Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.Chronic absenteeism rates have barely improved over the past year, signaling that school attendance problems that grew during the pandemic have remained a stubborn challenge, according to a new report.The analysis released Tuesday by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute shows 22.6% of students in 44 states and the District of Columbia were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year. That’s down from 23.5% in the 2023-24 school year, but it’s still much higher than before the pandemic — a decade ago, the federal government considered a significantly lower rate to constitute an emergency.Nat Malkus, a senior fellow with AEI and the author of the report, likened persistently high chronic absenteeism to a nationwide tax, in which states are spending the same or more on education than before the pandemic, but kids are getting less from education because they’re showing up less.“If we accept that, then we’re just going to become comfortable with a school system that functions at lower productivity for the same cost, and what we need here is people to be fully engaged in schools,” he said.Below are four numbers that show just how common chronic absenteeism has become, the states where it’s highest, and what parents think about it:0.9That’s how much chronic absenteeism declined from 2024 to 2025 in terms of percentage points. After reaching a high of 28.3% in 2022, chronic absenteeism started improving in the 44 states tracked by AEI. But now even that incremental progress is slowing, while the rate remains well above the prepandemic baseline.In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education called a chronic absenteeism rate of 15% — based on the Civil Rights Data Collection for 2013-14 — a “hidden educational crisis.”Malkus said the numbers indicate that both schools and parents need to re-establish a “culture of regular attendance” for all students.“There’s just some acceptance that this is kind of the way it’s going to be,” he said. “It seems very dangerous.”AEI, along with the left-leaning Education Trust and absenteeism organization Attendance Works, developed a challenge for districts to cut their 2022 chronic absenteeism rates in half by 2027. The new report estimates that fewer than half of students are in districts on track to meet that goal.48%That’s how much higher chronic absenteeism rates were among kindergartners in 2025 compared with 2019. Even though many kindergartners were not yet born or were newborns in 2020, they are still chronically absent at rates higher than their counterparts were in 2019. Malkus found similar conclusions for first, second and third graders, all of whom did not attend school during the first two school years of the pandemic.Researchers recently were buoyed by increases in long-term test scores among 9-year-olds, indicating students who were largely not affected by pandemic school closures are showing promising achievement in reading and math. But chronic absenteeism numbers don’t seem to have followed the same pattern, Malkus said.41%That’s the chronic absenteeism rate for Alaska, the highest of any state in AEI’s analysis, though it has still declined from from 2022, when it reached 46%. Absenteeism remains stubbornly high in Michigan, Colorado, New York, and Illinois, among other states.School districts pouring resources into fighting absenteeism have had attendance numbers go up. Although nearly 61% of the Detroit district’s students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, the district has outpaced the rest of Michigan in reducing absenteeism since the pandemic. Officials believe that health hubs across the district that help families get to the root causes of problems that keep students from showing up to school are crucial. In May, researchers who studied Michigan schools found that strengthening relationships between families and schools through regular home visits or family engagement initiatives were effective.Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee are among the states with some of the lowest chronic absenteeism rates. All three had rates of 18% or lower. In Memphis, the largest school district in Tennessee, leaders say a door-knocking campaign and more outreach has helped.28%That’s the share of parents who think absenteeism is a problem in their own children’s schools. But 60% think it’s a problem in other schools.Malkus said the nature of absences in recent years point to a cultural shift in how families view attendance, with parents more apt to let kids stay home for a variety of reasons. And it’s easier for parents to view chronic absenteeism in the abstract than for parents to view it as their own responsibility, he said, citing survey data from the University of Southern California.“Everyone agrees it’s a problem, and they seem to agree that it’s somebody else’s problem,” he said. “That’s oftentimes what cultural shifts look like, where people are like, ‘It’s bad, but it’s somewhere else.’”Similarly, students said that they were most likely to miss school for illness, but thought other students missed school because it was too stressful or too boring. Even so, 32% of students reported “family vacation or event” as a reason to miss school and 16% reported “just didn’t want to go.” Separate research this month from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found immigration enforcement activity caused a “substantial and persistent” increase in absences among foreign-born students. Younger students were potentially less affected than students in higher grades, researchers speculated, because the older students “exercise considerably more individual discretion” in the decision to miss school. Schools have struggled to put families at ease when it comes to immigration enforcement, particularly in areas where federal agents have detained parents and students around school property, areas that used to be regarded as off-limits by the Department of Homeland Security.Malkus acknowledged that immigration enforcement actions can drive attendance numbers down, but said the broad decline in attendance over the past decade can’t be explained by immigration enforcement alone.Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.
