Regular School Attendance

Research demonstrates that regular school attendance is critical for children’s early literacy development, starting in preschool.

Children, particularly those with multiple risk factors, benefit from regular attendance at a high quality early education program where they learn to work on tasks independently and follow directions. Child care settings also provide opportunities to identify early signs and to establish good attendance and learning habits.

Chronic absence is especially problematic among students living in poverty, who are most likely to have poor attendance over multiple years, and least likely to have the resources to make up for the lost time in the classroom. Students from communities of color, as well as those with disabilities, are disproportionately affected. 

Nationally, it is estimated that during the pandemic more than 10 million children were absent during the first year of the pandemic. When students returned to school, absenteeism continued to persist. 

NC’s Department of Public Instruction reported that, at the end of the 2020-21 school year, the average North Carolina fourth grader needed seven months of additional school time to recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

Consistent school attendance in the early grades boosts children’s academic learning, achievement, and motivation.

Early chronic absence is associated with:

• lower academic achievement,
• truancy in middle school,
• school dropout,
• delinquency, and
• substance abuse.

When children miss a substantial number of school days, it is more difficult for them to learn to read and to acquire other crucial academic skills. The educational experience of regularly-attending children may also be adversely affected when teachers must divert their attention to meet the learning and social needs of chronically absent children when they return to school.

As North Carolina aims to increase the percentage of third grade students reading at grade level and succeeding longer term, measuring and addressing chronic absence is a critical strategy.

In the 2021/2022 school year, thirty-two percent of 4th graders in North Carolina scored at or above proficiency in reading. Disaggregated data by race for 4th grade reading highlights the racial inequities and the need to develop systemic responses to attendance barriers.  

• White 44%
• Black 17%
• Hispanic 21%
• Asian 56%
• Multi-Racial 22%

Data not available for American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Alaska Native.

Chronic absence is an effective measure of school quality. It is:

• An early predictor of student performance and one of the few available measures of school quality for the early (untested) grades.
• One of the only available measures for the early grades.
• Actionable.
• Already reported by school districts to the U.S. Department of Education and is based on data they already maintain in their systems.

Chronic absence data can reveal that a student needs help long before test scores or grades do. Using chronic absence as a trigger for early interventions could be an important strategy for closing the achievement gap for low-income children and affected racial minorities. Since students do not take standardized tests until the third grade, many district accountability systems largely ignore the early grades (prekindergarten through second grade). An indicator like chronic absence, which can be measured for all children, adds focus to the early grades. Including the early grades in measurements of school quality encourages investment and continuous improvement in early learning.

States across the nation are taking a close look at chronic absence and finding it to be a useful measure of school quality. About two-thirds of the state ESSA plans submitted to the federal Department of Education for approval included chronic absence as a measure.

North Carolina’s ESSA plan does not define chronic absence as a measure, but the plan does include language about focusing more on chronic absence in the future.

The North Carolina Pathways to Grade Level Reading Initiative partners have highlighted chronic absence as a critical measure to ensure that young children are on the pathway to early literacy and chosen the measure as one of three areas of focus for the state.

The national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading also has prioritized regular attendance as one of its core solutions that can contribute to more children reading at grade level by the end of third grade. NCECF is the state lead for the NC Campaign for Grade-Level Reading.

Chronic absence data are available for every public and charter school in North Carolina. The North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation (NCECF) has analyzed and aggregated those school-level results to determine the percentage of students in each school district who were chronically absent in schools with kindergarten, first-, second-, and/or third-grade students. 

In North Carolina in 2021-2022, 29.3% percent of elementary school students were chronically absent, which is 1.4 times the national average. There are disparities by race and ethnicity and a slight variance by gender. 

• American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Alaska Native students have the highest rates in North Carolina at 45%, followed by Black, Hispanic, and multiracial students (greater than 30%), followed by white students at 27.2%, and the lowest rates were among Asian students (16.3%).
• Nearly three out of every four Local Education Agencies (LEAs) in North Carolina reported from 23 to 39 percent of their elementary school students as chronically absent. In some districts, however, chronic absence was as high as 50 percent. Experts at the national organization Attendance Works say that chronic absence rates under about five percent are likely due to data collection errors.*

Many North Carolina communities are working to increase school attendance through a variety of strategies. When families are connected and engaged with their children’s schools absenteeism decreases. This NCECF Action Brief has highlighted engagement strategies that promote attendance and three community initiatives that are helping schools build strong bonds with the families they serve.

* 2021-22 attendance numbers based on our analysis of NCDPI public release data.