Getting students back to school is only half the battle. But many approaches — and many news articles about their efforts — leave out what happens to kids once they return.
By Robert Barnett
How will our young people learn if they don’t show up to school?
It’s a question that’s on many education reporters’ minds these days, and for good reason.
While chronic absenteeism has always been a challenge, rates increased during the pandemic and have stayed high since: in the 2022-23 school year, 28% of American students missed 10% or more of school.
These students suffer socially and academically, are at greater risk of dropping out, and face long-term consequences including lower lifetime earnings and poorer health outcomes.
As former FutureEd policy director Liz Cohen wrote in The 74, what happens in school can’t make much of a difference if students aren’t there.
And last May, the AP education team’s dogged reporting on too many kids missing too much school won national Pulitzer recognition.
So there has been a lot of attention paid, by the articles above and by countless others, to strategies that get kids back in school.
That matters! And there are research-based strategies that can improve student attendance.
But if what we really want is for students to learn – especially after they’ve missed a lot of class – we need to spend just as much time on an equally important question, and one that I rarely see asked or covered:
How do we make sure that chronically absent students can succeed when they make it back to class – and that media coverage includes this key component?
Despite their noble efforts, reporters who are only looking at getting kids back into classrooms are only depicting half the battle.
How do we make sure that chronically absent students can succeed when they make it back to class – and that media coverage includes this key component?
School Isn’t Designed to Meet Chronically Absent Students’ Needs
I first encountered chronic absenteeism firsthand as a math teacher in DC Public Schools, which have long experienced some of the highest absenteeism rates in the country.
I tried to teach a new lesson every day, but I always had students in my room who had missed the previous day (or days) of class.
From a teacher’s perspective, helping these students catch up is hard enough. But from the perspective of a chronically absent student, catching up feels impossible.
After all, knowledge in all subjects builds on itself. Therefore it will be difficult for any student to learn Wednesday’s lesson if they missed Monday and Tuesday. In fact, if Monday’s and Tuesday’s lessons had value, it should be!
So how can a student be expected to master Lesson 3 if they haven’t even seen Lessons 1 and 2? And please don’t assume that students can “get the notes from a friend” and be ready for class. If that were enough to learn, we wouldn’t need school in the first place.
In my classroom I – and every other teacher with chronically absent students – faced what seemed like an impossible dilemma. If I stuck to “on-pace” instruction, without pausing to help chronically absent students catch up, I would leave my absent students further behind. But if I slowed down to help my absent students get up to speed, I’d lose students who were ready to advance. I couldn’t possibly meet every learner’s needs.
Until, that is, I stopped teaching one lesson per day.
If I stuck to “on-pace” instruction, I would leave my absent students further behind. But if I slowed down, I’d lose students who were ready to advance.
There Are Ways to Support Chronically Absent Students in Class – and Every Other Student Too
My approach to help chronically absent students catch up was simple.
I recorded my direct instruction on short (5-8 minute) videos, let students advance at their own paces through my content, and required each student to master Lessons 1 and 2 before they reached Lesson 3.
This approach — now called the Modern Classroom instructional model — made learning more accessible and freed me up to work closely with my students during class.
It also let students who had missed class catch up, while their classmates who were ready could move on as quickly as they were able.
This approach worked for other teachers too.
In 2018, my colleague Kareem Farah and I founded the Modern Classrooms Project, which has now empowered over 80,000 educators around the world to meet their own learners’ needs, no matter how many days of class those students miss.
One study from Johns Hopkins University found that, while only 11% of traditional teachers in our partner schools felt that they could easily help students catch up after missing class, every single teacher who used our model felt capable of helping those students catch up. Students felt more capable and enjoyed learning more in Modern Classrooms as well. You can learn more about our impacts here.
Ours isn’t the only approach that can help chronically absent students catch up: mastery-based learning has been around for a long time, and its benefits for students have been demonstrated over many years. But I share it to show that there are better ways to reach students who miss class.
Without approaches like these, millions of chronically absent students will continue to languish, even if we can get them back to school.
Why isn’t there more reporting on classroom-level instructional approaches like these?
Reporting at the Classroom Level Matters
Why isn’t there more reporting on classroom-level instructional approaches like these?
I’m not sure of the answer. It might be because the details of pedagogy feel too technical for an average reader or reporter, because alternative approaches to instruction feel controversial, or because classroom-level solutions feel hard to scale. A state- or district-wide policy that gets students back in school is easy to understand and easy to support. Students should be in class. The rest is murky.
But if we really want students to learn – which, after all, is the point of attending school in the first place – neither our efforts nor our reporting can stop at the classroom door. What happens in individual classrooms, to the individual students who return to class after absences, really matters. These young people, like all of their classmates, deserve instruction that meets each of their diverse needs.
It’s time educators and journalists make classroom success a national priority as well.
Robert Barnett co-founded the Modern Classrooms Project, which has empowered 80,000+ educators in 180+ countries to meet every learner’s needs. Before that he taught math, computer science, English, social studies, and law, from the middle-school to university levels, at public and private schools in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of Meet Every Learner’s Needs: Redesigning Instruction So All Learners Can Succeed and he hopes his children will learn in Modern Classrooms someday!
Previously from The Grade
An interview with the AP team responsible for Pulitzer-recognized education coverage
Where next for chronic absenteeism coverage?
