Addressing Chronic Absence

Chronicabsence.net becomes Attendancecounts.org

Attendance Counts debuts its website today, offering strategies, research and tools for reducing chronic absence in our schools. Hedy Chang's blog can now be found there, along with toolkits, assessments, research and policy news. School districts across the nation are already monitoring this important data--starting in kindergarten--and making changes that improve attendance. Through local practice and policy reform at the state and federal level, we can ensure that all schools are taking attendance seriously.

Attendance Counts' campaign for reducing chronic absence is also part of the PolicyforResults.org toolkit for ensuring that more children are reading on grade level by the end of 3rd grade. The recent KIDS COUNT report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation identified chronic absence as one of the reasons children are not learning to read well by the end of 3rd grade, contributing to the nation’s achievement gap and its high dropout rates.

Community School Grants Can Support Chronic Absence Work

The Coalition for Community Schools, one of Attendance Counts' key allies in our chronic absence work, sends news that the U.S. Department of Education has released application information for the Full Service Community Schools (FSCS) grant.

 This year, the Education Department is making $5 million available for the grants, with a maximum of $500,000 a year available. The department expect to give out eight to 12 grants, ranging from $275,000 to $500,000. The grants are designed to help public schools function as full-service community schools and support state collaboratives developing such programs.The deadline in July 23.

This is an important opportunity for communities to secure funding for a community schools approach, which taps community resources to provide the seamless integration of academic, health and personal development services for children and families.

Community Schools can also use this as an opportunity to explicitly address chronic absence through a comprehensive approach to school improvement--using attendance both as a programmatic goal and a measure of progress.

In Providence, R.I., the Making Connections network of community providers has been using absence data to tip them off to children and families in need of support.

They're using a Full Service Community Schools grant to to pay for transportation to bring children to school, as well as family counseling and home visits. This effectively creates a system of wraparound services for the most vulnerable children and families.

If you are working in a school facing high levels of chronic absence, don’t miss out on this opportunity to obtain the resources you need to address this critical issue and ensure all children have an equal opportunity to learn!

 

San Francisco Resolution Seeks to Curb Chronic Absence

San Francisco schools would analyze chronic absence patterns and launch pilot programs to improve attendance in elementary schools, under a resolution submitted this week (June 8) to the San Francisco Unified School District's Board of Education.

Commissioner Norman Yee's resolution also calls for using an electronic communications tool known as School Loop to alert parents, teachers and afterschool providers when children are missing too much school--to excused or unexcused absences. The school district also uses School Loop to provide information about homework and academic records.

And Yee suggests that the district engage the city's Department of Children Youth and Their Families and encourage good school attendance as part of the district's Parent Engagement and Partnership Plan adopted last year.

This resolution, which would come up for a vote in late summer or early autumn, provides a model for what local school districts can do to encourage the analysis and tracking of chronic absence.

As many as 16 San Francisco's 76 elementary schools now have chronic absences rates of 15 percent or higher; in one school, it ran as high as 39 percent. In addition to the educational time lost, there's a financial loss in a state where average daily attendance play a role in state funding.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome makes that point in a San Francisco Examiner story that ran today (June 10).  "Fixing this problem is critical," he said. "There's money attached from average daily attendance, so the school district has every incentive to prioritize this."

Under Yee's resolution, the school board would ask the superintendent to provid an annual analysis of chronic absence patterns in elementary schools by school, grade and astudent populations; the superintendent would then create pilot programs in a set of low-performing schools called the "Superintendent's Zone" to reduce chronic absence by at least 5 percent in these schools.

The pilot schools would set up student attendance monitoring teams at each school, under the resolution. The team would review data and identify and barriers to good attendance for children and families, such as health problems, unreliable transportation, unstable housing or other factors.

 

Each school would then develop a plan for reducing chronic absence and would partner with community agencies to help parents get their children to school every day.

Q & A with Hedy Chang

The Hechinger Report, a new website that offers education news aimed at reporters and policy wonks, interviewed Attendance Counts director Hedy Chang for its weekly question & answer feature.

