Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Chris Saldaña: Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Saldana, and this is the National Education Policy Center's Education Interview of the Month. This month, we're interviewing Dr. Michael Gottfried, who's a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gottfried is an applied economist with expertise in the economics of education and education policy.

His research targets data driven decision making on a broad range of educational issues, including student absenteeism, career and technical education, Early Childhood Education and Educating Students with Disabilities. In this month's podcast, Dr. Gottfried walks us through some of his research on chronic absenteeism and education policy.

So for folks who may be unfamiliar with the term chronic absenteeism, where does it come from and what does it mean?

Michael A. Gottfried: In the context of K-12 education policy, chronic absenteeism refers to generally missing 10 percent more of the school year. So what's funny about it is that there's not one single measure that states are using to define chronic absenteeism, which makes it complicated, but when is anything ever not complicated in education policy?

So we have some states that define it and most states, I should say, define it as missing 10 percent or more of the school year. Some states or districts might say it's 10 days or more or might say it's 18 days or more, but generally like for the introductions of chronic absenteeism, I would put it at 10 percent of the school year or more.

And generally that's about 18 days.

Chris Saldaña: How does that variation between states change the experience of students, the experience of schools and districts? are some states, for example, could they be considered to be harsher on students in terms of chronic absenteeism versus others?

Michael A. Gottfried: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

There's variation and it also changes our, us as policy makers. It changes how we perceive chronic absenteeism because, if a child is chronically absent at 5 percent of the year, so I'm missing 5 percent of the year. Now we're intervening the student is now at risk at 5%, whereas in another state that student would not be considered at risk.

And so it's putting students at risk, potentially in one state, that in a different state they wouldn't be put at risk. So it's making it complicated for an unknown reason, right? And so it really probably depends on states histories and states preferences. But there's no rhyme or reason as to why it's different.

There's also no rhyme or reason as to why 10 percent was the cutoff. So it was set. The first time chronic absenteeism was really used was like in 2002. But the first time it was really used was in the mid 2010s. And it was coined as 10 percent or more. I think, this is just a hypothesis, that it's a nice round number.

But there's been work that's been done that missing 9 percent is the same as missing 11 percent is the same as missing, like there's nothing special about the 10 percent cutoff.

Chris Saldaña: What was the justification for all of a sudden now, okay, now we're going to focus on Chronic absenteeism. Was it, had it become an issue?

Or what, I imagine absenteeism has always been something that we've struggled with in public education. So why was that the time to do it?

Michael A. Gottfried: That's a great question. And it's true, we've been talking, I have a book with a co author Ethan Hutt at UNC Chapel Hill. And in the book we talk about absenteeism has been measured since like the 1900s, the early 1900s.

And he as a historian, has images from the early 1900s of like attendance logs. So this has been something that's been talked about, recorded, measured kept records of for a long time. So why the mid 2010s is a great question. So I think part of it is that we just have better data. So I think it's for the first time that we can see a whole state's data systems that was really ramped up.

Maybe it started even in the early 2000s, right? With NCLB, like just getting more data. And then all of a sudden it's Okay, we have a lot of kids who are absent, so that's part of it. I think another part of it is just this inertia that's happened. Back in the mid 2010s, VP Harris, Back when she was attorney general of California, was interested in chronic absenteeism, Obama was interested in chronic absenteeism health and human services was, so it was just this inertia, that it's hard to, it's like a chicken and the egg, where we don't really, can't really pinpoint who started first on that, and then we also just, we just see more kids are being absent, so I think that's also, there's always been absenteeism, but I think coining it Having more data and just having more eyes just continues to create this inertia around it.

Chris Saldaña: You mentioned that there's better data now. Do we know, or I guess I should ask, what do we know about the drivers of chronic absenteeism?

Michael A. Gottfried: We know that there are a lot of barriers. The barriers include health, right? So that's been something that's been very well established, particularly in the, like the school nursing literature, transportation is a huge issue, family logistics.

