Chronic absenteeism – referring to students who miss 10% or more days of the school year – has become one of the most urgent problems across American schools since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Before the pandemic, about 15% of students across the country missed that much school.
That figure roughly doubled between 2022 and 2023 to more than 28%, according to recent national estimates.
Now, several years later, this figure sits at around 23% nationally. That means close to 1 in 4 students are still missing enough school to put their learning at serious risk.
Researchers point to various challenges to help explain why so many students frequently miss school, including poverty, unreliable transportation and housing instability.
But addressing those problems requires long-term policy changes that are often slow to make and not necessarily possible.
This challenge layered on top of the very real barriers that chronically absent students face can make educators feel defeated and think that absenteeism is simply too big and entrenched of a problem for schools to meaningfully address. This feeling can cause educators and other observers to lose sight of how the school itself can be part of the solution.
We are education scholars who recently published research showing that positive school climates play a significant role in reducing chronic absenteeism, including for students most at risk for chronic absence. This research demonstrates that when schools attend to the conditions that make all students feel welcomed and valued, they are much more likely to show up.
How students feel at school plays a more consequential role in reducing rates of chronic absenteeism than some might think.
Our January 2026 analysis draws on nearly a decade of data from the Georgia Student Health Survey, an annual survey the state conducts with middle and high school students.
We found that school climate – or how students experience their schools on a day-to-day basis – matters a lot for whether they attend school regularly.
A school’s climate is shaped by whether students feel safe, whether they feel they belong, whether there are adults who know them and support them, and whether the building runs in a way that helps them learn. In other words, it’s how school feels to the students inside it – and as these experiences become more positive, students are much less likely to miss a lot of school.
This finding is not unique to Georgia.
In 2021, a study of New York City students reached similar conclusions, as did another 2026 study of Chicago students.
These researchers found that school climate and how connected students felt to their school mattered even more for attendance after the pandemic than before it.
Across very different contexts – even after accounting for poverty, homelessness and other factors that contribute to chronic absence – these studies suggest that when students feel safe, connected and supported at school, they show up.
But our results from Georgia reveal something equally important about what happens when schools lose that positive climate. When students perceive their school becoming less welcoming and supportive, their absences don’t just increase gradually – they spike dramatically. And these spikes are steepest among Black and Latino students.
When we look at what schools are actually doing to improve attendance, a revealing gap emerges.
Some school leaders are clearly taking the problem seriously.
Nearly half of surveyed school principals in Georgia and Michigan named attendance as a top concern in a 2025 survey. These principals said they were trying a range of responses to address the problem.
However, most of their strategies were either communication-based, such as calling or writing to parents, or incentives-based, such as offering rewards to students for good attendance. While potentially helpful, these approaches are aimed at changing student or parent behavior but do little to address some other underlying reasons students are missing school, such as school climate.
This same survey finds that in both states, strategies focused on improving what students actually experience inside the building make up only about 15% of what schools report doing.
When we look more closely at which specific dimensions of climate appear to matter most for reducing absenteeism, three stood out as the most consequential. They were connectedness, safety, and structure for learning.
Connectedness reflects whether students feel a sense of belonging and feel tied to others at school. Of the eight school climate dimensions included in our analysis, connectedness was the strongest predictor, corresponding to nearly a 3 percentage point reduction in chronic absenteeism.
Safety, meaning an environment where students are not worried about being hurt or caught up in frequent conflict, was similarly linked to notable declines in chronic absence. Structure for learning, or whether a school has clear systems and supports in place, including consistent behavioral standards and high academic expectations, also predicted meaningful declines in the share of chronically absent students.
Importantly, these patterns held across both middle and high schools and across racial groups, which suggests that investing in these areas is a broadly applicable strategy for making school a place students want to be.
Creating a welcoming school climate requires real work. It asks school leaders and teachers to both acknowledge the challenges that make school harder for some students and honestly ask: Are we inviting students in or pushing them away?
A school might start small. We think that auditing who is being suspended and for what, making sure every student has at least one adult checking in on them, or asking students directly what would make them want to be at school are all good places to begin.
Poverty, transportation and housing instability are real barriers to students’ attendance, and we believe that addressing them remains essential. But fixing these challenges will take time.
When educators and school administrators prioritize whether students feel connected to their school community, as well as safe and supported at school, they send students a message that is itself an intervention: You are seen here, you are safe here, and this place was built with you in mind. Our data suggests that message is powerful enough to help bring some students back.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jerome A. Graham, Michigan State University; Su Yon Choi, Florida Atlantic University, and Yi-Chih Chiang, Idaho State University
Read more: More than 50% of Detroit students regularly miss class – and schools alone can’t solve the problem How Ohio schools reduced chronic absenteeism Breakfast After the Bell programs reduce school absenteeism
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
