About one in four Minnesota students are chronically absent, meaning they miss 10 percent or more of the academic year. Their absence leads to a predictable cascade of avoidable issues, including learning loss, classroom disruption, and heightened behavior issues.
Yet, all absences are not created equal. While one student may miss a Friday for wisdom tooth surgery, another absentee might be avoiding a test or a newly estranged best friend. The former absence will likely have few long-term consequences, while the latter lays the foundation for a destructive pattern of truant behavior.
A new report authored by Nat Malkus and Sam Hollom of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) studied the difference between excused absences and unexcused absences using Indiana attendance records from 2015-2024. That report found that unexcused absences are meaningfully different from excused absences, especially as it pertains to test scores. The pattern of unexcused absences indicate a minority high-risk group of students that have many absences.
Excused absences occur when a student can present a note from a doctor or parent justifying their absence, and unexcused absences occur when a student cannot provide a justification. The classification accuracy has strong limitations; it is of course possible for a parent to lie to the school and say their child is sick, or for a previously sick child to forget a doctor’s note at home, with both examples producing inaccurate bookkeeping. In general, however, the attendance data produced strong takeaways that can safely lend insight to chronic absentee trends.
It remains true that the majority of students have relatively few absences, and in the converse, a minority of students hold a majority of all absences. But the distinction between excused and unexcused absences makes that generalization more precise. Malkus found that excused absences increased sequentially as the absence-rate deciles moved up, meaning that there was no unexpected spike in the number of excused absences among the most chronically absent students. In contrast, unexcused absences did spike among the most chronically absent students. As Malkus puts it,
[S]tudents in the 10th absence-rate decile (the 10 percent of students who are most absent) have more than twice as many unexcused absences, on average, as students in the ninth decile, with unexcused-absence rates of 19 and 7 percent, respectively, in 2024. Strikingly, students in the 10th decile had, on average, more unexcused absences than students in the ninth decile had total absences.
Put another way, the students who are most chronically absent don’t necessarily have parents who prolifically write them excuse notes — at some point, they no longer have the desire or ability to procure justification.
That’s not to say that excuses don’t abound. Despite the fact that every absence has an impact on a student’s classroom experience and academic performance, Malkus found that chronically absent students still had about half (48 percent) of their absences excused. Students who were not chronically absent had the majority (68 percent) of their absences excused. With this in mind, it’s possible that many chronically absent students do not initially raise red flags indicating that they will become chronically absent, as absences are more likely to be excused by parents and trusted by school offices at the beginning of the year.
For the least absent 80 percent of students, unexcused absences remained consistent across grades, with about two per year from kindergarten to 12th grade. However, the most absent 20 percent of students had far more unexcused absences as they matriculated into high school, meaning that, when taken as a unified student group, unexcused absences for 12th graders nearly doubled those of 3rd graders. This implies the existence of a large subset of high schoolers with chronically unexcused absences, whose consistent absence from the classroom is highly noticeable. The data does not imply an Indiana social norm that encourages most high schoolers to play hooky on Fridays, but instead points policymakers in the direction of a group of high-need, at-risk students.
Unexcused absences climb steadily throughout the year, increasing strongly in April and May. Malkus points out that this is when students and parents alike typically lose steam, and front offices become increasingly credulous of shoddy excuses. Poor and otherwise disadvantaged students make up a disproportionate amount of unexcused absences. Assuming that these absence classifications are accurate, this implies that the large subset of students who are worryingly absent from the classroom tend to be disadvantaged in a number of ways. This knowledge should empower (and propel) administrators to target absentee reduction efforts to these student groups in particular.
Every absence matters, but some types of absences are more destructive than others. Malkus found that every type of absence had a negative effect on student test scores, but unexcused absences had much harsher effects on student performance. In a way, this is unsurprising; an unexcused absence is far less likely than an excused absence to have teacher or parent involvement that can help ensure a student gets back on track seamlessly. Absenteeism’s significant effect on academic performance underscores the urgent need to identify and reconnect with student groups that are slipping through the cracks.
While more analyses will need to be done before we can know for sure, there’s no reason to believe that Minnesota students have significantly different absentee patterns than Indiana students. Chronic absenteeism generally behaves similarly from state to state.
If anything, Minnesota may be in a place of greater need than Indiana; in 2024, 19 percent of Indiana students were considered chronically absent, and 24.5 percent of Minnesota students were chronically absent.
As I have written previously, Minnesota is in significant need of an attendance systems refresh. It’s time for the Minnesota Department of Education to create standardized attendance codes and publish attendance data in a timely manner. MDE has noted that they plan to release a chronic absenteeism tracking dashboard, which could prove to be an incredibly fruitful first step in identifying the students most in need and forming a plan to turn their (excused or unexcused) absences into a solid attendance record.