Especially when kids are young. So there's a lot of chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. And part of that comes down to just families for the first time are sending their kids to school. And that's a lot, it's very nice to send your kid one day. And then as a parent, you're like. I have to do this for the next 220 days.

That takes a lot of practice and planning. I need to have my kids lunch ready. They need to be in jackets, it's snowing out. That just takes a lot. So it's a lot of family logistics. There's a lot of issues around housing instability, foster care disengagement. So all of these are drivers of absenteeism that have been there for a longstanding, for a long time.

So it's not necessarily that these are new post COVID. That's a question that comes up, is how are things changed since COVID, but we're not really sure. These are things that have been around for a while, so the drivers are long standing drivers of absenteeism.

Chris Saldaña: You mentioned that there's some variation, for example, by age or by grade.

Are there other student characteristics where we noticed that there are significant differences in the kinds of life circumstances that are driving chronic absenteeism?

Michael A. Gottfried: So early on, we see a lot of health, right? Kids are young, their immune systems are still developing. So we see a lot of that, but we see it with a lot of young kids, school refusal.

But for the same reason that parents are still getting used to the idea of going to school, that's also really stressful on the kids. So they go from being at home or being in a pre K to all of a sudden being at a K 5 or K 12 and that, that can be really stressful for kids. And so we see a lot of early school refusal behaviors.

I don't want to go. I feel sick. And they may not actually be sick. We all have that like stereotype of like putting the heat lamp close to your forehead and saying, Mom, I have a fever. So there's a lot of that kind of behavior like that I don't want to go. And I understand because it's anxiety about going to school.

Then families get anxious, that trickles back down onto the kids. There's just a lot of feelings of anxiety about going to school. And then, interestingly enough, you see a bump in middle school, and you see a bump in high school. Those are, again, transition points. So we see these bumps in major life transition points for kids.

And it's about going to middle school now and that can be intimidating. That could be really scary and going to high school. Same thing can be intimidating and really scary for kids.

Chris Saldaña: What do we know of the impacts of chronic absenteeism?

Michael A. Gottfried: So we can say with enough confidence now in the research that it affects test scores.

It affects dropout. It affects social development. It affects the kids around me. If I'm absent more, my test scores. of my classmates go down. If I'm absent more, my classmates don't come as often. It also affects teachers in the way that they interact in, in the classroom. So I have a new study out with some students of mine that teachers perceptions of the absent kids are different than the perceptions of other kids in the room, even if the kids aren't like that. So for example, teachers perceive abstinence kids as being less academically prepared, even if those kids are high performing. So teachers are changing how they perceive the kids in the room. And then I have a study that is coming out just at the time of this podcast, actually on teacher job satisfaction.

Teachers feel less satisfied with their jobs. When they have more absent students, and the reason for that we build a framework is that teaching, the core of teaching is instruction. And the further that I deviate from the core of what my job is, the less satisfied I am with that job. So when we have kids who are absent, they come back and they exhibit all of these issues that I just raised.

So they, they are lower, often lower performing because they've missed school. They are disengaged or feel alienated because they've missed social time or they are socially less developed or they are, causing other kids to be upset. So the teachers are now remediating behavior, remediating academic stuff rather than focusing on core instruction.

And then the final piece of it, how it impacts schools, is that there's funding tied to daily attendance. And as kids miss school, schools miss out on financial resources, which is a huge hit to the school, particularly when we're talking about schools and districts that have kids who are missing half the year, which again, of course is it, is a, it's like a endless loop because those schools need the resources.

And so now we're not giving them the resources that they need to help support these kids. So it's. It's like an endless cycle. Unfortunately,

Chris Saldaña: I want to follow up on, on when you were mentioning about teachers and their experiences with chronic absenteeism and the way that it shapes their work.

What. What do we do with it in that kind of, with that kind of observation? Is it I imagine some of it is maybe preparation and making sure people are when they. When they encounter these kinds of challenges are prepared with some critical understandings of what might be happening.

