SED plans to require school districts to measure attendance in new way

On Board Online • September 2, 2024

By Sara Foss
Special Correspondent

Since the 2017-18 school year, the State Education Department (SED) has used a chronic absenteeism indicator as a measure of school quality and student success. Students are considered chronically absent when they miss at least 10% of instructional days, typically 18 or more days of class.

But SED plans to create a new way to for schools to measure attendance beginning in the 2025-26 school year.

Under SED's proposed amendments to the accountability section of the state's Every Student Succeeds Act Plan (ESSA), students will be assigned to one of four attendance "performance levels" based on the percentage of school days attended:

Level 1: 85% or less.

Level 2: 85.1% to 90%.

Level 3: 90.1% to 95%.

Level 4: 95% or more.

Under the new rules, suspensions will not be considered absences. Nor will staying home for extended periods for medical reasons.

"Replacing the Chronic Absenteeism rate with the Attendance indicator underscores that a student's attendance is important, whether a student's absenteeism rate is considered chronic or not," an SED draft of the proposed accountability amendments states. "The negative effects of missing school manifest even before a student's attendance reaches the level of chronic absenteeism."

The shift from a chronic absenteeism indicator to an attendance indicator comes at a time when chronic absenteeism is considered an epidemic. Chronic absenteeism rates surged during the pandemic and remain higher than before the school shutdowns triggered by COVID-19.

The new attendance indicator will be calculated for all students in a school and each subgroup of students. Examples of subgroups include economically disadvantaged students, English Language Learners and Black students.

To be included in these calculations, a student must be enrolled for 30 days during the school year to ensure "that the data more accurately reflects the attendance patterns of students who are consistently part of the school or district," the SED document states.

Education policy experts said New York's attendance indicator is a more precise and nuanced measure than chronic absenteeism. They say it should enable schools and districts to flag students struggling with attendance earlier and intervene.

"From a measurement perspective, it's almost certainly better at providing real, policy-relevant information and also better at focusing districts on the actual goals that policies might be designed around and that an accountability system would be focused on," said Melissa Lyons, assistant professor of public administration and policy at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany.

The chronic absenteeism indicator has an arbitrary cut-off that incentivizes focusing on students on the bubble rather than the kids in need of the most help, Lyons said. If a student goes from missing 10% of instructional days to 9%, it's considered a success, but "you wouldn't observe any improvement if a kid is missing half of the school year and goes from 50% absent to 25% absent," she said. "That would be a dramatic increase in the number of days they're in school, but they would still be considered chronically absent."

If states really want to tackle chronic absenteeism, revisiting and tweaking the metrics makes sense, Lyons said. "We don't want to focus on moving kids from 10% absent to 9% absent," she said. "We want to move the needle, period."

It remains to be seen how meaningful the new categories will be to parents. "The challenge will be that if you're just telling people, 'You know, your kid has been attending school 78% of school days,' that may not mean all that much on its face," Lyons continued. "So you have to say, 'Your kid has attended 78% of school days, and the average kid is attending 98%.'"

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national organization focused on reducing chronic absenteeism, said she hopes New York will continue to monitor and post its chronic absenteeism data publicly. The performance levels compiled by the new attendance indicator might be difficult for the average person to understand, she said.

"You don't want to lose the ability to quickly look at a dashboard and understand how many kids are chronically absent and where they are," Chang said.

Jonathan Burman, a spokesman for the New York State Education Department, said the state will continue to gather data from local education agencies (LEAs) to track chronic absenteeism. The information will be reported to LEAs to weave into their data sets as they determine how best to support the students they serve.

"The new lens through which we will view attendance provides a broader capture of the needs across a school community," Burman said. "There will still be a focus on students who are chronically absent, but the new indicator methodology highlights the opportunity to improve attendance for all students."

Chronic absenteeism is correlated with lower standardized test scores and lower graduation rates, among other things. These negative impacts disproportionately affect students of color, economically disadvantaged students and English Language Learners.

Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said the proposed attendance indicator would be an improvement but question whether chronic absenteeism or attendance are appropriate as school accountability measures. He noted that these figures usually are a reflection of the community's socio-economic status.

Higher poverty districts have higher rates of chronic absenteeism, and measuring chronic absenteeism and attendance reveals little about what a school is "uniquely doing to improve and help their students," Hansen said. "The best school accountability measure would be something that really shows what the school itself is doing to help move these kids along, and I don't think an attendance measure is doing that."

Hansen said chronic absenteeism is important to track, but he doesn't think it should be tracked under the Every Student Succeeds Act. "I don't think we necessarily need to incorporate every important measure into our accountability system," he said.

In May, officials from the Greater Johnstown School District officials visited the White House as part of a panel discussion on chronic absenteeism. The district usues mentoring program that pairs students struggling with attendance with a caring adult.

Scott Hale, principal of Johnstown High School, said he views the chronic absenteeism measure as problematic because of the 10% cut-off. He described a student who was absent roughly 80 days of school one year and managed to cut the number of days absent in half the following year.

"That's a significant improvement, and that's what we're looking for," Hale said. "It's really difficult to change a kid who's been absent so many times to get to that 10% threshold."