school year.

[A]

So when some people first hear the term chronic absenteeism, they imagine students missing days of school right and left. When they then hear that chronic absenteeism simply refers to students who miss 10% or more of school days, they may think, oh, that's actually, that actually doesn't sound too terrible. So is it actually that terrible? Is 18 school days actually a lot?

[B]

So 18 school days is a lot, but it's not a magic number. So there's a couple things to pull apart here. The first is, is that chronic absenteeism is a measure of all absences that's unexcused and excused. And when you get to 10% of the school year, you might want to compare this to a job, right? If you miss 10% of the days that you are working, you are likely to be in trouble with your boss. I think in the same way, if you miss, you know, a day every two weeks at a regular pace, it's going to knock you off of a continuous learning trajectory. Indeed, that's what we find. There's a bunch of things that are, that are, that are negatives, net negatives that are associated with chronic absenteeism. So in some studies, it's one of the greatest predictors of not completing high school. It's negatively associated with academic achievements and other indicators of engagement in school. And, you know, the other thing to just point out here is that it's a threshold right. You cross 10%, all of a sudden you're chronically absent. But most of these things are denominated in days absent. And every day matters. So it's always important. And I can't. I can't end this question without saying that chronic absence is a marker of a number of absences. And a few absences are fine, but each one actually matters.

[A]

Right. So I think when many people hear like 10%, like one day every two weeks may sound like a lot, but 18 days is also like over three and a half weeks of school. If you miss that continuously, I think everyone would agree that's like a huge chunk. And many chronically absent students are missing way more than that. So you said in your response that there's nothing magical about that 10% threshold. Is the relationship between absences and the negative consequences of absences continuous? Does it suddenly take off around that 10% threshold?

[B]

Yeah, it really doesn't. I mean, there's been some work trying to figure out, okay, well, what's the optimal number of absences where there's a real spike in the. The negative impacts, and there's not a great place for that. It's not 10%, which I think is sort of a measure of convenience. I mean, it's just like 10% sounds about. About right. Which is not to take away from the, The. The folks that decided, here's a great definition. You got to call it somewhere. And there is no clear line of demarcation. Some folks have. Have done work on the association of academic achievement. What test scores and days absent. And that's pretty linear for both reading and math. It's not like one or two days doesn't matter. On average, each absence is associated with a slight dip in test scores.

[A]

So I know when you start working on chronic absenteeism, 10% was already pretty fixed as the threshold. But do you think 10% is the right number to care about? For instance, you could make the case that since every absence is a problem, we should set the threshold lower to make it clear that absenteeism is an issue for a much wider set of students. Or you could make the case that since the effect of each absence is linear, we should set the threshold higher so that we target interventions at students for whom absenteeism is really a problem. I mean, what do you think?

[B]

I mean, the short answer is I don't know. And I'm not terribly. To be honest, I'm not terribly interested in it. So let me just tell you why. First of all, I do a lot of work with chronic absence, because that's the data that we have available. Once upon a time, it was average daily attendance, which is just, you know, how many days do kids miss on average across the school year? That's actually a better sort of dependent variable for a lot of these things. There isn't one perfect spot for chronic absenteeism. And the question, in the context of, well, how do we turn this around? Well, it may be different for kids who are missing 25 days of school. That may be a different approach than trying to get kids who are missing 18 days down to 14 days or some significant improvement. I don't know where we tackle those things precisely, but my main concern in this whole business is, well, this jumped after the pandemic. The reason that I keep focusing on chronic absenteeism is it's the data that states and districts publish. So you got to work with the data you have.

[A]

So who does chronic absenteeism harm? Is it mainly the students who are absent? Is it other students, Teachers?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, so as a teacher, former teacher, I know that absences are a pain. You have to make up students, you have to get them their work, you have to kind of bring them back along. So absences are just a pain for teachers. They certainly damage students. Learning process. I'm. I like school. I think school is important. I think kids learn in school. I, I want it to be a little more coherent than it is, but I, I think it's a coherent learning program. Most of the time. The more interruptions you have in that, the worse it's going to be for students. But it's not just those students. Right? Like, if you're in a class and it's. And many students are missing days, sort of like popping like popcorn all across the classroom, that's going to interrupt the coherence of that classroom altogether. So it puts a burden on the teacher. Some students are not keeping up, and so there's some toll on all students in the classroom.

[A]

Before the pandemic, how bad of a problem was chronic absenteeism?

[B]

Well, you know, there were folks who would call it a crisis. It was about 15% of all K12 students. And let's just think about that for a second. 15% of all kids missed 18 days of school. That, that does not seem. That's not a great baseline. So I would say it was a substantive problem. You know, it's sort of hard to handicap these things with any specificity. I don't think it was the number one problem in schools, but. And it certainly is a Bigger problem in some schools than other. That was definitely the case before the pandemic. It's a, it's a real concern.

[A]

So then the pandemic struck in 2020. The nation shut down, schools went remote. How bad was chronic absenteeism that school year that spring?

[B]

Well, that spring we have no idea because kids weren't in school and people didn't know even what attendance meant. When schools were shut down the next year, the 2020. 2021 school year or 2021, it. We're kind of uncertain what the data mean. In some states, they look pretty reliable. In a lot of states, it's very strange. Of course, we had closures, we had quarantine. So there were lots of reasons for absences. So during the pandemic, we're just kind of blind. By 2022, it was pretty bad. I mean, it got to, at least by my count, about right at 28 and a half percent, up from like 15.2 or 3. There's some variation in the numbers that kind of keep popping up because not all states publish it and you have different amounts at different times. But it went up about 85% over the pre pandemic baseline.

[A]

So why do you think it is that chronic absenteeism really took off in 2022? Was it the Omicron wave? Was it that students had grown unaccustomed to in person instruction? Or do you think chronic absenteeism actually took off before 2022, but that data collection was just too unreliable for this early shift to show up in the numbers?

[B]

So in the height of the pandemic, the 2021 school year, we'll never know. We just don't have the data to know. I think it did go up during that period. But again, you know, what does a quarantine mean for absences if you're at home and so many kids were remote and some kids were just blind to that time period, by 2022, it had risen a lot. I would love for it to have been the Omicron wave that was the highest point of infections. So there's a reason to think, well, that's probably a big reason why there was so much absenteeism. Unfortunately, the next year we only got better by about 3 percentage points. And that next year there was no omicron wave. So it's kind of hard to attribute it to that. Look, I think there's some uncertainty about this. I mean, how do you know about the behavior of a population of people? The most convincing story that I have is that we Interrupted norms and didn't build them back. And we interrupted them in a really salient way. So we said, hey, you got to stay home. It's very dangerous. It was dangerous. And we had salient messages around that, like your grandmother might die or you might get your family sick. Real reasons to stay home from school. When we wanted to come back to school, the message was a little less potent and salient. It was like, okay, we're back. Please come back to school. We're glad to be back.