But what have you found has been successful in supporting teachers who are experiencing these kinds of challenges in their classrooms?

Michael A. Gottfried: It's a great question, especially because it might not be a teacher's quote unquote job. When they sign up to teach, when you hire someone and you look at their schedule of duties, remediating absenteeism may not, may or may not have been on there.

And so I think that, first getting teachers on board, I think reducing absenteeism is a whole school effort. So we need kids to be in there, but when they're not there, we need teachers, we need other staff, we need school leaders to get on board. I think we also need to ensure that we don't reward or punish teachers for their classroom absence levels, which would be similar to what we did with test scores and value added modeling with No Child Left Behind. So the concern back then, rightfully is that there's lots of things going on outside of the classroom, and how can the teacher be held accountable? For that and it's similar here. So many of the things that I listed earlier on about the reasons why kids are absent are outside of a teacher's control and outside of the school's control.

And so what we really need to support for families, for parents, for children, but to get to the question of what can teachers do? So I think, yeah. First of all, I think for the first paper out on teacher perceptions, my research on that, I think just recognizing that teachers, Hey, you might be changing your views on this student, right?

Just really just recognizing that your views might change almost like a bias training, but that's not the right word for it, but just recognizing look, you will have students who are absent. You are going to have to change your practices for those students. Don't let that bias, or here are the steps to not bias that.

I think a second way to address that is providing supports for teachers, whether that's in classroom or a specific person outside of the classroom but at school who can address some of the needs of the students who are absent when they return. I think that would also, that would float over to the satisfaction study that I have.

That if a teacher's core source of happiness, of job satisfaction is teaching, and that's what they're best at, then what other supports at the school level, at the teacher level, can be implemented to help teachers. For example, could we have a after school program, not run by the teacher, to catch those students up?

So at least the teacher doesn't feel like, okay, this is my responsibility once again.

Chris Saldaña: That's a perfect segue to my next question, because I think you mentioned that when teachers sign up to be teachers, Oftentimes, it isn't even in the fine print that they're going to have these kinds of challenges. I want to ask you about a systems level question about what have we done as a society, whether it be the federal government or state governments, to try to address chronic absenteeism.

Michael A. Gottfried: So I think the first thing is tracking and monitoring. absenteeism. I think it's really important to get a handle on what does it mean to be absent, who's absent, why are they absent, and the data are often rough. You would think that it would be super easy, you're either there or you're not. And it's actually really difficult because there's excused, there's unexcused absences.

Having a doctor's note, some families from other income, different income levels might be able to have a doctor's note more readily available than families from other different income levels, or they have the social capital to know to call the doctor or whatnot. So it's not as easy as you would think to just measure absenteeism.

So I think that's the first step. It's just what does it mean to be absent? How do we measure that? How do we keep that consistent? Cross, even just across schools in a district, if we can get some consistency, I think that would be really helpful because to your point earlier on, a kid who's chronically absent in California might not be chronically absent according to a measure in Maryland and that, that doesn't seem right and that makes it really hard to develop policy.

So I think the first step is just better measures, thinking about the measures.

Chris Saldaña: In terms of other interventions, are there, have there been investments in, you mentioned that maybe extracurricular programs might help or after school programs or maybe there's some other interventions. Have there been efforts to implement those kinds of interventions at state, within states or through the federal government?

Michael A. Gottfried: not at the state or federal government level. They've left it up to the schools generally because it's, they, they're so context specific, which makes it difficult from the research side to say this is a hundred percent what's working, although I'm working on that.

I have a us department of education funded study. That's doing a meta analysis or analyzing all of the study is to say what actually is working, but the issue is that the way that you implement something and San Francisco is so different from how you implemented in Georgia, let's say, and so it becomes really complicated because, even transportation oh just let's just offer school buses, but that looks and let's say rural America looks so different than in like Chicago.

