Module 1: Understanding Chronic Absenteeism - YouTube

Welcome to Module 1 of a twelve part module series entitled Attendance and Truancy Among

Virginia Students, a collaboration between the Virginia Department of Education and Attendance

Works, a national and state initiative that promotes better policy and practice around

school attendance. My name is Joseph Wharff and I am the school counseling specialist

in the Office of Student Services at the Virginia Department of Education.

This session is entitled Understanding Chronic Absenteeism.

Starting in Pre-Kindergarten, students need to be in the classroom to benefit from what’s being taught there.

Too many absences leave students struggling and

subsequently failing classes in middle and high school and dropping out.

This session will define chronic absence and begin the discussion on how absences affect

student achievement throughout the child’s academic life.

Please note that there is a Facilitator/Participant companion guide for each session which is

located on the Virginia Department of Education Web site. The facilitator/participant companion

guide allows viewers, whether working individually or in a group, to follow each session and

answer reflection questions and create a working document to address the critical issues related

to attendance and truancy in schools, divisions, and communities.

Thank you for partnering with us.

The first session is entitled Understanding Chronic Absenteeism.

This learning module is designed to equip Virginia school divisions

with strategies, frameworks, and materials and

resources to help you to increase attendance and reduce chronic absence. This training

lays the foundation for subsequent trainings in your school or division.

Module 1 will lay the ground work for understanding what chronic absence is and how it affects

student achievement through a child’s academic life.

Today’s agenda includes a learning goals review, defining chronic absence,

how chronic absence impacts achievement, and a reflection exercise.

Educators will learn what chronic absence is, and how it differs from other measures

of attendance and how chronic absence affects academic outcomes.

Remember a time when you helped a student or a school improve attendance.

How did you know the student or school had high rates of absenteeism?

How were the absences affecting academic outcomes?

Take some time to reflect these questions. The companion manual for

session 1 provides an area for notes.

What is chronic absence?

It means a student is missing 10% or more of the school year for any reason.

Unlike truancy, which counts only for unexcused absences, chronic absence

looks at excused absences and absences due to suspensions. Chronic absence is a measure

of lost instructional time for any reason.

Unpacking attendance terms is critical because the word attendance encompasses multiple measures

– each of which mean something different. If we aren’t clear about which attendance

measure we are using, we can easily get confused and think we are talking about the same thing

when we are not. Here are three of the most common measures.

The first is ADA, or Average Daily Attendance,

which refers to the percentage of students who show up to school every day.

It is often used for funding because it helps us know for example – how many desks do I

need in my school to accommodate the typical number of students who show up every day.

The second term is truancy – which typically refers only to unexcused absences.

But, keep in mind truancy is defined differently across states. In Maryland for example truancy means

missing 20% of the school year due to unexcused absences. In California, it is a child who

misses more than three days without a valid excuse or is late to class by 30 minutes three times.

Regardless of the definition, truancy is typically used to begin identifying when a student may

be breaking state compulsory education laws and to trigger the beginning of legal intervention.

Chronic absence is a relatively new term that is based upon what research shows about the

impact of lost instructional time. It is defined as missing 10% or more of schools days and

shows when a student has missed so much school that he or she is academically at risk.

Likewise, it is important to recognize the limitation of monitoring average daily attendance

or ADA. Let’s say, for example, you have a school with 200 students. If 190 show up

to school, that is 95% attendance. But let’s say 10 students miss every day. How many absences

is that over a 180-day school year?

It’s 1,800.

Does that mean all 200 students missed exactly 9 days?

Probably not. Or did 90 students miss 20 days? Probably not. The truth is,

you don’t know how many chronically absent kids you have until you look at your data.

This slide shows variations in chronic absence across elementary schools in Oakland, California,

all of which had a 95% ADA rate. ADA is a school rate that doesn’t tell you which

students are missing 10% of their days and are on a track to chronic absenteeism. Additionally

it is important to note that the lower the average daily attendance rate is, the more

likely it is that the school has a significant number of chronically absent students.

