There’s no single silver-bullet solution for bringing down rates of chronic absenteeism, a new study finds.
Instead, the most successful schools tailor multiple strategies to their community’s needs, starting with efforts to build strong relationships with students and their families, finds the analysis by the Everyone Graduates Center and the Partnership for Student Success at Johns Hopkins University.
“The data really says you’ve got to match the [attendance] strategy you pick to the reason why your kids aren’t coming,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center. “With older kids, and even parents, they have to trust you when you ask that question.”
Future Ed, a think tank at Georgetown University, and Attendance Works released the study Monday alongside an update of its Attendance Playbook, which examines more than 150 studies on attendance strategies to identify research-based solutions. The third edition of the playbook builds on previous versions, which states and districts use to select strategies.
Though definitions vary slightly, students are typically considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of school days.
Rates of chronic absenteeism peaked at about 28% in the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the Return to Learn tracker maintained by the American Enterprise Institute. Of the 45 states that have reported data from 2024-25, 38 have shown declining rates of chronic absenteeism, but none have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the tracker. Of the six states that have reported data for the 2025-26 school year, all have reported declines.
Effective attendance strategies target student relationships
To evaluate successful strategies, researchers at Johns Hopkins analyzed results from two prior nationally representative surveys of principals conducted during the 2024-25 school year: one conducted by the Partnership for Student Success in collaboration with the RAND Corporation, and a School Pulse Panel conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.
In the federal survey, principals overall identified staying home for minor symptoms, physical illness, poor mental health, and parent apathy as key contributors. In high-poverty schools, principals were more likely to identify “staying home to take care of siblings” and transportation as key barriers, the analysis found.
Both surveys asked principals about the use and effectiveness of 10 common attendance strategies, including tutoring, wraparound supports, incentives like awards for good attendance, involving law enforcement, and home visits.
“In both surveys, strategies that promote students’ school connectedness had the strongest and most widespread effectiveness ratings,” researchers wrote.
What the analysis found:
- The strategies deemed most effective focused on relationships. In the federal survey, 72% of principals identified efforts to build a supportive school environment as moderately, very, or extremely effective. Sixty-nine percent identified home visits, and 67% identified mentoring programs.
- Twenty-seven percent of principals reported that their schools’ absenteeism levels were equal to or below pre-pandemic levels. Those principals were more likely to say their schools had identified four or more effective attendance strategies than other respondents.
- Principals were three times as likely to say their school had at least four effective strategies if it had an attendance team, a group of educators, counselors, and administrators who meet regularly to analyze attendance data and find solutions.
- A school’s effective use of student and family surveys, interviews, and focus groups also correlated with a higher number of effective attendance strategies.
The results suggest that schools that prioritize relational work with students and families are more successful at increasing attendance as are those that find successful ways to collect feedback about barriers that contribute to absenteeism, Balfanz said.
That can be a challenge because the chronically absent students schools most want to hear from are often disengaged and hard to reach, he said. And families may not want to report issues like missing school to care for siblings if they fear legal consequences, Balfanz said.
Finding attendance strategies that fit school communities
Schools that haven’t had success with blanket surveys asking about attendance should try smaller strategies, like asking trusted teachers to interview students or doing a targeted audit to determine why each absent student didn’t come to school on a given day, he said.
If a strategy isn’t effective, school leaders should ask if it matches their community’s needs, if they are implementing it well, and if it reaches a meaningful number of students, Balfanz said.
“It’s hard but doable,” he said. “It takes time to build that know-how and capacity of: What are the strategies that make a difference?”
The Attendance Playbook aims to make research more digestible for school and district leaders who are looking for solutions, said Maureen Tracey-Mooney, Future Ed’s associate director. The volume reviews an array of post-pandemic research and a deep dive on strategies related to student relationships and social-emotional learning.
Since the pandemic, “kids are feeling more isolated and less like they belong in school,” she said.
“If you don’t have those trusted relationships that anchor you to school, you are less likely to go,” Tracey-Mooney said.
Authors contracted with Mathematica Inc. to screen hundreds of studies, identifying 150 to include in the review, and rate the research findings.
The playbook organizes successful interventions in tiers, starting with schoolwide efforts that affect all students, like fostering positive school climates. More targeted strategies include early warning systems that track data to identify students who are not on track to graduate. The most intensive supports include partnerships to address housing insecurity or severe student anxiety.
“We hope states and districts take it up and use it in their trainings with principals and superintendents,” Tracey-Mooney said. “‘How are you engaging families? What are the five strategies that you are going to select that respond to those challenges?’”
