Chronic Absenteeism Still a Struggle in 2024–2025

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Persistent high levels of absenteeism are slowing students’ academic recovery after the disruptions to schooling brought on by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Dewey et al., 2025). Even several years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, heightened levels of chronic absenteeism continue to be one of district leaders’ top concerns. Four in ten districts identified reducing chronic absenteeism in their schools among their top three most pressing challenges for their schools during the 2024–2025 school year, including 8 percent who ranked this issue as their top challenge. Districts’ concern about chronic absenteeism is on par with their concern about raising math and reading achievement.^[1]

Beyond being a persistent challenge, chronic absenteeism levels also continue to be a puzzle. Heightened absenteeism was perhaps not surprising during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically upended normal schooling conditions. However, it remains unclear why increased absenteeism is still such a large problem for school districts years after the pandemic has ended and schooling routines have returned to prepandemic conditions.

There are many competing and complementary explanations for why absenteeism has remained above prepandemic levels (Mervosh and Paris, 2024). One hypothesis is that families and students became accustomed to districts’ relaxed expectations and revised instructional practices that were implemented during the pandemic; for example, schools might still be providing more-generous makeup windows or allowing students to make up more missed schoolwork online, relative to their prepandemic practices. Specifically, the availability of online materials to replace in-person instruction may have shifted at least some parents’ perceptions about the importance of their children being physically present in school (Diliberti et al., 2024; Saavedra, Polikoff, and Silver, 2024). A second is that many youths are struggling with mental health challenges after the pandemic, and increased anxiety or depression may be the reasons that students are missing more school (Stanford, 2023). Third, parents may be taking illnesses more seriously after the pandemic and keeping their children home for minor issues instead of sending them to school (Diliberti et al., 2024; Vázquez Toness, 2024). Finally, teacher absenteeism has also increased (Hansen, Aggarwal, and Wagner, 2025), which some suspect might make in-person attendance less compelling for students, although recent data have cast doubt on this theory (Jacobson, 2025).

In this report, we investigate the state of chronic absenteeism across the nation as of the 2024–2025 school year. We provide chronic absenteeism levels for the most recent school year using recollections from district leaders, updating our prior work on this topic from the 2023–2024 school year (Diliberti et al., 2024). We also investigate youths’ reasons for being absent from school and consider what strategies districts are using to get students back in school.

To address these questions, we primarily use survey and interview data collected through the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and MGT. In particular, we use data from an ASDP survey administered to 245 K–12 public school districts between March and May 2025.

We weighted these districts’ responses to our survey to make them representative of K–12 public school districts across the country. We caution readers that this is a very small share of the roughly 13,000 school districts located across the United States. Furthermore, although we weighted our small sample of districts to make it representative of school districts across the country at least on such observable characteristics as enrollment size, region, locale, and district poverty level, even our weighted survey sample might not be entirely representative of districts nationally. It is likely that the public school districts that enroll in the ASDP and take our surveys differ from those who do not in meaningful ways that are impossible to measure. We complement these survey data with interviews of 14 leaders of these districts between March and May 2025. Although we interviewed only those who agreed to participate, these data help us better understand and extend our survey results. We also rely on results from an American Youth Panel survey of 1,551 youths, ages 12 to 21, conducted in January and February 2025, which we also weighted to be representative of youths across the nation. More details about our methods are included at the end of this report.

The full set of ASDP survey results can be viewed and user-friendly charts can be created in Bento, a free data visualization tool. To learn more about Bento, go to www.getbento.info/about or email bento@mgt.us.

Chronic Absenteeism Remains Above Prepandemic Levels

In spring 2024 and spring 2025, we asked nationally representative samples of K–12 public school districts to estimate what percentage of their students had missed 10 percent or more of school days (i.e., had been chronically absent) during the school year. We used districts’ responses to this survey item to construct a national estimate of the chronic absenteeism rate in the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 school years, as shown in Figure 1.^[2]

As reported in Diliberti et al. (2014), we estimate that roughly 19 percent of K–12 students nationally (or about 9.4 million students) were chronically absent in the 2023–2024 school year. Our updated estimate for the 2024–2025 school year is roughly 22 percent (10.8 million students). Because these estimates are derived from district leaders’ best recollections of their student absenteeism rates, they are subject to some degree of uncertainty, as represented by the confidence intervals in Figure 1.^[3]

