Chronic absenteeism (when a student is absent for 10 percent or more of the school year) has reached crisis levels, leading experts to scramble for explanations.
Nationally, chronic absenteeism grew from a concern into a crisis after COVID-19. Pre-pandemic, chronic absentee ratings hovered around 15 percent. After a dramatic spike during the pandemic, chronic absenteeism appears to have stabilized at around 24 percent.
Minnesota isn’t beating the odds. Chronic absentee ratings have been within one percentage point of the national average since 2017, except the 2022 school year, when it was 1.5 percent higher.
Nationally and locally, almost one in four students are considered chronically absent. This creates a myriad of issues — students who are not present cannot learn, and when they return, valuable class time is used to bring them up to speed. It’s no surprise that national test scores are at eye-popping lows.
So, why has the system cracked so thoroughly? One hypothesis begins with the fact that teacher absences have remained elevated since the pandemic. This heightened lack of curated instruction coincides with a substitute teacher hiring crisis, which means that fellow teachers have to step in when a coworker is absent, straining the system. Students who experience absent teachers then lose faith in the classroom and choose to be absent themselves.
Is this true? Does Mr. Smith’s custody issues or Ms. Jackson’s chronic flu really have such a devastating effect on the classroom?
A new American Enterprise Institute (AEI) study by Arya Ansari, an Ohio State University professor, explored this question by studying a vast quantity of Rhode Island student data from 2018 to 2024. In the data, about 92 percent of Rhode Island students were successfully matched with a corresponding teacher. Then, by tracking teacher absentee data alongside student absentee data, Ansari was able to see if there was a direct link between teacher absences and student absences.
Teacher full-day absences did rise post-COVID, but only by a few days.
At the same time, student tardiness and absences rose highly during the pandemic and remained high for the five years after the pandemic.
Ansari noted that previous literature suggests that student performance can be negatively impacted by increased teacher absences. However, his findings suggested that student absences are not affected.
When examining the associations between teacher and student absences, I found that teacher absences were only weakly associated with a few outcomes, with “effects”—even when statistically significant—close to zero. Specifically, each additional day a teacher was absent was linked to a significant but negligible increase in tardies…
To put this in perspective, if a teacher missed 10 more days of work than the average teacher, each student in their class would be tardy only 0.05 more days per year. Even in a classroom of 25 students, the impact of this increase would be only 1.25 additional tardies across all students in the classroom. There was a similarly small increase in early dismissals of 0.001 days per student (p < 0.05). Practically speaking, if a teacher had 10 more absences than average, this would lead to roughly 0.25 additional early dismissals across a class of 25 students…Overall, these findings indicate that teachers’ absences have little to no meaningful effect on student absences.
It’s possible that Ansari’s findings could shift when the data is parsed by grade level. After all, kindergarteners are usually driven to school and have no choice in the matter, while a high school senior might choose to drive to Starbucks upon learning that their calculus teacher is absent. Interestingly, he found that some students may be choosing lattes over learning from a sub, the percentage of students who are doing so is miniscule.
Teacher absences were associated with a slightly larger increase in tardies for middle school students (0.012 days, p < 0.01) and high school students (0.038 days, p < 0.001) compared with elementary school students. When considering part- and full-day absences, there were no consistent differences by teacher absence type. Overall, these findings suggest that the links between teacher and student absences are largely consistent across grades.
Ansari’s work helps us to understand that the student absentee crisis can’t be understood through a simple cause and effect syllogism based on increased teacher absences. Teachers should feel free to take sick days as needed, knowing that their absence will not create a correlative absentee effect among their students.
It’s a more complex problem that will necessitate a complex answer. After the pandemic washed away social norms surrounding the school system, today’s school system must strive for quality, openness, and accountability for parents and administrators alike in order to convince families that the hours in the classroom are a valuable use of time.