Making a Case for Statewide School Attendance Data

A recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times — Why tracking chronic student absenteeism is key for California — points to a notable data gap that we’ve heard about elsewhere.

In the opinion piece, Hedy Cheng and Yolie Flores point out that California doesn’t have a systematic way to capture chronic student absences. Rates of chronic absence may be more significant than we realize – and affect children far younger than we may expect. Cheng and Flores, for example, point to a national study that estimates that as many as 1 in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students miss at least a month of school.

This issue of attendance in school was important enough for San Diego County to include these data in its report card on children’s well being, published by that county’s Children’s Initiative. According to 2007 data from that report card, about one in four kids in public schools in San Diego County missed at least 5 percent of school days (amounting to about 9 days a year).

However, collecting these data were not easy for San Diego County, requiring extensive collaboration from the county’s school districts. If this indicator is so key – the SD report card describes school attendance as “one of the strongest predictors of school success or failure” – how can we make these data easier to analyze? Fortunately, Cheng and Flores point to some possible improvements, noting that the state’s Board of Education is looking into the possibility of tapping federal sources to track school attendance.

Tags: Data Challenges

Posted by Andy Krackov

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