[A]

Right. Students weren't told their grandmothers would die if they would stay home.

[B]

Yes. Yeah. Well, they. They certainly weren't told if you don't come to school, your grandmother might die or someone might get sick. So there was something certainly less potent in that pivot back to school. And I don't necessarily know that we've ever mustered a reset on the behaviors that we were locked in pre pandemic. So we had a set of behaviors that were normalized. We broke that normalization during the pandemic, and it's been sort of a jump ball since then, and that's why it's been not falling back into line in the way that we would hope so.

[A]

Right. Rates were really high during the 2022 school year. They fell some during the 2023 school year. What happened in 2024 and 2025, the latter of which subject of a recent report.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Again, the 2023 year. So this is. We had that high point in 2022. It dropped about three points the next year. You can see that as a glass half full or empty. I. I'm kind of dour about this. With the serious drop in Covid between those years, I certainly would have liked to have seen more progress the following year. That's from 23 to 2024. So this is two years post height. In that year, we dropped about two and a half percentage points, a little bit more than that by some measures. And so that's good. But the progress was slowing down a little bit. The latest year for which we have the data in is not this past school year, but 2025. That year we improved across the 45 states that we have data by less than 1 percentage point. So the progress is slowing. It's slowing at a rate that if it just kind of keeps slowing at this rate, we are going to be probably somewhere in the 21 to 22% rang range up from 15% before the pandemic. That is not a place we should be comfortable coming to rest.

[A]

Nat, you predicted a few years ago that there would be a slowdown in progress. So has this slowdown in progress been a surprise to you at all, or has it been roughly what you expected?

[B]

So I'm not surprised by it. It's sort of hard to look back then because I've been paying attention to chronic absenteeism every month for several years. It's not surprising because that was sort of the trend that the data was following early. You know, two years in, we saw progress slowing down and to change human behavior at scale, and this is a huge scale. I mean, we're talking about one in four students. It's really going to take a muscular approach to turn that around. There have, there has been work on this. I don't want to discourage folks, but there has not been any easy answers. There's not been. Here's the program you put in place to turn around absenteeism. And since we haven't seen that and we've seen the progression sort of slowing progress over time, unfortunately, I'm not surprised.

[A]

In terms of the slowing progress, how much of it do you think is that? It's really easy to make progress when rates are really high. And how much of it do you think is that? You know, there's just less energy around this issue than there was a few years ago.

[B]

I think. I think it's both. I'm not sure that there's less energy around this than there was. There may be a little bit less primacy on attendance, but it get talked about frequently. I think maybe the lack of progress comes in. Schools and districts have tried to do a lot of things. They turned out to be frustrated, and there's no clear magic bullet. I mean, look, part of this is how big of an emergency is this? What are we willing to do to turn this around? And I, I haven't seen the kind of muscular response that's going to change the behavior of, you know, 6 or 7 or 8% of the students across the nation. That's hundreds of thousands of families that have to really change behavior. You know, the other thing is this is sort of a common sense shift. I mean, I've talked to people who are kind of in the education business or around it, and a surprising number of them will tell me sort of quietly, you know, behind closed doors. Well, you know, actually I got one of those notices and we should probably do better, but for my kid, it's probably not that big of a deal. This is sort of one of those tragedy of the commons things. I, I'm, I'm here To tell you listeners this matters for everybody. And I, I really don't think a casual relationship with school acquaintance attendance is a good thing to foster.

[A]

So a while back, you AttendanceWorks and Ed Trust started this effort called the 50% challenge. What is the 50% challenge?

[B]

Yeah, the 50% challenge was an effort to get states to commit to a 50% challenge. That 50% challenge is in five years, cut your chronic absenteeism by 50%. From the pandemic high, which we're almost Every state was 2022, we had many states jump on to that. It covers about one in three students in the nation. The states that have signed on, not all of them have shown outsized progress, but many of those that. Those states that have shown progress are those that signed on. We're very proud of that. And look, part of the theory of this was to sort of grab hold of the bully pulpit to make sure that state leadership was pushing on this. I think that states have to give the political cover for superintendents and district staff to push hard on their schools on this and for schools to push on parents. And if there's not a clear sign from on high that this is a priority, I think we're cooked. I'm encouraged by a lot of the effort by states on this. The real challenge is can we keep that pressure up when the going gets tough? The going is tough right now, and so we're trying to keep that campaign alive.

[A]

How many districts are currently on track to actually cut chronic absenteeism rates in half over that five year period?

[B]

Not enough of them. So I look at this in two ways. Some states didn't jump by as much as others. So I look both at the states that are on track to cutting their 2022 absenteeism in half and the states that are on track to reach their pre pandemic baseline. Both of those, for both of those, it's 29% of districts that's weighted by students. So 29 of students are in districts on track to get back there. That's a pretty low percentage given the fact that we're asking them to basically get back to where they were, something we were used to just six years ago.

[A]

So districts and states that aren't on track to cut rates in half over five years, are they on track together just a little bit later or not at all?

[B]

Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of variation. I mean, there's actually a huge amount of variation in, in Vermont, I think it's close to 80% of districts are on track to cut it in half by 2027. A number of states are in single digits. So there's a lot of variety. There's very few states that are really on track to meet the these benchmarks. They're aggressive. Admittedly, this is a large lift, but when we look at it across the board, no one's really making super ideal progress. There are a few states that are doing better than others, but really, I don't want to give a very Pollyanna ish account here. If we are making the kinds of progress, if we stay on the trajectory that most states have been on, or we are not only going to not make it by five years, I don't think we're going to get back to acceptable levels over seven or eight years. Behavior just sets in and it's harder to maintain a pressure campaign. So, you know, let me just return to the original idea. We got to set goals and push on them now rather than having a 12 or 13 year time horizon to get this right.