In Figure 1, we present these survey-based national estimates alongside annual chronic absenteeism rates for the school years 2016–2017 through 2023–2024 that we obtained from Malkus (2025).^[4] Although the Malkus estimates were constructed using a different methodology than our estimates, we include them to provide the best available context to interpret our 2024–2025 estimate. Nevertheless, readers should use caution when interpreting the trendline because our estimate is both derived through a different method and imprecise because of our data limitations.^[5]

With these caveats in mind, our 2024–2025 estimate is lower than the estimated 28 percent of students who were chronically absent in the 2021–2022 school year but notably is still above the prepandemic rate of about 15 percent.

When we interviewed district leaders, their comments mirrored these findings. Even as their districts’ attendance rates improved, 11 of the 14 leaders reported that their districts’ chronic absenteeism rates are still “too high” or “disappointing.” As one leader from a district with more than 20 percent of students chronically absent said, “That number has actually dropped each year since we came back from COVID full-time . . . even though it still feels very high.” All of the district leaders with whom we spoke said that they are “continuing to work on” reducing absenteeism.

Extreme Chronic Absenteeism Is Highly Concentrated in Urban Districts

We categorized the severity of districts’ chronic absenteeism levels using definitions from Attendance Works (2024): low (0 to 5 percent of students chronically absent), modest (5 percent to 10 percent of students chronically absent), significant (10 percent to 20 percent of students chronically absent), high (20 to 30 percent of students chronically absent), and extreme (30 percent or more of students chronically absent). Figure 2 shows the distribution of our surveyed districts across these severity levels in the 2024–2025 school year. As shown in purple, about one in ten of our surveyed districts reported extreme chronic absenteeism levels in 2024–2025. Meanwhile, fewer than one in ten districts had low absenteeism levels, as shown in yellow. Most districts fell in the middle of the spectrum. That is, about two or three districts in ten had modest, significant, and high rates of absenteeism in the 2024–2025 school year.

District Subgroup	Low (%)	Modest (%)	Significant (%)	High (%)	Extreme (%)
Total	7	24	30	28	11
Urban	0*	0*	23	33	44*
Suburban	8	42*	27	16	7
Rural	8	19	32	31	9
Low poverty	11	46*	28	15*	1*
Middle poverty	5	19	36	28	12
High poverty	8	10*	21	41	20
Majority White students	10*	25	33	23	8
Majority students of color	1	19	24	38	18

An annotation that encompasses the "Extreme" category of Urban, Surburban, and Rural indicates: "Urban districts were five to six times more likely to report extreme chronic absenteeism than their rural and suburban peers."

NOTE: This figure depicts response data from the following survey question: “What percentage of your students have missed 10 percent or more of school days (i.e., have been chronically absent) thus far during the 2024–2025 school year?” (n = 202). We categorized districts by the severity of their chronic absenteeism levels using definitions from Attendance Works (2024). An asterisk (*) indicates that the subgroup percentage of districts reporting a specific chronic absenteeism severity level is statistically significantly different (p < 0.05) from the remainder of districts not in that subgroup that said the same. The purple box is intended to call attention to the much higher rate of extreme chronic absenteeism reported by urban districts compared with suburban and rural districts.

However, the severity of chronic absenteeism levels varied significantly across different types of districts as shown in Figure 2. Most concerningly, nearly half of urban districts reported extreme levels of chronic absenteeism, meaning that 30 percent or more of students in urban districts were chronically absent. Urban districts were roughly five to six times more likely to report extreme chronic absenteeism levels than their rural and suburban peers did (see the purple box in Figure 2). This finding suggests that dangerously high levels of chronic absenteeism is a problem that is largely concentrated in urban districts.^[6] Of course, high levels of chronic absenteeism is not an entirely new problem for urban districts; even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, urban districts had higher absenteeism rates than their suburban and rural peers (Malkus, 2025).

We talked to two leaders in urban districts with extreme chronic absenteeism levels about why they thought their rates remained elevated. Their responses generally matched those of the district leaders in suburban and rural areas. They cited an increase in student and family disengagement, student illnesses and mental health challenges, and transportation issues, but they emphasized that the challenges they face in urban districts “are just that much more acute and concentrated.”

