Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $1 Million to Five Studies Identifying Drivers of and Solutions To Chronic Absenteeism

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days during the academic year, skyrocketed during the pandemic and remained stubbornly high at 26 percent in SY 2022-23.

These rates of absence are alarming given the significant implications of chronic absenteeism for student learning. Studies conducted prior to the pandemic link the lack of regular school attendance to poorer academic achievement and social-emotional development across early childhood, elementary, and middle school. A growing body of work suggests that the adverse implications of chronic absenteeism may be even greater post-pandemic, with students—particularly those from marginalized groups—continuing to perform substantially worse on math and literacy assessments, on average, than they did pre-pandemic.

Despite consistent evidence that chronic absenteeism is a significant problem facing the U.S. education system, there is much less research that has sought to understand and identify the root causes of chronic absenteeism post-pandemic and examine the implications of contemporary chronic absenteeism for students’ learning and development. There is also limited rigorous research studying strategies currently used by states, districts, schools, and organizations to promote school attendance and family engagement in contemporary settings.

Last month, EdTrust, American Enterprise Institute, and Attendance Works set a collective goal to halve chronic absenteeism within five years. To make that target achievable, educators and administrators need access to more high-quality evidence on the root causes of and solutions to chronic absenteeism post-pandemic. Given this need, Overdeck Family Foundation is announcing $1 million in grants to support five studies designed to produce data and research that collectively inform the work of policymakers and practitioners in the hope of increasing student attendance from Pre-K to high school.

Below is a summary of the five studies:

Understanding root causes of post-pandemic chronic absenteeism

Dr. Elaine Allensworth and Marisa de la Torre from the UChicago Consortium on School Research will receive $250,000 to identify student, school, family, and neighborhood factors associated with absenteeism in grades six through nine in the Chicago Public Schools. The research will inform responses to the absenteeism crisis in Chicago and beyond by clarifying the role of in-school versus out-of-school factors influencing absenteeism during key transition grades and testing whether they vary for demographic subgroups.

Dr. Michael Gottfried from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Dr. Ethan Hutt from the School of Education at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will receive $246,376 to leverage West Virginia’s uniquely detailed data on student absences—which include type of absence (full or part-day) and 27 different reasons for absences (ranging from issues like chronic conditions and homebound illness to lack of transportation and parent employment obligation)—to pinpoint the drivers of absenteeism most strongly linked to student achievement in the state. The research will look at different rural landscapes and degrees of poverty. Ultimately, the findings will inform which types of absenteeism to target with policy and intervention in order to strengthen student learning across both urban and rural settings. Findings will also provide insights into how to build more robust data systems and refined approaches for ensuring that students who should be in school are present and accounted for.

Designing and/or testing effective interventions to reduce absenteeism

Alex Zepeda from The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health and Dr. Rebecca Dudovitz from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA will receive $250,000 to examine the extent to which school-based health centers and behavioral health services are associated with reductions in chronic absenteeism in Los Angeles County post-pandemic. This study will help inform whether Los Angeles and districts nationally should adopt and scale health and mental health interventions as a tool to help promote stronger attendance in kindergarten through ninth grade.

Drs. Jacob Kirksey and Jessica Gottlieb of Texas Tech University will receive $186,037 to conduct a study estimating the impact of Texas’s teacher merit-based pay policy on student attendance and identify any specific teacher engagement and communication strategies, facilitated by the policy, that appear most effective for reducing student absenteeism. This study has the potential to heighten understanding of the role teacher quality and teacher-directed family engagement behaviors have on attendance and inform the creation and adoption of policies shown to be effective at improving teacher behaviors at scale.

Drs. Ariel Kalil and Susan Mayer of The University of Chicago Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab will receive $150,000 to prototype and test how a new messaging intervention can impact preschool attendance. This study will produce transferable insights about messaging that preschool providers can use to strengthen family relationships and attendance rates and codify a potentially scalable messaging intervention useful for providers across settings serving young students and their families.

We believe this collective set of studies will generate actionable insights to guide policy and practitioner responses to the ongoing absenteeism crisis currently facing America’s schools. Our investment in this research, coupled with our ongoing support for Attendance Works and a grant to the Ad Council Research Institute to develop a messaging toolkit for states, districts, and principals based on new research aimed at understanding parents’ and families’ knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions around school attendance, will lift up actionable and much-needed information at a critical moment for the education sector.

If you would like to learn more about Overdeck Family Foundation’s research strategy, please contact our research team at: research@overdeck.org. To stay up-to-date on the latest news from our Foundation, subscribe to our newsletter, and explore the findings from our latest research grants in our Research Repository.

Header image by Jake Ingle on Unsplash