[A]

So, Nat, we know that student test scores have been falling since about 2013, and that a lot of the pandemic decline in test scores probably would have happened even without the pandemic. I wonder if something similar is true for chronic absenteeism. To be sure, we don't have great chronic absenteeism numbers going back that far, but we have some numbers. So in 2014, which I believe is the first year for which we have national data, 14% of students were chronically absent. However, and very importantly, chronic absenteeism then was defined as 15 days absent, not 18 days or 10% of the school year. This, I think you'd agree, is a pretty big difference. By 2016, the percentage of chronically absent students using the same definition had risen to roughly 15.5%. Then in the 2017 school year, rates were 13.4%, which sounds like a decrease, but this was the year we started using the 10% definition. And then by the 2019 school year, rates had risen to roughly 14.8%. In other words, both between 2014 and 2016 and between 2017 and 2019, rates rose by about 1.5%. Projecting forward very loosely and roughly, of course, we might have expected chronic absenteeism rates to continue to rise by 1.5 percentage points every two years, which means they would have hit 19.3% during the 2025 school year. In reality, they were 22.6% for the 45 states for which you have data. So do you. What do you make of this argument? Is it possible that much of what we're seeing is actually a longer term trend.

[B]

So I'll say a couple of things on this. The first is we don't have great data. So this puts us right into the realm of speculation on this. I think in terms of average daily attendance, which the numbers go back a little more regularly, I don't see a clear trend or an idea that this would just continue to increase over time. I paid a lot of attention to those test score numbers and they are troubling. I think there's a difference in what the pandemic did to achievement and attendance because attendance is really sort of set it and forget it. It doesn't necessarily build. And what we're used to doing is the standard operating procedures for the next year. That interruption from the pandemic is something that we could have caught back up to, but, but didn't. I think in learning there's a more cumulative effect that was a setback that differentiates these two. You know, the other thing that I'll say is let's say that we're right. Let's say, or let's say the conjecture here that, you know, 20% is actually where we would have been without the pandemic. Well, we're three points over that, which is a lot. And I'm not going to sort of accept the idea that 19 is okay any more than I accept the idea that decreasing test scores is acceptable. So I don't know what the sort of natural trend would have been, but I'm quite comfortable stomping on the foot that is leading into more absences and lower test scores.

[A]

But just in terms of fighting this, right, like we might think, oh, we're just fighting the pandemic. We also might be fighting a second trend.

[B]

It's, it, it's certainly plausible. I mean, look, there was, there's, there's, there's this theory. You know, Derek Thompson, when I talked to him about this, he was like, maybe this is just part of the pandemic checking out. I think there's something to that. You know, I think church attendance took a hit during the pandemic that lasted. People don't go to work as much. I think there's some institutional checking out. Some of those trends could have just increased with the role of technology and other things that displace sort of belonging. It could be, I can't rule it out. I'm still happy to fight against it.

[A]

Yeah. I think one big difference is that like when I was in elementary school, if I stayed homesick There was, like, nothing to do. Like, the shows on television were terrible. The Internet, then there wasn't much on there that was, like, fun for an elementary school kid, right? I had to read or something if I wanted to retain myself, which wasn't really that much more compelling than being in school by the time I was in sixth grade. Like, maybe YouTube existed, but there wasn't much on there. Videos took, like, five minutes to buffer. Now, if kids want to stay home, it's very fun, right? They probably learned this during the pandemic. They probably already knew it. They can watch TikTok for hours, watch whatever they watch on YouTube. I don't know what kids do, right? So, like, there's a way in which staying home is much more compelling and fun than it used to be. I just wonder if that, like, plays a role here at all. I mean, you have, you have, you have kids, right?

[B]

And they're, they're happy to stay home. Although they will tell you that I make them go no matter what. Look, I mean, I sort of deny the, the premise. I mean, I think that there's a lot of reasons that kids are like, I really like to not go to school on the marginal day. I get that. Are there a bunch of goodies at home that weren't there before that increase the desire to stay home? I don't think so. I think mostly it's kind of driven by this again, and I'm just not sure that's compelling enough. It could be, but look, when I was a kid, we had Nintendo at home. I'd be happy to stay home and play on the Nintendo for plenty of time. And if I had the opportunity to skip, you know, Algebra one to. To play several hours of unmonitored Nintendo, that was enough for me.

[A]

So do you think chronic absenteeism rates are currently so high because the pandemic changed how students who experienced it relate to school? Or do you think chronic absenteeism rates are currently so high because something has changed about schooling itself? In other words, should we expect the problem to go away as pandemic cohorts graduate?

[B]

Yeah. So in the most recent paper we've. We finally had some way to look at this by looking at grade level data. So if you can look at grades, you know, each year, you can look at how students who were in school during the pandemic, how much they are absent. Only in 14 or 15 states, but still a lot of kids. And this enables us to look at kids who in the 2025 school year were in kindergarten through third grade. In other words, they weren't substantively in school when the pandemic hit. And this can tell us, well, if those kids attendance got better, then maybe this is something that will pass when the pandemic generation moves on. We see this some in test scores. If you look at the latest long term trend test scores, the kids who were never in the pandemic didn't have the damage the nine year olds that the nine year olds that were going through the pandemic exhibited, they, they showed a lot of catch up, which is great. Unfortunately, the kids in kindergarten through third grade have pretty much the exact same pattern of absenteeism as the kids in 2025 who were in higher grades and experienced the pandemic. All that to say the kids who never experienced the pandemic are showing about the same increase in absenteeism the as other kids, which makes me think it's not an event that we're going to recover from and the newest cohorts are going to escape. But it's more about sort of the common sense of what attendance is and how important it is. And I'd really love to have seen those younger students showing better attendance. Maybe we'll see that in a couple of years. I'm holding out hope, but right now we're not seeing any comfort there.

[A]

So yeah, one striking thing in here actually is that during the pandemic absenteeism spiked even more for kids in the early grades. Right. If you look at that heat map in your recent report, do you have any sense for why that is?

[B]

Well, I think part of it is just because, yeah, it's just a relative change. There's a shape of absenteeism where kindergarten and first grade are kind of particularly high. And then it gets better through elementary school, through about sixth grade and then it starts to grow into high school. So high schoolers had higher incoming rates. So if you look at the percentage change, it looks much better if you're in the lower grades. But still big percentage point jumps.

[A]

You mentioned long term trends a couple answers ago. Do you think there's a conflict with what we're seeing there and what we're seeing on absenteeism? So like you look at 9 year olds in terms of absenteeism, they're struggling just as much as everyone else. In terms of academic achievement, they're better than 9 year olds were a few years ago. 13 year olds meanwhile, are struggling on both. Do you see any conflict there?

