To succeed in school, students have to be present. Families and teachers can work together to make sure students show up every day on time. To do so, families and teachers need a trusting relationship they can depend on if attendance becomes an issue. With the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME), an education technology company, and public schools in DC, we tested whether giving teachers a new communications app would help them positively engage families and improve student attendance. The project has informed the District’s strategies for increasing student attendance and investing in education technology.
Sample conversation between a teacher and parent. (Credit: The Lab @ DC)
Why is this issue important in DC?
In School Year 2018-19, 30.2% of public school students in DC missed more than 10% of school days.1 Research in other cities (Chicago and Philadelphia) shows that absenteeism in this range is an important predictor of high school dropout.2
What did we do?
Evidence from multiple cities suggests that informing and engaging families about student absenteeism can improve attendance.3 There is much less research on the impact of education technological applications designed to support parent-teacher communications about attendance. The evidence is especially limited for upper grade levels.4
In this project, school administrators and teachers received professional development around positive family engagement and access to a web and mobile app to text message and email parents. The app included features designed to support teachers in building bridges for parents who were hard to reach due to irregular schedules, work commitments, or language barriers.
Six DC public middle and high schools piloted the web and mobile app during the 2019 - 2020 academic year. All families could receive messages from school administrators. This study focuses on the impact from the additional app use by teachers. In each school, we randomly assigned teachers into two groups: those who could use the app to message the families of students in their classrooms and those who could not. We analyzed how well the app worked by comparing attendance for students in the classrooms where teachers were allowed to use the app (treatment group) to attendance for students in the classrooms where teachers could not use the app (comparison group).
What have we learned?
Our analysis showed that offering teachers the app may have improved attendance by reducing chronic absenteeism by 3-9 percentage points. Our ability to see an impact from the app was limited by the shift to virtual learning in March 2020 due to the pandemic. Since virtual learning changed how absenteeism was measured, we were able to study attendance outcomes only for students in schools that rolled out the app earlier in the school year. As a result, our sample became too small to know precisely whether the improvement in chronic absenteeism was due to the app or chance. Beyond having a possible effect on attendance, we used data science tools to learn that the app was also used by schools to provide valuable social support to students and their families during the pandemic.
“I think this is a great tool to support students who are missing school or late to class, but also to shout out and celebrate students who have shown up 100% of the time — and to celebrate parents.”
What comes next?
The Deputy Mayor for Education will use the findings, along with those from the Every Ride Counts project, to shape the District’s Every Day Counts Initiative, which ensures that every student is in school every day.
What happened behind the scenes?
The Lab’s perspective on different ways to tackle attendance issues was not only shaped by academic research. It was also shaped by the fact that The Lab staff includes several parents of current (and future) public school students in DC, as well as former K-12 teachers. Their experiences with classroom apps and school messages—both positive and negative (i.e., form letters filled with legalese about the consequences of missing school)—informed how we think about how both parents and teachers engage with the app.