One-Quarter of Youths Think Being Chronically Absent Is Not a Problem

We asked about 1,300 youths, ages 12 to 21, who are enrolled in K–12 schools and are part of the RAND American Youth Panel, created in 2024, whether they thought it was a problem when children miss three or more weeks of school in a single school year. Most of the students (74 percent) said that missing three weeks of school is mostly a problem and that it is hard to catch up from that much missed school. However, one-quarter of youths (26 percent) said that missing three weeks of school is “mostly OK” and that students can make up what they missed online or in person (see Figure 3).

Youths’ perceptions about whether being chronically absent is a problem did not depend on gender, race/ethnicity, or age group. However, we did find one factor associated with youths’ beliefs about whether being absent is problematic: their parents’ highest education level. More specifically, youths whose parents’ highest education levels were high school completion (or less) were more likely than youths whose parents had higher education levels to say that they believe missing three weeks of school is mostly OK (see Figure 3). A full one-third of students whose parents did not complete further education after high school said that they felt missing three weeks of school is mostly OK.

By Far, Youths’ Top Reason for Missing School Was Sickness

All told, 82 percent of youths reported that they had missed at least some school in 2024–2025. Perhaps related to their beliefs about whether missing school is problematic, children of parents whose highest education level was high school completion (or less) were slightly more likely than youths whose parents completed higher levels of education to say that they had missed at least some school this year.

We asked youths to identify all the reasons why they had missed school in the 2024–2025 school year. By far, the most common reason that youths identified was sickness: 67 percent of them said that they had missed because of sickness (see Figure 4). Other reasons that youths identified for missing school were not nearly as prevalent: 10 percent said that they missed school because they felt down or anxious, 9 percent said that they missed school because they overslept, and 7 percent said that they missed school because they were uninterested. Though still not very prevalent, older youths (those 15 to 17 years old) were more likely than younger youths (those 12 to 14 years old) to identify these three things (anxiety, oversleeping, and disinterest) as reasons for having missed school. Meanwhile, less than 5 percent of youths selected the other reasons noted, including needing to care for a family member (4 percent), lack of transportation to school (3 percent), being too far behind on schoolwork (3 percent), and work conflicts (1 percent).

Taken altogether, these findings support the hypothesis that one reason absenteeism has remained above prepandemic levels is simply because youths and their families are taking sicknesses more seriously after the pandemic. What we heard from district leaders further supports this hypothesis. In interviews, some district leaders said that they believed schools and families had overcorrected when it came to dealing with children’s sicknesses by encouraging children to stay home for even mild symptoms. As one leader from a rural district expressed, “I think we had trained them during COVID.”

However, it may also be the case that youths report sickness as their reason for missing school because this reason might be more socially acceptable than others. Youths also might interpret sickness as encompassing other health and wellness reasons for missing school (e.g., “taking a mental health day”); therefore, youths’ responses may overrepresent sickness as the primary reason for school absences.

In Interviews, District Leaders Reported That They Need and Use Multiple Strategies to Address Chronic Absenteeism

In interviews, six out of 14 district leaders described addressing chronic absenteeism as a high priority in their districts. Given the high rates of chronic absenteeism, most district leaders reported using multiple strategies to address the challenge from different angles.^[7] As one leader from a suburban district explained: “I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all kind of thing for this. . . . It’s finding the right combination to put in place.” In total, 12 out of 14 district leaders with whom we spoke described combining efforts across the three strategies described below.

• Using family messaging: Nine out of 14 district leaders reported revising their messaging to families—particularly to families with young children—about the importance of attendance. Changes included updating their attendance notification systems to use more parent-friendly language (e.g., focusing on how a student’s absences compare with their peers rather than citing legal codes) and to highlight what students miss—such as live instruction and peer interaction—when they are absent.
• Tailoring approaches by student age: For younger students, district leaders emphasized the need to build strong attendance habits early at a young age and establishing attendance as a shared family routine. One leader explained, “If we let a kindergarten parent create bad habits for their child and think it’s all right for them not to come to school, then we’re going to be battling that forever.” For older students, district leaders were more focused on engagement. District leaders perceived that older students are more likely to come to school when it feels more meaningful and relevant to their future plans. Six district leaders described refining instructional practices and adding career-connected learning opportunities and extracurricular activities. For example, one leader described developing a work-based learning program to give students in-school opportunities to pursue their postsecondary career plans, giving them a reason to attend school.
• Partnering with community organizations: District leaders described partnering with local agencies, health and social service providers, nonprofit organizations, and local universities to support students and families beyond what schools can offer alone. For example, one suburban district worked with a local university to open a high school mental health pop-in center staffed by social work interns. A rural district partnered with a county program that assigns a court counselor to support families struggling with attendance—an approach the district leader said works because “the fact that it’s a non-school person tends to get their attention.”