And so it's hard to even say like transportation would be the solution when transportation looks so vastly different across the United States. Or it looks so different even within a single state.

Chris Saldaña: Are there policies that, and this may be at the district level, are there policies that you have encountered that you would say that's probably not what we want to be doing?

Policies that might be harmful for students?

Michael A. Gottfried: Yes, two things. One, anything punitive is not going to work. Anything punitive. And that could be as simple as pointing kids out for being absent. When they come back to as grandiose as getting the juvenile justice system involved. So I think threats to parents, threats to kids, that's just not working.

I understand the argument that we want to hold kids and parents accountable for coming to school, but we don't have to do that through a punitive system. So I think both of those things can exist at the same time. Yes, we want kids to come to school. Yes, we want parents to be responsible for their kids.

No, we don't want to punish in return. I think those are not working. I think a second, I said there were two, I'm going to say three. The second thing is when things get organizationally complex. I think that also puts a big strain. So for example, a school now has a mentorship program, but it also has a texting program.

It also has a transportation card reimbursement program. So the more actors that you get involved, it just gets really complicated. And it gets really complicated just administratively because now you need someone at the school who's going to reach out to all of these actors to make this happen. It gets complicated because it's also gets difficult to determine what is it that's working.

So what's the mentor? Was it the transportation card? Was it the free meal? Like I know anymore as a school, which it is, I think. So I think that makes it really complicated. It also makes it really difficult to replicate in other schools. So for example, if you have a mentorship program in let's use Philadelphia, where I am, how do we know that's going to work in state college in the middle of Pennsylvania, they're such different contexts that, for Oh, we had city year and that was so great for Philly schools.

There's no city year in let's say state college. And how can we say that's a good policy or program to have when we know it's not replicable? And then the third thing is, it's, what we're really trying to get after here are the children who are missing 40 percent of the year, 30 percent of the year, 50 percent of the year, 20 percent of the year even.

But what I see a lot of focus on is just trying to get those 11 percent down to 9%. Those are the kids that are easy to work with. And so what I see a lot of are things like pizza parties and pop parties. If we're all here, we get pizza at, that works for that kid who is maybe missing a little bit too much school, but if you're missing half the year, I don't think pizza is going to be the reason why I suddenly start coming to school, but those are the kids we really need to focus on.

And that's also the problem with the chronic absence measure is that this 10 percent is low in some ways. that the kids that are really at risk are the ones that are missing 40, 50 percent, 60 percent of the year. Those are the kids I want us to focus on to get back into school. But a pizza party or access to the rec room because you were here for all of the school days of this week is not going to get at those kids that really need supports and resources.

Chris Saldaña: Have we seen, I know the pandemic changed a lot about chronic absenteeism and the challenges that schools and districts are facing. How much has that population of students who are really struggling to come to school consistently, how much has that population grown since the pandemic? Was it a significant increase or was it just a pretty consistent trend before and after?

Michael A. Gottfried: Yes, that's a great question. So we've seen an increase in the populations that we care about coming to school. So for example, we've seen kids with disabilities, which is an area of my research. They were around, let's say they were like 15 percent of that population was. Was missing. And now it's like a 30 percent or chronically absent.

So we've seen huge jumps. There's been a little bit of a shrink back. So maybe that's a sign that was pandemic related. And then it's like coming back in a little bit, but these rates are still really high for student groups that we care a lot about.

Chris Saldaña: I'm going to ask you a really big policy question that, that I don't know that there's even an answer to, but there have been two big shifts in education policy that I think stand out to a lot of folks.

One is choice and one is high stakes accountability. When you think about the challenge of chronic absenteeism and these two movements as being front and center and as solutions for educational inequity and educational injustice, what do we know about how these policy ideas and the issue of chronic absenteeism intersect?