[B]

Well, I don't see a conflict. I see them as different, largely because learning is so cumulative, and attendance is a little more normative. Right. So if a kid didn't have first grade or second grade during the pandemic, when people were going more remote and it was just sort of a rotor wash of a school year, then maybe they didn't take the academic hit. As they build, they build off a higher level in terms of attendance. I just don't see those divisions playing out in the same way because they're not cumulative. It's more what we're used to in the previous year. Look, some of this might be that just the more recent cohorts had brothers and sisters who sort of normalized this in their families. And so it's still sort of a family cohort effect. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's how it gets transmitted. I think there's expectations around attendance that have been sort of. I'll just say it degraded since the pandemic, and it's going to be tough to think that they're just going to snap back to some normal when it isn't being modeled by other students, other families, and the personnel in school.

[A]

Demographically, do we see that chronic absenteeism is worse for particular groups of students?

[B]

Yeah, and there's there's sort of two things to hold in your hand at the same time here that are just really important. Before the pandemic and after the pandemic, students who were more disadvantaged, black students, Hispanic students, traditionally underserved minority students, poor students, students with. With special ed needs, lower scoring students, all had higher chronic absenteeism. They also have higher increases in chronic absenteeism in percentage point terms over the pandemic, they still have higher chronic absenteeism. So if the question is, are they more affected by chronic absenteeism? Unequivocally, yes. That doesn't necessarily describe the change that happened over the pandemic. So in terms of wherever the particular group was before the pandemic, how much of an increase in percentage terms over the pandemic? Those are remarkably. Even so, it seems like there was a rising tide relative to your baseline. So it increased a lot for everyone in terms of percentage, but it still affects disadvantaged students more.

[A]

One thing looking at the demographic numbers that I find really striking is how similar the relative increases were. It was like 85, 90% for everyone. Right. Do you have any sense for why it was so uniform?

[B]

I don't. It fits with the idea that there was just a general loosening and there's certain sets of expectations and experiences that predict, you know, your behavior. If there Was a general loosening. Well, that would fit with everybody increasing by a percentage. Look, this is just a theory. There's no way to tell from where I sit, where I'm collecting all these numbers, what the actual story is. But the story does fit with sort of this loosening of the norms, what's sort of standard operating procedures, and a fairly uniform increase in how much that change was. It is still really important to understand that. And I don't want to underplay this. I just think it's very important to think about two things at the same time. One is, who does this hurt the most disadvantaged students? And the second thing is what happened during the pandemic. And the thing that happened during the pandemic, at least in proportional terms, hurt everyone in very similar ways. Not only that, but the recovery since the pandemic has also been very proportionally similar. Again, hurts disadvantaged students more, but the change over time is incredibly proportionally similar.

[A]

So you said it hurt everyone in similar ways. When thinking about chronic absenteeism, should we think, well, you know, there's a particular population of students, maybe within each demographic that is more chronically absent now that the rest of students are fine, or should we think, actually, you know, all students are more absent than before, but only so many hit the chronic absenteeism threshold?

[B]

No, I mean, when we think about this again, we're talking about this threshold effect. Who passes that 10% mark as if it's sort of magic. We've done a lot of work with a bunch of states who have shared kid level data, and in some places, kid day level data. And what you find in state after state after state is it's not a chronic absenteeism change. It's not like there's just a bunch of kids that went from 9% to 11%. And so we have this shift in chronic absenteeism. The entire distribution of absences shifted. So there was a group of kids who were missing a lot of school before the pandemic. That sort of group moved to missing even more school. There were kids who were sort of in the middle. The middle moved to a few extra days, three or four extra days a year. And the kids who had very good attendance, well, now there's fewer of them. And so you shouldn't think about this as well. It's these, these knuckleheads who are chronically absent. It's the entire distribution of absences got worse. And because of that, more kids pass that 10% threshold.

[A]

It's really like a population wide problem.

[B]

I think it's a population wide problem.

[A]

That's right. Maybe pulling in the other direction a little bit. You and Sam Holland have recent research showing that chronic absenteeism is mainly driven by unexcused absences, suggesting that maybe chronic absenteeism is in fact qualitatively different than other sorts of absenteeism. Can you share a little bit about that research and what you found?

[B]

We looked at Indiana data which not only gives us day level attendance data, but also tells us whether the absences were excused and unexcused. It's important to remember that when you look at chronic absenteeism, it just treats all absences the same. The, the same thing with average daily attendance ada it just looks at attendance writ large. But there's reason. There's prior research from before the pandemic about unexcused absences being different. We wanted to look at that again post pandemic. It's important to note when I talk about this, I, I don't have the data to sort of compare unexcused and excused absences before and after the pandemic. But again, we find, as was found in, in prior research, that students who have a lot of absences, they have a greater proportion of their absences or a greater share of their absences are unexcused. When you get to the top 90% of absences in Indiana, it's, it's really a lot of them are unexcused. And we also look at whether those matter more and they do matter more. So for student achievement, unexcused absences just have a much greater damage to test scores than excused absences. And we also looked at sort of the timing of this. And the timing, whether you look at it across the year tells some of the tale. And if you look at it across days of the week, it tells the tale. So there's more absences on Mondays and Fridays than in the middle of the week. You can think of some reasons that that might be the case. I just don't find them compelling. Next to those are the days next to the weekend. So I think that there's a reason that they're more unexcused on those days. And then when you look at them against patterns of sickness and public health data, the excused absences are really tightly correlated to the influenza like illness rates and the unexcused absences are not. So I think that there's signal there. And I also think that for schools and districts that are trying to target absenteeism, it's certainly true that we have More of all kinds of absences. So we have more excused and unexcused absences after the pandemic. But the unexcused absences are worse for kids and if we put more effort into curbing those, I think there'll probably be a more general effect on all absences. So I think that's probably the target worth focusing on.

[A]

So, Nat, it's time for grade it. Do I need to explain this to you?

[B]

You don't. I, I'm, I'm well aware of it.

[A]

Moral education in America today.

[B]

I'm going to give. I would give it and complete. You know, I first let me just give the caveat that I don't have good data on this and usually I want to base these things in data. I will say that I think we have seeded a lot of the role of schools informing whole people and in talking about moral foundations and we've embraced sort of more generic sort of civic minded ideas of what is the foundations for right and wrong. I think that's a weakness. I think it takes moral courage to do that. I think it's very tough to do that with in the public school structure and I think it's pretty important that we get back to that.

[A]

So you always complain when guests give incompletes. You just gave an incomplete. I know you don't have data, but

[B]

D graded D space for it. D. I'm a tough grader.

