In so many parts of life, just showing up is the first step. Unfortunately, in schools, students who are absent tend to struggle in class, perform worse on tests, and are less likely to graduate. Since students miss school for different reasons, it’s hard to know how to help individual students get to school on time, every day. Together with DC Public Schools (DCPS), we worked to identify the reasons students are absent and customize supports for those students and their families. To increase our impact, we built a statistical model to predict absenteeism before it became a chronic issue. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, we had to discontinue this effort.
Students lining up at Dorothy Height Elementary School. (Credit: DC Public Schools)
Why is this issue important in DC?
In the 2017-18 school year, nearly 28% of DCPS students missed at least eighteen school days. When kindergarten and first grade students miss this much school, they are much less likely to read at grade level in 3rd grade; for 6th graders, they are more likely to drop out in the future; and for 9th graders, they are less likely to graduate high school.
1
What did we do?
We used school records to build a statistical model to predict absenteeism before it becomes a chronic issue. With DCPS, we planned to target customized supports to students identified by the model. But, we had to discontinue this project before implementation because the nature of school attendance—and the data used to track attendance—changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, DC students attended school virtually, rather than in person, for long periods of time during the pandemic.
What have we learned?
We ended this project prior to implementation.
What comes next?
We may report on what we learned from the parts of the project we were able to complete. While this project did not move forward, the issue remains important for DC. With DCPS or other school partners in the future, we may revisit the predictive model we built to predict whether a student will be chronically absent.
What happened behind the scenes?
Lab members attended a DCPS Student Attendance & Support Services team meeting to learn about different attendance supports offered to students. For example, the DCPS team shared that middle school students may think of themselves as already grown up, when actually they are still rapidly developing and changing as individuals. They, as well as their families, may need new supports to help address changing family responsibilities and dynamics.