Who Owns Attendance? Chronic Absenteeism and Shared Responsibility

The national conversation about chronic absenteeism has accelerated over the past several months, and for good reason.

A recent RAND study found that one-third of students ages 12 to 18 and nearly one in five parents believe missing three or more weeks of school is mostly acceptable. Family vacations during the school year, occasional mental health days, and allowing older students to decide whether they wanted to attend school were all viewed by many as reasonable. Shortly afterward, the American Enterprise Institute reported that although chronic absenteeism has declined from its post-pandemic peak, progress has slowed dramatically. What began as a crisis now appears to be settling into a persistent challenge rather than a temporary disruption.

Taken together, those reports suggest two things. First, expectations around school attendance may have shifted. Second, despite years of investment and attention, chronic absenteeism remains stubbornly above pre-pandemic levels. If that is true, perhaps it is time to broaden the conversation.

Much of the current discussion has appropriately focused on what schools should do differently. Researchers continue to examine which strategies, investments, and state supports are associated with reducing chronic absenteeism. The latest work from Johns Hopkins, for example, explores why some districts have been able to rebound while others have not, pointing to the importance of funding, data systems, technical assistance, and coordinated state and district efforts.

That work matters, and schools should continue it.

My question is a different one.

Who owns attendance?

I believe we have become so focused on what schools should do that we have become increasingly reluctant to talk about what families should do. Those are not competing conversations. They are complementary ones.

Schools should do everything reasonably within their power to improve attendance. They should build welcoming campuses, remove barriers wherever possible, communicate early and often, and create environments where students feel connected and successful.

Parents, however, are the only people who can establish, day after day and year after year, that attending school is simply expected.

Schools create the conditions for learning.

Families create the expectation that students will be there to learn.

Although the RAND study focused on middle and high school students, I don't believe the attitudes it identified suddenly appear in adolescence. They are often rooted in expectations established years earlier. In the elementary grades, attendance is largely a parental decision. Young children are not deciding whether they would rather stay home or skip school. Adults make those decisions.

By middle and high school, the picture often changes. Anyone who has worked in a secondary school has heard some version of the same sentence: "I can't make him go." Or, "I dropped her off, but she left campus." Those parents are often frustrated, discouraged, and genuinely at their wits' end. By then, however, schools are frequently confronting years of habits and expectations they did not create and cannot undo on their own.

That does not mean every attendance problem has the same cause. Some families face extraordinary barriers. Housing instability, chronic illness, transportation challenges, family crises, and significant mental health needs require schools to respond with compassion, flexibility, and meaningful support. Other families have gradually allowed attendance to become negotiable. Still others are struggling to regain influence over teenagers who no longer believe attending school is expected. Those situations deserve different responses, but they do not eliminate the importance of parental responsibility.

Part of the challenge is that attendance is easy to underestimate. Parents naturally think about individual days. Schools see the cumulative effect. There are only 180 instructional days in a school year. Missing just two days each month means a student has missed ten percent of the school year. Viewed one absence at a time, a doctor's appointment, a family vacation, or an occasional day at home may seem insignificant. Viewed across an entire year, those decisions represent weeks of lost learning. Students cannot benefit from instruction they do not receive.

Whenever parental responsibility is discussed, the conversation often jumps immediately to punishment. I think that is the wrong place to begin. Accountability should begin with partnership, communication, and a genuine effort to understand why a student is missing school. Schools should remove barriers wherever they reasonably can and work alongside families to solve problems before they become crises.

That does not mean accountability ends with support. When a family has the ability to get a child to school but repeatedly chooses not to engage, schools have a responsibility to hold firm to the expectation that attendance matters. That may mean difficult conversations, documented attendance plans, persistent follow-up, and progressively stronger interventions. The specific response will vary depending on the circumstances, but the expectation should not. A student's education is too important for chronic absenteeism to become something we simply accept.

To me, accountability is not synonymous with punishment. It means making attendance an expectation rather than a daily negotiation. It means communicating with schools when barriers arise, engaging in problem-solving before attendance becomes a crisis, and following through on agreed-upon plans. Accountability should always be proportional to a family's circumstances. The expectations placed on the parent of a first grader are not identical to those placed on the parent of a seventeen-year-old. Families confronting homelessness or serious illness deserve a different response than families who have simply stopped treating attendance as a priority. Fairness requires us to recognize those differences without abandoning the expectation that children belong in school.

The research has helped us better understand why students miss school and what schools can do in response. That work should continue. My concern is simply that we have devoted far less attention to the expectations that belong at home.

If the AEI report is right that chronic absenteeism is becoming a long-term condition rather than a temporary one, schools cannot carry that responsibility alone. They never could.

Schools can build relationships. They can remove barriers. They can create extraordinary places for students to learn. What they cannot do is create an expectation for attendance that does not exist at home.

Public education has always worked best when schools and families embrace the responsibilities that belong to each of them.

No attendance initiative will ever be more powerful than a home where school attendance is simply expected.

Dr. Ryan Smith, with more than 20 years of leadership experience in public education, is dedicated to ensuring every student receives an outstanding education and reaches their highest potential. Through his current service as Deputy Superintendent in the Bellflower Unified School District and previous experience as Superintendent of the Monrovia Unified School District, his commitment to putting students first has driven success and positive change across various schools and districts. Learn more about Dr. Smith at his website, on LinkedIn, or X.