[A]

D. Okay, good. DIY as a concept.

[B]

I love it. I'm definitely a DIY person. Some people sometimes make fun of my Google account profile where I, I have a, a Coke bottle and a clamp trying to keep my Coke from going flat. I'm willing to try all kinds of DIY things, do lots of, of building projects. So I give DIY an A.

[A]

You're.

[B]

You're more capable than you think you are.

[A]

You're more capable than other people think.

[B]

I think it holds true generally.

[A]

Okay. Data tracking projects. You seem, you seem to have a penchant for these.

[B]

I'll give them a B plus. There's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, they are exhausting and once you sign up for them, you really are stuck with keeping up with them until they run their course. And they don't always do that in a convenient way. The other thing is that you're sort of a slave to the data that you can track. And across, you know, 100,000 plus schools, that's pretty difficult to do. Even across 12,000 districts, 13,000 districts, that's tough to do. They get A high grade because I think they give good indicator data and that keeping track of things over time is the best way to know sort of where we're heading and what we

[A]

need to respond to small Christian colleges as they exist.

[B]

I went to a small Christian college, Covenant College. Go Scott's. I love Covenant College and I'm sending my, my son there. I don't have a great breadth of experience to base this on. I will give them a B. I do think that there's, you know, there's this claim about conservative institutions that if they're not driven to be conservative, that they will necessarily not be conservative over time. I think it's important for Christian institutions to be intensely focused on being Christian lest they become less Christian over time. So that's where my, my B is for the watchword on being focused on their, their origins.

[A]

DC Parking Enforcement.

[B]

I'll give DC Parking Enforcement a D. I foolishly try and beat the meter man or woman in D.C. and hopefully they are not listening right now. And usually I get away with it. And every once in a while I have some bad weeks.

[A]

Clarified milk rum punch.

[B]

I'll give that an A. I do like to make cocktails. And a clarified milk punch is a crazy concoction by which you can combine a bunch of dark liquids into a pot and then filter them through milk curds and they come out clear. And not only not crystal clear, but you, you can see directly through them. And not only that, but they still have the whey in the drink which gives it a wonderful mouth feel. And now I feel a little bit like an idiot for saying mouth feel. But it's true.

[A]

As a researcher, I'm sure it's easy to find fault with schools, but you're not just a researcher, you're a parent. So as a parent who actually sends kids to school, how would you grade sending your own kids to school? I mean, do you trust schools to do what they're supposed to do or do you think, no, if I'd had the time, I would have homeschooled.

[B]

I would have been terrible at homeschooling. I'm sure homeschooling would have blown up. My kids will second that. How much trust do I put in schools? I would say a C. And I don't want that to reflect on my, my la. My daughter's still in high school, so that's not a direct reflection on. On that. It is very difficult for parents to know exactly what is going on in their kids schools. You have to put a lot of trust in them. I have a great deal of trust in the. The Catholic school that I sent my kids to for their upper elementary years mostly. But most of the other schools I felt a little detached from as a

[A]

future oriented policy improving K through 12 accountability.

[B]

Yeah, I think it's table stakes quite frankly. Look, there's. There was a great push under no Child Left behind. And by great I don't mean fantastic. I just mean big to hold schools accountable at the school and subgroup level for their kids results. I think that that information was useful for people like me. I think it was also useful to put pressure on schools because I think there's a huge amount of upside for schools and I also think that schools get pulled in a lot of directions. So I will mostly sign on to my friend Vlad Kogan's idea that test scores are the North Star and schools should do a lot of other things. But test scores are a clear identifier of what their core competency is and they need to stay focused on that. I am fine holding them accountable to that. And I think that if we don't do it then we are likely to see slippage. So we got to give them a grade. So I'll give the future of accountability in a

[A]

the intellectual vibrancy of education research and policy in 2026.

[B]

I would give that a C minus. Look, I think that a lot of. There's a lot of great researchers out there. I would say that a lot of the research that we do has been habituated to look at the marginal thing. I think that our school systems have been on a negative turn for about 12 years. I don't think we know very well why. I kind of can't believe that we don't have more big idea focuses on why we would have this long term downtrend in scores. And sort of the lack of focus on those big questions makes me think that too many people are focused on regressions with one more variable or one more DV rather than the. The central core of what schools do. And you know Ellie, we've had conversations before about thinking bigger and I think a lot of education research could get a better grade from me if they were willing to do so.

[A]

School masking policies during COVID

[B]

so if you want me to grade the school policies, I'm going to give them a pretty low grade at C. I think the backbone of those policies was from the CDC's guidance in schools. I'm going to give that an F. I've done some work on this and it was just clear when we tracked masking that there were some states that were just sort of COVID cautious states that they were going to do. They were going to stay with the CDC guidance because that is, that was sort of the company line. There were a bunch of other states that said, you know, sort of screw the cdc, we're conservative and we don't, we don't need them masks. And no one was really focusing on, not no one. Most school districts, the vast majority, were not focusing on infections on the ground and when it may be prudent to put on some masks to keep people safe and also being practical about when it might be fine to take those off. I think that if we were just a little bit more pragmatic about that and actually let school health professionals and state health professionals make those decisions, we would have been better off. There may come another time, even if it's not a Covid or a pandemic where masking might be useful. And I think we've sort of had that ship sail for a long period. I think it was a period of intensely stupid partisan decision making.

[A]

Aren't you an author on a paper that showed that masking saved a bunch of lives?

[B]

Well, we are on, I am on a paper with some great folks and we do find that some causal evidence that the decision to drop masking may have cost some lives. There's a lot of people are puzzled by that sort of finding in the context of my attitude about maxing but masking rather. But I don't think those two necessarily conflict. I don't think masking was dumb. I think the masking decisions were dumb. They were brute. They were really from the top down. I think that sort of better masks done not with exhausting requirements but with targeted and temporary requirements could have been more effective. And that paper does suggest that the, the drop in masking, which was fairly sudden, could have led to not more sort of student deaths, but more sort of community infections and might have been a problem.

[A]

Education policy under Biden K12 and higher ed.

[B]

What education policy? Sorry, I got, I got to give that an F. There was some murmurs about early childhood. There was a bunch of boatload of talk about forgiving student loans and man, there was just billions and billions of dollars forgiven. Not only was that unfortunate, I think illegal and, and foolish in and of itself, but there was no clear off ramp ever created or anticipated. It was sort of a go for broke. We're going to forgive all this student debt or bust. And it went bust. And, and, and, and you know, if that's an incomplete answer. Was there a K12 agenda? If there was, I, I missed that memo.

[A]

The impacts, perspective or actual of private school choice on student achievement.