District Leaders Noted Challenges in Addressing the Scope of Chronic Absenteeism with Limited Resources

District leaders also suggested that addressing the full scope of chronic absenteeism remains difficult given limited capacity and external barriers. In a departure from similar interviews that we conducted with district leaders in spring 2024 (Diliberti et al., 2024), five leaders suggested in spring 2025 that their absenteeism levels are being driven by out-of-school factors that are often beyond the district’s control. For example, four leaders described how housing and transportation instabilities have created persistent difficulties connecting with families, particularly when contact information changes frequently or families remain disengaged despite school-provided support services. Other leaders pointed to broader, systemic issues, such as mental health needs and food insecurity that may affect families’ ability to ensure that their children are in school, all of which districts cannot solve alone.

Districts’ ongoing—and, in many cases, expanded—efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism remains challenging with fewer resources. In interviews, four leaders cited inadequate funding and staffing following the end of federal pandemic relief funding as a challenge. One district leader explained that they could not scale their promising, relationship-based strategies, such as home visits, without enough personnel. Three leaders expressed that their staff were experiencing fatigue addressing chronic absenteeism, saying it can be disheartening when repeated efforts fail to improve attendance or reengage families. Although some formal consequences exist (e.g., truancy court, required parent meetings), leaders noted that these measures are often difficult to enforce or lack impact, leaving staff feeling like there is little follow-through when other strategies do not work. As one leader explained, “There’s a lot of fatigue around chronic absenteeism. . . . It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of paperwork. It’s a lot of paper-pushing. It’s a lot of phone calls . . . and [staff] don’t see an immediate effect.”

Implications

Data from our spring 2025 survey of K–12 public school districts and follow-up interviews with district leaders confirm that heightened chronic absenteeism levels have persisted years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, this problem remains highly concentrated in urban districts, about half of which are experiencing extreme levels of chronic absenteeism (defined as 30 percent or more of students chronically absent).

In interviews, district leaders reported trying to combat chronic absenteeism with multipronged strategies, including focusing on family messaging and tailoring interventions by age group. Given the magnitude and persistence of the problem, districts’ choice to use multiple approaches likely makes sense because no single approach is likely to make a significant dent in the problem.

Although districts’ current approaches might be helping at least some students return to school, clearly there is room for continued improvement. Going forward, districts need help identifying what does and does not work for their specific student populations. Districts need to more rigorously test their interventions (e.g., more career-relevant high school programming, tailored messages) to determine which efforts are most effective in differing district contexts and how different interventions can be used in concert. Some districts, such as Baltimore City Public Schools, have taken this on themselves (Baltimore City Public Schools, 2023). Baltimore has devoted a central office department to tracking the effectiveness of various school-level interventions and working to scale up those that prove most effective (Hill et al., 2024). The district has also enlisted many individuals, from students up to the mayor, in communicating the importance of daily attendance (Mayor’s Office, City of Baltimore, 2023).

Youths said that they are most commonly missing school for a legitimate reason: sickness. But it is also possible that parents are keeping children home for minor illnesses when they should be sending them to school. Schools and districts likely need to reopen conversations with parents about the benefits of in-person schooling. In particular, districts may need to talk directly with parents—especially parents of younger students—about how sick is “sick enough” to keep their children home and when it is appropriate to send them to school, even if the child is not feeling perfectly well.

Parents are not the only ones making decisions about whether their children should stay home from school: Older youths likely have input into their attendance. Importantly, these youths are the ones most likely to be staying home for nonsickness-related reasons. Therefore, districts may also need to reengage directly with their students (especially their older students) about the importance of in-person schooling because these youths may not be convinced. An alarming number of youths reported in our survey that missing three weeks of school is “mostly OK.” Presumably, this is because youths feel disinterested in what they are missing in the classroom or because they feel that they can easily keep up from home. Research on the contemporary uses of asynchronous learning has yet to shed light on whether this is true, and older research on the effect of absences indicates that it is not.