Hedy told reporter Sarah Garland about the importance of looking at excused, as well as unexcused absences. "Attendance is really about, is the kid in school or not? There’s a much broader variety of reasons why kids aren’t in school. Particularly at young ages, it’s not truancy. It’s not like a kid is out on the streets and know one knows they’re not at school."

Chronic Absence Bill Advances in California Assembly

The California State Senate this week gave unanimous approval to legislation that would support the tracking of chronic absence rates in schools across the state.

SB 1357 would set a common definition of chronic absence for the state--missing 10 percent of the school year. It would require including attendance information for individual students in the state's longitudinal data base, as long as there is federal funding to support the effort.

And it would make chronic absence analysis and intervention a key part of an early warning system, geared at preventing high school students from dropping out.

"We all know that dropping out is a process, not a specific event, and the process is marked by many indicators along the way, including school attendance--and the flip side of attendance, excessive absenteeism, Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento),the bill's sponsor, said before the floor vote Tuesday. "Poor attendance and chronic absence, even in the early grades, is highly predictive of higher dropout rates later on."

The bill, which now moves to the Assembly, signals the emergence of the influential Steinberg as a champion for chronic absence reporting. And it demonstrates the tenacity of the California Attendance and Absence Partnership, which is backing the measure.

Tracking Chronic Absence for Drop-out Prevention

We've often said that tracking chronic absence is an essential ingredient in reducing high school drop-out rates. Attention to absences in the early grades can keep vulnerable students on track and help them build good attendance habits that will carry them through their school years and beyond.

A story in USA Today last week describes a Philadelphia middle school where a program called Diplomas Now is working to turn around attendance problems before students reach high school.

Here's their approach to reaching absentee students:

"[Adam] Jackson punches in the home number of one absent student and stands silently while he waits for someone to pick up.

Finally he introduces himself and, in a soft, deferential voice, says, "I was wondering if Isaiah's going to be in today, or if everything's OK? 'Cause I didn't see him."

Not exactly the typical scolding call from a truant officer. But day after day, calls like that have helped to boost Feltonville's average daily attendance....

Moments later — and armed with a list of 11 chronically absent students — a pair of in-house social workers will climb into a weathered silver Honda Accord and begin driving around the neighborhood, knocking on doors."

Diplomas Now, building off the work of Johns Hopkins education researcher Robert Balfanz, collects data on attendance, behavior and grades in English and math--key early warning signs of drop-out risk. They create spreadsheets of at-risk students and bring in volunteers to tutor and mentor children, offer afterschool programs and link them to social workers.

We endorse these sorts of efforts. We also encourage schools and districts to look for patterns in absences that can help address attendance in systemic ways. Are there neighborhoods, schools or classrooms where attendance is particularly bad? Do the patterns suggest programmatic interventions that help reduce absences due to poorly conceived discipline policies, lack of access to health services,  problems with neighborhood safety or unreliable public transportation?

Casey Report Highlights Chronic Absence in Third-Grade Reading Campaign

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is releasing a report today (May 18th) that examines why two-thirds of our nation's students finish third grade without learning to read proficiently and what steps we can take to turn this around. Reducing chronic absence is one of several suggestions the foundation will make in the report being released at 1 p.m. at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and on a webcast.

Certainly this is not the first time we've heard that reading by the end of third grade is critical to closing the achievement gap, reducing dropout rates and creating productive workers for a global economy. But Casey's report takes a different tack, going beyond the school years to look at how we can make grade-level reading a shared national goal.

1. Casey does some backward mapping for results, realizing that accomplishing this goal requires a 0-8  strategy. The report stresses the need to engage parents early, to provide good early care and preK programs and to ensure that children arrive at school developmentally ready to succeed in school.

2. Casey recognizes that time on task, in this case exposure to literacy and language rich types of environments and instruction, is essential to early reading. Thus, there is a focus on getting kids to preschool, encouraging summer learning, reducing chronic absence and providing strong afterschool programs. In an interview with Education Week, Casey Executive Vice President Ralph Smith said, "Because we generally thought about it in terms of truancy, we haven’t really done the math. When you do that, you find that for many reasons we have not completely built a culture of attendance.”(Casey is a major investor in Attendance Counts.) There's also an emphasis on equipping parents to provide a rich language environment at home.

