Education

Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere

Published

2 years ago

April 9, 2024

Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere

In Anchorage, affluent families set off on ski trips and other lengthy vacations, with the assumption that their children can keep up with schoolwork online.

In a working-class pocket of Michigan, school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance.

And across the country, students with heightened anxiety are opting to stay home rather than face the classroom.

In the four years since the pandemic closed schools, U.S. education has struggled to recover on a number of fronts, from learning loss, to enrollment, to student behavior.

But perhaps no issue has been as stubborn and pervasive as a sharp increase in student absenteeism, a problem that cuts across demographics and has continued long after schools reopened.

Nationally, an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic, according to the most recent data, from 40 states and Washington, D.C., compiled by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Chronic absence is typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or about 18 days, for any reason.

Increase in chronic absenteeism, 2019–23

By local child poverty rates

By length of school closures

By district racial makeup

Source: Upshot analysis of data from Nat Malkus, American Enterprise Institute. Districts are grouped into highest, middle and lowest third.

The increases have occurred in districts big and small, and across income and race. For districts in wealthier areas, chronic absenteeism rates have about doubled, to 19 percent in the 2022-23 school year from 10 percent before the pandemic, a New York Times analysis of the data found.

Poor communities, which started with elevated rates of student absenteeism, are facing an even bigger crisis: Around 32 percent of students in the poorest districts were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, up from 19 percent before the pandemic.

Even districts that reopened quickly during the pandemic, in fall 2020, have seen vast increases.

“The problem got worse for everybody in the same proportional way,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who collected and studied the data.

Victoria, Texas reopened schools in August 2020, earlier than many other districts. Even so, student absenteeism in the district has doubled.

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

The trends suggest that something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school, in ways that may be long lasting. What was once a deeply ingrained habit — wake up, catch the bus, report to class — is now something far more tenuous.

“Our relationship with school became optional,” said Katie Rosanbalm, a psychologist and associate research professor with the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.

The habit of daily attendance — and many families’ trust — was severed when schools shuttered in spring 2020. Even after schools reopened, things hardly snapped back to normal. Districts offered remote options, required Covid-19 quarantines and relaxed policies around attendance and grading.

Today, student absenteeism is a leading factor hindering the nation’s recovery from pandemic learning losses, educational experts say. Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school. And a rotating cast of absent classmates can negatively affect the achievement of even students who do show up, because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track.

“If we don’t address the absenteeism, then all is naught,” said Adam Clark, the superintendent of Mt. Diablo Unified, a socioeconomically and racially diverse district of 29,000 students in Northern California, where he said absenteeism has “exploded” to about 25 percent of students. That’s up from 12 percent before the pandemic.

U.S. students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses. Absenteeism is one key reason.

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

Why Students Are Missing School

Schools everywhere are scrambling to improve attendance, but the new calculus among families is complex and multifaceted.

At South Anchorage High School in Anchorage, where students are largely white and middle-to-upper income, some families now go on ski trips during the school year, or take advantage of off-peak travel deals to vacation for two weeks in Hawaii, said Sara Miller, a counselor at the school.

For a smaller number of students at the school who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the reasons are different, and more intractable. They often have to stay home to care for younger siblings, Ms. Miller said. On days they miss the bus, their parents are busy working or do not have a car to take them to school.

And because teachers are still expected to post class work online, often nothing more than a skeleton version of an assignment, families incorrectly think students are keeping up, Ms. Miller said.

Sara Miller, a counselor at South Anchorage High School for 20 years, now sees more absences from students across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Ash Adams for The New York Times

Across the country, students are staying home when sick, not only with Covid-19, but also with more routine colds and viruses.

And more students are struggling with their mental health, one reason for increased absenteeism in Mason, Ohio, an affluent suburb of Cincinnati, said Tracey Carson, a district spokeswoman. Because many parents can work remotely, their children can also stay home.

For Ashley Cooper, 31, of San Marcos, Texas, the pandemic fractured her trust in an education system that she said left her daughter to learn online, with little support, and then expected her to perform on grade level upon her return. Her daughter, who fell behind in math, has struggled with anxiety ever since, she said.

“There have been days where she’s been absolutely in tears — ‘Can’t do it. Mom, I don’t want to go,’” said Ms. Cooper, who has worked with the nonprofit Communities in Schools to improve her children’s school attendance. But she added, “as a mom, I feel like it’s OK to have a mental health day, to say, ‘I hear you and I listen. You are important.’”

Experts say missing school is both a symptom of pandemic-related challenges, and also a cause. Students who are behind academically may not want to attend, but being absent sets them further back. Anxious students may avoid school, but hiding out can fuel their anxiety.