The bottom line is that chronic absenteeism is a glaring problem—especially for urban districts. It is likely that many, if not most, students who are not physically present fall behind, especially as they miss increasingly more days of school.

Notes

• [1] Reducing chronic absenteeism was district leaders’ fourth most commonly selected challenge. The top challenges identified by district leaders were (1) raising reading achievement (44 percent), (2) recruiting and keeping effective teachers (42 percent), and (3) raising math achievement (40 percent).
• [2] In our spring 2024 and spring 2025 surveys of nationally representative samples of public school districts, we asked, “What percentage of your students have missed 10 percent or more of school days (i.e., have been chronically absent) during the [school year]?” (In spring 2025, our survey question specified “thus far.”) Overall, district leaders estimated that, on average, 14 percent of their students were chronically absent in 2023–2024 and 17 percent were chronically absent in 2024–2025. Importantly, however, in both survey waves, we found that districts’ estimates of their schools’ chronic absenteeism rates varied substantially by district enrollment size. Therefore, to construct national estimates of the number and percentage of students chronically absent in the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 school years, we applied differential chronic absenteeism rates by district size. More specifically, using the Common Core of Data, we calculated the total number of students nationally enrolled in small, medium, and large districts (National Center for Education Statistics, 2024). We then multiplied these student counts by the districts’ estimated chronic absenteeism rates to obtain counts of absent students by district enrollment size. Our final estimated national absenteeism rates are the total counts of students absent divided by the national student population. For a more detailed description of our methodology (which remains consistent across survey waves), see Diliberti et al. (2024).
• [3] As shown in Figure 1, our estimated chronic absenteeism rate in the 2023–2024 school year using our district survey data is lower than that reported by Malkus (2025). As we described in Diliberti et al. (2024), we suspected that our estimated 19 percent rate in the 2023–2024 school year underestimated the true level of absenteeism. This suspicion has since been substantiated by the data in Malkus (2025). As our methods are constant for both years, it is possible that the chronic absenteeism rate for the 2024–2025 school year is also an underestimate.
• [4] For more details about how these annual national chronic absenteeism rates were collected and constructed, see Malkus (2025). Briefly, however, Malkus (2025) collected district-level absenteeism data directly from each state and calculated district-level chronic absenteeism rates by dividing the number of absent students by the total number of students in each district eligible to be counted. When data were not available directly from states, data were supplemented with data from EdFacts, a U.S. Department of Education database. Although these data are imperfect (e.g., data are missing for some states, data are compiled from multiple sources that present some comparability issues), they are likely some of the best available data to investigate trends in chronic absenteeism.
• [5] This impreciseness is due to a few reasons. First, we used district leaders’ reports—which may be rough recollections—from a small sample of districts. Second, we used survey data instead of administrative data, which are likely more precise. Third, we posed this question about chronic absenteeism in the 2023–2024 school year between March 2024 and May 2024, so we may have missed students who became chronically absent during the last weeks of the school year. For these same reasons, we may also be underestimating chronic absenteeism rates in 2024–2025.
• [6] The concentration of extreme levels of chronic absenteeism in urban districts is important to understanding national rates. This is because urban districts enroll considerably more students than their suburban and rural peers. More specifically, among the population of 13,000 school districts in the United States, only 7 percent are in urban areas (Grant et al., forthcoming). Yet roughly 30 percent of the nation’s 50 million public school students are enrolled in urban schools (National Center for Education Statistics, undated-a). And the nation’s 120 largest school districts (which represent less than 1 percent of all public school districts)—many of which are urban—alone account for roughly 20 percent of all student enrollment (National Center for Education Statistics, undated-b). Therefore, the chronic absenteeism levels in urban districts disproportionately affect the rates observed at the national level.
• [7] District leaders did not explicitly rank or categorize their attendance interventions by tier during interviews. However, the strategies they described generally align with the Attendance Works framework’s three tiers of intervention: Tier 1 (universal prevention), Tier 2 (early intervention), and Tier 3 (intensive intervention). For more information, see Attendance Works’ 3 Tiers of Intervention framework (Attendance Works, undated).