[B]

There's a big difference here between potential and, and what we should expect. I mean I am dispositionally and generally for more choice, but I think that the key there is to build markets, markets of choice that function, that give parents information to make good choices. They, that creates a supply side response so good schools can grow up and draw kids in. And I think that over time that that's going to be more potentially potent for student achievement if we can build sort of a choice market that works. The problem that I have with a lot of the choice mechanisms that we have now is that they are not well designed to build such a market. I don't want to put that all on the folks who are working for choice. I mean this is extremely contested. It's very difficult to get these programs off the ground. That said, I think we need to think more deeply about how we put choice together. If it can't improve student test scores along with a number of other valuable things, then I'm not sure it's worth all proponents make it out to be.

[A]

Okay. Thank you for the grades. So returning to chronic absenteeism, you had a report back in October in which you, Sam, Sarah Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer looked at popular explanations for why students are more absent now than before the pandemic. What specifically did you look at?

[B]

Yeah, that paper was a product of what we call Carwig. AI put together this Chronic Absenteeism Research working group or Carwig, where we got a, a bunch of different folks who had done a lot of pre pandemic work on absenteeism. We got together some states who would contribute good rich data, student level data, and in this case student day level data. And we came out with a bunch of papers. This was one of them. And really what we wanted to look at was different sort of stories that people tell, ideas people had about, well, what was the nature of the increase. And so we looked at a couple of them. We heard from, you know, folks out in the field. Well, kids are taking lots more holidays, they're taking more long weekends for vacations and so forth. They're, they're missing more on Mondays and Fridays. It's that weekend thing. They're, they're, they're, they're missing big chunks of time, whereas before they wouldn't. We looked at all of these and it's not that any of these weren't true. So do kids miss More around the holidays. They do. They also did before the pandemic. Do kids miss more days around the weekend? I already covered. This is more unexcused. We didn't know this back then, but we did find that absences on sort of Mondays and Fridays or whatever the weekend adjacent day was, were higher. They were higher before the pandemic too. Did kids take vacations? In other words, they missed Monday through Friday, an entire school week. And we're back on either. That's the best way we could take a look at that. Yes, of course they did before the pandemic as well. When we looked at all these stories, we saw the stories before and after the pandemic in relatively similar portions. And so the takeaway for us was we don't see in the day to day attendance data big differences before and after the pandemic. Except that the frequency of all these absences are elevated after the pandemic.

[A]

So absence patterns look roughly the same.

[B]

They do.

[A]

So many in education spaces like to say that the post pandemic rise in absenteeism is driven by homelessness or illness or unreliable buses or family finances. Basically anything except parent and student behavior. Is there evidence to support that narrative?

[B]

Look, those are reasons that people miss school. They were before and after the pandemic. It's more comfortable sometimes to attribute to external reasons why kids are missing so much school. The problem with that is I don't think transportation problems jumped over the pandemic. And, and look, I, you know, I've talked to district leaders who say transportation. We send a school bus to their neighborhood every day, like we take care of transportation. There are real transportation problems. I don't think that that's a huge indicator. Homelessness is a huge problem. There's a lot of other problems that kids who are homeless are dealing with than just attendance. And I don't think homelessness jumped a huge amount during the pandemic. So those are all very real causes. I don't think they're at the root of the increase that we saw.

[A]

It's also like, right, we see these increases across all students.

[B]

Yeah, well, we see proportional increases across all students. It's hard for me to believe that we would see anything across all students that was, you know, in, in some way either justifiable or due to external structural reasons. It seems that when you see a rising tide, you blame it on the rising tide and not a bunch of individual features.

[A]

What do you make of the idea that students are more absent because we as a culture have told them that School doesn't matter that much, both during the pandemic and just more generally.

[B]

I'm not sure that we've told them in any sort of direct way school doesn't matter that much. I can't defend this with data, but I am worried that we have allowed the expectations for attendance and in general a clear focus on achieving and working hard. I think that it's a possible explanation for the attendance trends and the achievement trends that that could be playing a role. Look, there's a longer explanation to why I think this. It could be other things, but I do think that there may be a diminishing intensity that we ask students to bring to school. I think some of the things that contribute to this may be sort of related to digital tools that kind of make it like, well, you know, missing an extra day. You can make it up. You can just get on canvas and see what your work is. I think that when we think through that in a well articulated way, we would say that's not a good replacement. But we don't always articulate our decisions for this. And so it can be a. A crutch that may bring about more absences that feel like they're not a big deal when they actually are. So, you know, look, I think that we should renew our intensity on these things. I think there's also a responsibility for schools to make sure that they are being compelling, that they're compelling students to come in and do work, to work hard and to achieve. I admit, I get very frustrated when my kid in public school had lots of half days, short weeks, weeks, when they were going in, and they said, well, I really don't need to go to school that day. And I said, well, you're going to school anyway. And then the takeaway at the end of the day was, well, we didn't do that much in school. I. I really think that there's responsibility on the part of schools to make sure that they are compelling students, even if it's not on a, you know, here's the bells and whistles. This is super fun, but to. To have learning happening at a regular pace and to be demanding. But I definitely think that students and families need to match that.

[A]

Didn't one of your kids have like two half days of school in a row?

[B]

Yes, yes, that did happen. I think it had to do with some makeup. Snow days. But look, this is part of the problem, right? If you have snow days and you miss school, then we should treat those as valuable days of school. Not only that, we should treat Our kids time as valuable and our teachers time as valuable. We should not phone it in. There should be no excuse for phoning these things in. I mean, I'm not going to get too wound up here, but it's inexcusable and we need to have less tolerance for sort of wasting student and teacher's time. They have 180 days of school in the year. You'll hear this a lot in terms of, well, the test is over, so we don't have much, much left to do. That's utterly ridiculous. Schools should be in the business of learning up until at least the second to the last day of the year. We should not be giving up a week early or two weeks early, and certainly not after tests are taken in

[A]

March or April while you're already wound up. Dare I ask you about teacher absences?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, we don't have a ton of information on teacher absences. The information that we do have has shown that teacher absences are kind of alarmingly high. I mean, if you look at the Illinois data, it's. It's kind of bananas. We looked at one of the papers out of Carwig, looked at Rhode island data because we could not only look at teachers and students, but we could match them. So teacher absences do appear to be up. They're not quite as high of an increase in proportional terms as students. But of course, there are some contracts and some, you know, these are jobs.

[A]

They're.

