Online assignments aren’t a cure for rising absenteeism in NC schools, researchers say

Missing too much school will hurt a student’s test scores, no matter the school — and even in an era of online learning, when some assignments can be completed from home, researchers say after examining North Carolina data. 

Access to online assignments could only be having a marginal effect on academic outcomes, said Ethan Hutt, a University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill researcher who co-authored a recent study on absenteeism.

Researchers pursued the study amid worsening attendance rates that have school leaders, policymakers and education experts around the country concerned. They say it’s part of a cultural shift in attitudes about the necessity of daily school attendance, sparked during the Covid-19 pandemic, when students learned mostly remotely and relied on access to assignments in online student portals or, in some cases, through paper packet delivery.

“We’re seeing basically a 65% increase in chronic absence rates,” said Hutt, an associate professor in UNC’s School of Education. “We’re seeing really, really large numbers of absences.”

About one-quarter of North Carolina students were chronically absent during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, down from about one-third during the 2021-22 school year, according to state data. That means they missed at least 10% or more of school days. Before the pandemic, less than 16% of North Carolina students were chronically absent.

The study, published by the free-market think tank American Enterprise Institute, looked at absences and performance during the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years in Maryland and North Carolina, at the student level. Scholars David Blazar, of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Seth Gerhenson, of American University, also co-authored the study.

Previous studies have linked chronic absenteeism and poor academic performance, and researchers wanted to see if and how the pandemic changed any of those realities. They found only that the academic consequences of chronic absenteeism are only slightly less severe — about 10% — than they were before, a phenomenon Hutt attributed to the increased availability of course materials online and other technology that can help students.

“Parents shouldn’t think, ‘Oh, well, the stuff is online. My student can catch up.’ You’re going to see the accumulative effect of these absences on student test scores,” Hutt said.

Hutt described the low attendance of students as a “cultural shift.” Low attendance in school is not merely a lingering effect of the pandemic, with high absences among students who had once attended school remotely, he said, because absenteeism is up even among kindergarteners.

Absences had a bigger impact on math scores than reading scores, researchers found. That was more true in North Carolina than in Maryland; in North Carolina, the impact on math was far worse and the impact on reading was much less.

The findings were consistent across urban, suburban and rural schools. That means the risk of worse academic performance exists for any student, regardless of the school they attend, Hutt said. Effects will be worse on lower-income schools, where attendance rates are often worse, he said.

Education leaders and policymakers should think about ways to communicate the consequences of poor attendance but also ways to help students get to school, Hutt said. For example, thinking about how a student in a rural area can get to school if they’ve missed their bus or working with organizations in communities with attendance struggles. Schools should figure out why students are missing school and put resources toward helping them get there, he said.

“This is a place where we will see a return on our investment,” Hutt said. “We know that if a student is there in school, they’re going to do better than if they’re not.”

Schools started many efforts to address attendance issues during and immediately after the pandemic, using one-time federal pandemic stimulus dollars. It’s unclear how many of those efforts remain, one year after the deadline to spend those dollars.

Some school officials told WRAL News last year they’d ramped up rewards for attendance and also punishments for failing to attend. Some districts are even referring more families to court to be held accountable for their children’s absences.