And schools have also seen a rise in discipline problems since the pandemic, an issue intertwined with absenteeism.

Dr. Rosanbalm, the Duke psychologist, said both absenteeism and behavioral outbursts are examples of the human stress response, now playing out en masse in schools: fight (verbal or physical aggression) or flight (absenteeism).

“If kids are not here, they are not forming relationships,” said Quintin Shepherd, the superintendent in Victoria, Texas.

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

Quintin Shepherd, the superintendent in Victoria, Texas, first put his focus on student behavior, which he described as a “fire in the kitchen” after schools reopened in August 2020.

The district, which serves a mostly low-income and Hispanic student body of around 13,000, found success with a one-on-one coaching program that teaches coping strategies to the most disruptive students. In some cases, students went from having 20 classroom outbursts per year to fewer than five, Dr. Shepherd said.

But chronic absenteeism is yet to be conquered. About 30 percent of students are chronically absent this year, roughly double the rate before the pandemic.

Dr. Shepherd, who originally hoped student absenteeism would improve naturally with time, has begun to think that it is, in fact, at the root of many issues.

“If kids are not here, they are not forming relationships,” he said. “If they are not forming relationships, we should expect there will be behavior and discipline issues. If they are not here, they will not be academically learning and they will struggle. If they struggle with their coursework, you can expect violent behaviors.”

Teacher absences have also increased since the pandemic, and student absences mean less certainty about which friends and classmates will be there. That can lead to more absenteeism, said Michael A. Gottfried, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. His research has found that when 10 percent of a student’s classmates are absent on a given day, that student is more likely to be absent the following day.

Absent classmates can have a negative impact on the achievement and attendance of even the students who do show up.

Ash Adams for The New York Times

Is This the New Normal?

In many ways, the challenge facing schools is one felt more broadly in American society: Have the cultural shifts from the pandemic become permanent?

In the work force, U.S. employees are still working from home at a rate that has remained largely unchanged since late 2022. Companies have managed to “put the genie back in the bottle” to some extent by requiring a return to office a few days a week, said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work. But hybrid office culture, he said, appears here to stay.

Some wonder whether it is time for schools to be more pragmatic.

Lakisha Young, the chief executive of the Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy group that works with low-income families in California, suggested a rigorous online option that students could use in emergencies, such as when a student misses the bus or has to care for a family member. “The goal should be, how do I ensure this kid is educated?” she said.

Relationships with adults at school and other classmates are crucial for attendance.

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

In the corporate world, companies have found some success appealing to a sense of social responsibility, where colleagues rely on each other to show up on the agreed-upon days.

A similar dynamic may be at play in schools, where experts say strong relationships are critical for attendance.

There is a sense of: “If I don’t show up, would people even miss the fact that I’m not there?” said Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, the commissioner of education in Connecticut.

In her state, a home visit program has yielded positive results, in part by working with families to address the specific reasons a student is missing school, but also by establishing a relationship with a caring adult. Other efforts — such as sending text messages or postcards to parents informing them of the number of accumulated absences — can also be effective.

Regina Murff has worked to re-establish the daily habit of school attendance for her sons, who are 6 and 12.

Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times

In Ypsilanti, Mich., outside of Ann Arbor, a home visit helped Regina Murff, 44, feel less alone when she was struggling to get her children to school each morning.

After working at a nursing home during the pandemic, and later losing her sister to Covid-19, she said, there were days she found it difficult to get out of bed. Ms. Murff was also more willing to keep her children home when they were sick, for fear of accidentally spreading the virus.

But after a visit from her school district, and starting therapy herself, she has settled into a new routine. She helps her sons, 6 and 12, set out their outfits at night and she wakes up at 6 a.m. to ensure they get on the bus. If they are sick, she said, she knows to call the absence into school. “I’ve done a huge turnaround in my life,” she said.

But bringing about meaningful change for large numbers of students remains slow, difficult work.

Nationally, about 26 percent of students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic.

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

The Ypsilanti school district has tried a bit of everything, said the superintendent, Alena Zachery-Ross. In addition to door knocks, officials are looking for ways to make school more appealing for the district’s 3,800 students, including more than 80 percent who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. They held themed dress-up days — ’70s day, pajama day — and gave away warm clothes after noticing a dip in attendance during winter months.

“We wondered, is it because you don’t have a coat, you don’t have boots?” said Dr. Zachery-Ross.

Still, absenteeism overall remains higher than it was before the pandemic. “We haven’t seen an answer,” she said.

Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

3 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.