[B]

They're required to be there. Key in this is that I've had several. I've had a superintendent sort of confront me on this. When you can get the teachers back in school, then I'll worry about the students. So there's this question, well, maybe there's some relationship that students are seeing teachers there less frequently. And so they think, well, maybe it's not as important for us to show up. I think that's a lot of credit on believing that students show up because they see teachers there every day. But when we examined this, I didn't examine it. Arian Ansari did, and he had very good data, which meant that if you don't find anything with this data, there's really nothing there. And the story was there was nothing there. In other words, teachers absences are not having spillovers that cause student absences. They may both be up, but they're not driving each other.

[A]

But like a teacher absence. Right. The whole class, many classes a day, whatever that teacher would teach. Right. They're getting, like, way worse instruction, presumably.

[B]

Definitely.

[A]

And like, I don't remember, was it like 10 days a year?

[B]

It. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head. You can, you can read the paper by Aria. It's at the Carwig website. But you'll, you'll be shocked.

[A]

So this is probably a more marginal concern right now, but I think this is like a serious concern, maybe for some people. What do you say to the kid or parent who says, well, school attendances isn't that important, Right. In the past it might have been important, but now with AI, school's preparing kids for a world that won't exist anymore and may not exist already.

[B]

So let me just say first of all that I 100% agree with the next thing that parents say, which is, well, the. The schools should be really more interesting. I just went over that. They should be compelling and driving students towards productive use of time. That said, I just don't think that AI is going to change the importance of schools. I. I don't think that there's some magical world coming where schooling isn't going to matter anymore. I think that school is a place to develop young minds so that they know how to read and do some math and write, but more than that, to think and to be articulate and to be able to appreciate what is a pretty fantastically interesting world and to be a part of, you know, being a good custodian of that world, of their country, of their community. I think that's all very important. I don't think AI is going to fill that gap.

[A]

Right. So the worry I was getting at was not that school will no longer matter in a world of AI, although that is a worry some definitely have, but rather that schools aren't currently preparing students for that world. And the secondary worry here is that even if school will still matter in a world of AI, it won't be essential or necessary in the same way. So take the liberal arts. They shape us. They matter. But plenty of people aren't interested in them, right? They're not necessary in the way that school now is necessary. So if you want to participate in the job market, get a job, be a member of society, right now, you really have to go to school. In a world when school is just filling a function like the liberal arts, people can say, I opt out of that.

[B]

Yeah. So again, I just disagree with the premise. But, but let me also just say specifically when it comes to chronic absenteeism, that there's a number of arguments in this sort of vein. One is, well, maybe it's the school choice. Well, you know, there's lots of school choice. Another one is, well, there's a lot of homeschooling. And I just want to make clear that that is not what we are talking about with this absence problem. We're not talking about people going to do other things or thinking things are less valuable. We're talking about people detached, becoming more detached from institutions. I'm an institutionalist. I think institutions are important. I think schools are important institutions, and we need to think about them as institutions. We need to be custodians of them. And I think that the more we have people checked out, the less productive and also just weighty those institutions are. I think they're. They're good. When it comes to preparing students for the future, I, you know, I think the future's always been dynamic. I think a good, solid education is an important aspect for having students confront the world that they're going to confront. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like. I think good education is part of a better. A better version of whatever that future brings.

[A]

Nat, in the past, you've said that chronic absenteeism is the number one problem facing schools. Why do you think it's so important?

[B]

Yeah, and I'm. I gotta tell you, I'm a little divided on that. I have said that before, and, you know, running neck and neck with that is the decline in test scores on the bottom half of the distribution. Our lowest scores are dropping their scores really quickly. And that is not a pandemic effect. So I'm sort of of two minds. But those two minds are focused on two really big problems. One of the reasons that I think chronic absenteeism is perhaps one of the biggest ones is not actually about the chronic absenteeism. It's about that institutional argument that I was just making. I think schools are good things. I think strong institutions are good to have capable authorities bring up students and teach them the. The things that they are going to need to know, to know some skills and also the appropriate way to be. Of course, families are essential institutions here as well, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be, you know, complemented by strong schools. And I think that the chronic absenteeism that we're seeing is indicative of. Of sort of a checking out of the importance of these schools. We got to shore that up. I mean, you have to come at me with an argument that says schools aren't that important and win me over on that, which you will fail at in order for me to say that it's okay if we just kind of disengage a little bit? It's not that big of a deal. It is a big deal. We should be sweating the small stuff.

[A]

Nat, how do you think schools and districts can combat chronic absenteeism? What should be the general strategy?

[B]

Yeah, that's a tough one. And I will just admit that I have done a lot of work on figuring out where the problem is and what it looks like and, and what the broad picture is. And I don't think anybody has great answers on this. So I'll just say that right out of the gate, one thing that has come out of the car wig work that I'm sort of excited about and I'd be happy for anyone to put to use is a tool that we put together that we're giving away for free at aei. It's a computer program that schools can use with data that they already have. We basically use day level student data in Rhode island and Indiana to see if we could predict which individual students would be chronically absent at the end of the school year. Very early in the school year with the data that schools typically have on hand. We were trying to think like a, you know, not like a, a fancy ST statistician or modeler, but just somebody with spreadsheet skills. Could they do this? And we developed a model in Rhode island and, and it worked very well. It was trained on 2017 data and was good at predicting other years all the way up to 2024. We built one in Indiana and importantly the one in Indiana predicted absenteeism in Rhode island and the one in Rhode island did a good job predicting in Indiana. So this tool basically takes that predictions those prediction capabilities and allows anybody, you don't have to send us your data, but you can get predictions before the first day of school that are pretty darn good. Well, I think that this can help in helping district and building level people identify the targets of their interventions early. If you think about it as well, we want to, we want to bend down the curve on absenteeism. The best time to do that is right at the front of the school year before the absences start accumulating. We had a paper that came out recently on that. We'll, we'll, we should link to it in the show notes. So I think one is try and act as early as possible and understand schools and districts that you have the data you need to do that. What else to do. I mean a lot of the things that make larger differences are really expensive and difficult. Home visiting Programs that sort of one to one outreach has, has shown benefits, but man, it's expensive. Of course it's expensive. That takes bodies. There are sort of communication tools like, you know, texts and informational alerts. Those are pretty easy to keep the price down. You can deploy them, you can do those better or worse. But even in their best instances, they can't curb absenteeism at the scale that we're seeing it. So I think those are sort of table stakes. You should have those in place, place. Some of the things that I've seen that appear to work in some places are a willingness to bring consequences to missing school. And a lot of schools and districts are reticent to do that. Now let me be clear. For a lot of people that triggers the idea that I think that we should have police officers rounding up students who aren't in school and district attorneys at this. I don't think that is a reasonable response to most of these problems. And I don't think that if we use them that it would necessarily make these things better. That said, if we think about this as a crisis, if we really, you know, if folks agree, wow, that's really bad, we really need to do something. I would encourage us to figure out what are reasonable consequences to disincentivize casually missing school. I think we can come up with those. I think we can deploy them responsibly. And I think that any idea that we're going to get out of this attendance crisis by not using every tool at our disposal is trying to fight a difficult fight with one hand tied behind our back. So I think consequences deployed responsibly are a necessary part of our response.