 This is an issue that often breaks down by socioeconomic status. As we continue to point out, the long term effect of chronic absence matters most for kids whose parents might not have the resources to make up for lost time on task. At the same time, these parents are faced with the kinds of barriers--poor transportation, unstable housing ,etc that make persistent chronic absence more likely.

3. Casey's new report recognizes what we've found in Attendance Counts, namely that it takes more than schools and teachers to fix our nation's schools.  Communities and families are essential partners, who can work in concert with educators, to ensure that children learn to read well by the end of third grade.  So often education is just seen as the purview of educators with others saying we can’t be held responsible for this outcome. Yet, particularly when it is framed as more time on task that helps to ensure kids can achieve this outcome – it is clear a wide array of community stakeholders have a critical and essential role to play.

Rhode Island KIDS COUNT Reports Chronic Absence District by District

Rhode Island KIDS COUNT has added a page to its annual Fact Book featuring chronic absence rates for all the state's school districts.

The analysis found that 10 percent of students in kindergarten through third grade were chronically absent in the 2008-2009 school year. The percent climbs to 16 percent in the state's core cities, with Providence, Central Falls and Newport having the highest rates. At the same time, the average daily attendance rate at schools in the core cities was 93 percent. This finding reinforces the reality that ADA figures can mask a problem with chronic absence.

The addition of this indicator was inspired by the publication of  Present, Engaged and Accounted For  which first raised awareness of educators and community groups in Rhode Island to the importance of tracking the numbers and working with schools and families to reduce chronic absence.

“There is so much emphasis on reading at grade level,” Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, said in a recent article in the Providence Journal. “We started to get practical. We asked, ‘Who is in school and who isn’t? Why not? How can we share strategies and improve attendance?’ ”

New York City's Attendance Court Tackles Truancy

The New York Times has this piece Tuesday about the city's Attendance Court, a 2-year-old pilot program that takes a "problem solving" approach toward reducing chronic truancy in three schools in the district. Thousands of New York City's 1 million plus students miss more than a month of school each year.

The "court," which provides coordinated services for the students and regular hearings over cases, focuses on truants, those students with numerous unexcused absences due to a lack of interest or family issues. This is often different from chronic absence, particularly among students in the early grades who generally stay home with a parent's knowledge. For the Attendance Counts initiative, our definition of chronic absence includes excused and unexcused absences, which may be caused by illness, family crises, the lack of reliable transportation or other issues. Like truancy, chronic absence requires that teachers and school officials understand the extent of the problem in their school and then put in place a thoughtful plan for improving attendance.

The Times piece features Program Coordinator Susanna Osorno-Crandall, who seems to be taking a "whatever it takes" approach to improving students' attendance. She is "the all-around cheerful arranger of after-school programs, homework helper and frequent buyer of alarm clocks to foster better wake-up habits." She works with Judge Eileen Koretz to urge students, and their parents, to take attendance seriously.

As one school counselor notes, however, it would be a challenge for school personnel to provide these kinds of individualized services.

What do you think of this kind of approach?

Building Attendance Habits: Starting in Preschool

Among the interesting findings in our research about chronic absence: Children who attended preschool were less likely to be chronically absent in kindergarten. This suggests that preschool plays a role in building good attendance habits and establishing routines for the primary grades.

 In a guest blog post that appeared on the New America Foundation's Early Ed Watch blog this morning, Louise Wiener and I explored what preschools, child care centers and elementary schools can do encourage good habits, not just for getting to school but for showing up on time.

As we wrote, "Communities can use data on chronic absence in kindergarten to determine where to open or expand preschools so they help address the needs of school experiencing high levels of poor attendance....

"We believe an even greater impact is possible if preschools and schools explicitly take action to improve attendance. The first step is for schools and preschools to collect and analyze attendance data child by child. The current focus on average daily attendance conveys how many students are showing up every day but it doesn’t tell us how many of the absent children are missing extended periods. Without individual data, it is impossible to identify and try to solve nascent problems."

We encourage policymakers, teachers and parents to take step to encourage good attendance habits--as early as possible.