Michael A. Gottfried: In theory, starting with the choice policy, my hypothesis would be that chronic absenteeism should go down because as a family, as a student, I chose a school that I think would fit my needs, would fit my interests, I'd be super motivated to go to the school but the reality, I think the choice literature shows us in policy, is that it actually exacerbates inequalities because those who choose have more social capital, have bigger networks, all the parents or guardians who can drive them the hour to the science school.

And what's happening is those who didn't choose are going to schools that were either the default or they didn't want to go to or they didn't get into or whatnot. So I could imagine that for those student groups. They might even be less engaged or less excited about school or more anxious about school because they didn't have the choice is supposed to empower you in theory.

Those who didn't choose don't feel empowered so they don't feel like the system is working for them and once again they feel like they're disengaged from the system so I could see it backfiring. Definitely. As for the high stakes accountability, again I think it makes school feel more anxious, like an anxious place.

It makes it less, It's about developing the whole child, it puts a huge focus on academics, it gets rid of all of these other pieces of human growth and development. And I think for those reasons it feels like a almost sterile place to go to school and that's not a place that I necessarily would want to go to.

if I, especially if I was already on the cusp of I'm not so happy here, I probably wouldn't want to.

Chris Saldaña: The other potential policy that folks advocate for quite a bit is investing more in public schools. which we know has an impact on student educational outcomes, but at the average. So when we're thinking about calls for more money in schools, how would that intersect with the idea of chronic absenteeism, given that many of the challenges that students are experiencing are outside of school?

Michael A. Gottfried: That's great. I think we need to think about schools as being centers for community and supports. And thinking about how rather than being general school based health centers is a great example of how school funding could be used to support students at school and support their families.

Because it's not just like a nurse, it's doctors, it's health insurance, it's all vaccines, it's all sorts of things. And I think that would be an example of a policy that it's still school funding, but it's a way to service all students. Another example, I have some work with Jacob Kirksey that looks at school meals.

and universal meals and how that reduces chronic absenteeism. And again, the idea is, it's thinking about the mechanisms behind chronic absenteeism. In that case, we think it's a family logistics, like I don't have to worry about lunch, but it's also serving all the kids in the school and it's using school funding.

So I think there's ways to think about serving all the kids in the school. So it's not just the average student, but thinking beyond just smaller class size, newer textbooks, those things are important. We've been talking about those things for decades. But this is a different way to think about school as a way to serve and support.

And in doing so, school becomes a place where I want to go. I need to go. I need to go to school for the school based health center. As long as I'm here, I might as well go to school. So those kinds of thinking about it as a place. That's not just this high stakes accountability testing mill would potentially reduce chronic absenteeism.

If we start addressing all of these issues that are barriers to getting to school at school, then the barriers should be lifted.

Chris Saldaña: You've already started to go here, but as you think about policy recommendations, If a state policymaker was to come to you and say, we, we have the votes. We have the money.

What would be the things that you want me to keep in mind as we design a policy that can address chronic absenteeism effectively?

Michael A. Gottfried: I feel like I'm going to feel very old school because it's an old school problem, but I think health on the top of my list, there's been, as I mentioned earlier, there's school nursing work that's where they went and they asked parents, why is your child not there?

And the number one reason is health. And I think that's come up with COVID, right? I think that's been exacerbated with COVID, kids, families, for whatever reason, are missing more school. Part of that might be just health related. So I think if we can address health I think that would be a very big win towards addressing chronic absenteeism.

I think another one, if I can have a top two, I think transportation. Is in large one, we see a lot of districts cutting school transportation. I find that shocking because literally the purpose of the bus is to move kid from point A to point B. If you want kids to get to point B, you need to help them get to point B.

So I think thinking about that is particularly in rural areas, right? So if a child misses a bus and lives down a tertiary road in rural West Virginia, how are they getting to school that day? So they're not going to school that day. So I think those two would be pretty big helps. if there was the budget and the policy support for it.

Chris Saldaña: Dr. Gottfried, thank you for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc. colorado.edu.