References

• Attendance Works, “Chronic Absence: 3 Tiers of Intervention,” webpage, undated. As of June 12, 2025:
  https://www.attendanceworks.org/chronic-absence/addressing-chronic-absence/3-tiers-of-intervention
• Attendance Works, “National Chronic Absence Patterns,” webpage, January 31, 2024. As of June 2, 2025:
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c5yzaCkoJlgVUiGKkvRrggR-HOKS0gl46ZEb6nzMB-8/edit?tab=t.0
• Baltimore City Public Schools, “Over One-Quarter of Baltimore City Public Schools Campuses Improved Their Ratings on the Maryland School Report Card,” December 13, 2023.
• Dewey, Daniel C., Fahle, Erin, Thomas J. Kane, Sean F. Reardon, and Douglas O. Staiger, Pivoting from Pandemic Recovery to Long-Term Reform: A District-Level Analysis, Education Recovery Scorecard, February 2025.
• Diliberti, Melissa Kay, Lydia R. Rainey, Lisa Chu, and Heather L. Schwartz, Districts Try with Limited Success to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism: Selected Findings from the Spring 2024 American School District Panel Survey and Interviews, RAND Corporation, RR-A956-26, 2024. As of June 12, 2025:
  https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA956-26.html
• Grant, David, AK Keskin, Melissa Kay Diliberti, Claude Messan Setodji, Gerald P. Hunter, Samantha E. DiNicola, and Heather L. Schwartz, Technical Documentation for the Eleventh American School District Panel Survey, RAND Corporation, RR-A956-37, forthcoming.
• Hansen, Michael, Purnima Aggarwal, and Rebecca Wagner, State Data Shows K–12 Teacher Absences Surged Post-Pandemic, Brookings Institution, May 19, 2025.
• Hill, Paul, Sarah McCann, Lydia Rainey, and Chelsea Waite, When Challenges Never Let Up: School District Leaders Steer Through Hazards in Baltimore and Chicago, Center on Reinventing Public Education, July 2024.
• Jacobson, Linda, “Chronic Absenteeism’s Post-COVID ‘New Normal’: Research Shows It Is More Common, More Extreme,” The 74, June 3, 2025.
• Malkus, Nat, Lingering Absence in Public Schools: Tracking Post-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism into 2024, American Enterprise Institute, June 12, 2025.
• Mayor’s Office, City of Baltimore, “Mayor Scott Announces Mayor’s Attendance Challenge at First Day of School Visit,” press release, August 28, 2023.
• Mervosh, Sarah, and Francesca Paris, “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere,” New York Times, March 29, 2024.
• National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 203.72. Public Elementary and Secondary School Enrollment, by Locale and State: Fall 2021,” dataset, undated-a.
• National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 215.30. Enrollment, Poverty, and Federal Funds for the 120 Largest School Districts, by Enrollment Size in 2021: School Year 2019–20 and Fiscal Year 2022,” dataset, undated-b.
• National Center for Education Statistics, “2022–23 Common Core of Data (CCD) Universe Files, Version 1a,” data file, NCES 2024-151, January 2024.
• Saavedra, Anna, Morgan Polikoff, and Dan Silver, “Parents Are Not Fully Aware of, or Concerned About, Their Children’s School Attendance,” Brookings Institution, March 26, 2024.
• Schwartz, Heather L., Melissa Kay Diliberti, Lisa Berdie, David Grant, Gerald P. Hunter, and Claude Messan Setodji, Urban and Rural Districts Showed a Strong Divide During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results from the Second American School District Panel Survey, RAND Corporation, RR-A956-2, 2021. As of June 12, 2025:
  https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA956-2.html
• Stanford, Libby, “Students Are Missing School Because They’re Too Anxious to Show Up,” Education Week, October 6, 2023.
• U.S. Census Bureau, “Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program School District Estimates for 2022,” data file, December 2023.
• U.S. Department of Education, “Chronic Absenteeism,” webpage, undated. As of June 2, 2025:
  https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/supporting-students/chronic-absenteeism
• Vázquez Toness, Bianca, “Cough? Sore Throat? More Schools Suggest Mildly Sick Kids Attend Anyway,” Associated Press, February 7, 2024.

Topics

• Education Administration
• Education Policy
• Students
• Survey Research Methodology