Here is a comparison of chronic absence and truancy, students who missed 10 days without

an excuse nearing the end of a school year in San Francisco. Take a look at kindergarten.

Using a chronic absence measure, the district identified twice as many students than if

it only looked at the truancy data. This is important for the purposes of intervening

early and using the right attendance measure as an early warning indicator. It is unlikely

that a kindergartner is going to be absent without someone knowing about it. Often those

early excused absences, left uninterrupted, become a repeated pattern and turn into unexcused

absences when students are older.

It’s easy not to notice when a student is missing too much school. 10% of a school year

is about 18 days of absence. That sounds like a lot but when you break it down, that’s

just two days a month. Most parents, and many schools, don’t get too stressed out when

a student misses two days of class in a month. But when it happens month after month, it

becomes a problem. Many schools, and school division data systems,

aren’t set up to track which students are at-risk for chronic absence.

This is something that we hope to change.

Why does attendance matter for achievement? Let’s look at research from around the country.

Starting in Pre-K, student attendance equals exposure to language-rich environments. This

is especially important for students from low-income families. Students need to be in

the classroom to benefit from what’s being taught there. Too many absences leave students

struggling to read well by the end of third grade, subsequently failing classes in middle

and high school and dropping out in high school. Attendance in high school even predicts college

enrollment and persistence. More information and more research can be found on the Attendance

Works Web site at attendanceworks.org.

Researchers in Chicago wanted to understand the relationship between chronic absence and

reading levels in 2nd grade. They analyzed the attendance patterns of a group of students

in 2nd grade and compared their attendance history against the 2nd grade reading scores.

They found that in prekindergarten, each year of chronic absence resulted in increased need

for reading intervention by the 2nd grade. See the stair step pattern. The students represented

in the left hand blue bar were never chronically absent and had the highest reading fluency

scores. The students in the next bar over, were chronically absent just in kindergarten

and you can already see a slight dip in academic outcomes. Every year of absence correlates

with lower achievement. By the end of 2nd grade the students with persistent chronic

absence are in need of serious reading intervention.

Here is another example of research that demonstrates the link between early absenteeism and lower

levels of achievement and other negative outcomes as the student advances. In this analysis,

students who were chronically absent in kindergarten showed lower levels of literacy in 1st grade.

Chronic absence in kindergarten also predicted lower levels of achievement through 5th grade.

Students who were chronically absent were also twice as likely to be retained and suspended.

Children living in poverty are four times more likely to be chronically absent in Kindergarten

than their highest income peers. In addition, children in poverty are more likely to face

the kind of barriers – unreliable transportation, unstable housing or homelessness, and lack

of access to health care -- that cause children to be chronically absent year after year.

This chart shows why we need to start tracking chronic absence as early as possible. This

Attendance Works analysis found that students who were chronically absent in 1st grade were

nearly six times more likely to be chronically absent in 6th grade. Early chronic absence

also predicted lower test scores and higher suspension rates. If a child was chronically

absent for three years in elementary school, they were 18 times more likely to be chronically

absent in sixth grade. There are kids who fall off track in middle or high school even

if they attended regularly in the early grades. But the kids who are most risk to bring back

we may have lost in kindergarten and first grade and because we are looking at truancy

we didn’t notice that they or their families needed our help. We may have missed the opportunity

to interrupt chronic absence before they fell so far behind that they feel like school is

not a place where they can succeed.

By middle school, chronic absence is a surefire indicator of drop out across students of all

backgrounds. In Utah, researchers found that just one year of chronic absence – anytime

between 8th and 12th grade was associated with 3 times higher levels of drop out. If

a student was chronically absent for two years, over half the students dropped out.

While attendance matters for all students, it is particularly critical for students who

live in poverty. Fewer than 40% of the chronically absent students who were eligible for free

and reduced meals graduated from high school. By contrast 67% of the more affluent students

who were chronically absent ended up graduating.

We will provide resources at the end of every session for you to learn more. Before moving

on with additional modules you may want to look at these resources that are listed below.

The next session in this series is entitled Frameworks for Reducing Chronic Absence.

Thank you for viewing the video.