[A]

So right on that consequences front. One question I've had for a while. So in education, many problems are tricky. For example, if you want to, if we want teachers to teach better, the solutions are going to be fairly involved. Accountability, teacher evaluation may help. Better teacher training may help. Better curricular materials may help. Better school culture may help. A more skilled teacher. Labor force may help all these things though pretty involved and require real thoughtful changes. Now things are done with absenteeism though. While more involved and technocratic solutions may help, the problem to me seems to be simpler in a pretty fundamental way. For instance, take a student who misses 20 days a year. He already shows up to school 160 days a year. He knows how to show up to school. It doesn't require any particular skills on his part that he lacks. We just want him to do what he already does on 160 days. On five or 10 extra days. That's largely within his means in the vast majority of cases. All this asks when discussing how to combat chronic absenteeism, do you think we often overcomplicate matters? I mean, if we just put in place clear consequences for students who don't attend school frequently enough, don't you think students and parents would figure it out?

[B]

Well, I think on the margin that that's right. I mean, look, I don't want to make this sound overly simple and that there's just some law and order approach that'll turn things around quickly. I think I, I do think that a lack of willingness to use law and order and consequences in schools to have high expectations and expect students to meet them is self defeating. I think that we've got room to push on that. I want to, you know, I, I do want to be clear about this. When you have students missing 20 days of school, what might work in terms of consequences to get an extra five or eight days of school, which would make a big difference for that student both in terms of how well they're progressing through school and also on the long term, just about the soft skills of showing up every day. These are at least as key skills as, as, as reading and math. Those things that might work for that sort of student on the margin of chronic absenteeism are, are certainly not the same set of solutions that are going to work for kids who have real fundamental problems who are missing 40 and 50 days of school. And there's way too many students that are missing really huge amounts of, of school in, especially in some of our urban centers. But I think that for, you know, when you think about this, you don't want to think about what are the ways that we curb absenteeism for our most challenged students. You want to think about it for the median student and for the median student, I think that we shouldn't make it super complicated. We should have high expectations. We should push early on this, try and get ahead of it so that we establish good patterns. I think we can do better than we're doing now because six years ago, across the nation, most students had much better attendance. It's not that it's possibly achievable. This isn't like sort of the same thing with 100% profession proficiency under no Child Left Behind. We know we can do this. I think we need to develop the will.

[A]

So I couldn't find any survey results on this, but if I had to guess, I would think that the average American is fine with some consequences for absenteeism in the education world, though, there's a lot of resistance to that idea. Why do you. Why do you think that is?

[B]

I think there's a couple of reasons for that. So, first of all, I mean, we've looked at it, some of this survey evidence, and there's a lot of. There's nobody that says, who cares? But there is a lot of responses after the yes, this is a big problem. Kids should go to school. And the next response is, well, it's probably that the teacher should be better, or the teachers might say, well, we can't get the parents to cooperate, or the kids say, well, it's the other kids that are the problem. You know, there's lots of this is not my problem. So I think part of this is developing the responsibility. The other reason that consequences are difficult is because in a lot of public schools, there's something of a lack of authority. I think. I don't mean that there's no one with authority. I think that oftentimes we don't equip teachers or administrators with enough authority to have high expectations and hold the expectations. And as Jerry Seinfeld would say, holding them is the most important part. I mean, they really need to be able to have the authority to exert authority. I think teachers don't want to be on the hook for doing this when administrators are not going to back them. I think administrators are tired and find it difficult to toe the line. I think we need people to take this as sort of. I. I know bringing up broken windows theory is, you know, not everybody's cup of tea, but I am in the James Q. Wilson program and Education Studies at aei, so I'm happy to bring it up. But look, you know, this is a line we should hold. I mean, how well are our schools going to work if we're pretty loose on attendance? Not well. This is sort of the. The base level of expectations that we could build on if. If we can't get this right. I think there's a lot of other things that we're going to struggle to get right. I told you earlier that one of my other biggest challenges in public education is the falling test scores. I don't see any route to those falling test scores getting better that doesn't run through improving. This, in part because if kids go to school more, they can learn more, but also in part, if you don't shore up expectations on attendance. Do we really have a high hope of holding up expectations on reading and math scores and instruction and on the. The effective curricular delivery of teachers. I think we should at least start by making sure people get in the building regularly.

[A]

So, final question. To those who are tired of focusing on absenteeism and want to move on to other priorities, what would you say?

[B]

I'm tired of focusing on chronic absenteeism. I've done a lot of work over the past four years now on this. Kind of tired of being the chronic absenteeism guy around. I'd like to talk about some other topics more. Look, I think the key thing for us all to realize here is that this really is kind of a foundational problem. And I think if we're going to shore up our schools, which we do need to do, that establishing regular attendance is just the key to coherent institutions. If we can't do this, I'm not sure how well suited we are to do a lot of the other work that we need to do. We can't move on until this work is done and we're in a much better position or we're consigned to just being okay. With 21%, maybe of students chronically absent, that's, you know, 3 million more students than used to be. That's something we can't accept.

[A]

Now, Malkus, I want to say thank you for coming on the report card, but, yeah, it's your show. So.

[B]

Ellie, thanks for switching seats in my usual seat. Well, you know, metaphorical seats to the audience.

[A]

It's all the same, right? We're just in a vlog, but.

[B]

But you rarely get on the. Get on the line, so I'm sure they're glad to hear your voice.

[A]

They probably thought I was a woman, right? Ellie?

[B]

Ellie.

[A]

People hear Ellie, they think it's Ellen, right?

[B]

Yes, it is. Not Ellen.

[A]

They're very polite to me in emails when they believe this.

[B]

The beard gives you away right away when you're in person.

[A]

But thanks for listening to the report card with Nat Malkus. And special things to our guest, Nat Malkus. Also thanks to our usual host, Nat Malkus. He makes this podcast possible. That's it for this episode. I'm Ellie Lucas, Sa.