It remains fairly uncommon for school districts to have rebounded from significant increases in chronic absenteeism experienced during the pandemic, according to new research published by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
In fact, just 13% of districts studied had reverted to their pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism levels by the 2024-25 school year, the research showed.
Researchers defined “substantial increases” in chronic absenteeism for districts as a more than 10 percentage-point increase between the 2017-18 or 2018-19 school years and 2021-22.