From state to state, and sometimes from district to district, schools use different metrics to decide what constitutes an absence.
By Wayne D’Orio, The 74
Editor’s note: This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
It’s 2026. Satellites connect to devices in our pockets, artificial intelligence algorithms can drive cars and scan X-rays, and Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem is the basis for the summer’s hottest movie.
But there’s always a but. And right now, in a time when public school absences remain stubbornly high since Covid closures five years ago, it seems amazing not that educators can’t fix this problem, because it is complicated and occurs for many reasons, but that they can’t even agree on how to count whether a student is absent or not.
That’s not an exaggeration. While the number of chronically absent students nearly doubled after schools returned to in-person schooling in 2022, there is no universal consensus on how to determine the extent of this problem.
In fact, when Iowa put together comprehensive legislation in 2024 to address the state’s attendance problem, it became clear that different counting methods made it impossible to compare attendance statewide. Starting with the 2025-26 school year, the state mandated that all districts use the same method to count attendance.
For the most part, school attendance policies fall into three buckets:
- If you are present for any part of the school day, you are counted as attending.
- If you are present for at least half of the day, you are counted as attending.
- Your attendance is tracked at the period or even the minute level.
While Iowa has chosen the minute-level attendance as its state standard, there is no universal agreement or any research about which method is the best. Sixteen states leave that decision to local discretion. In fact, two experts, Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the CEO and president of Attendance Works, and Justine Oliva, the director of Policy & Research for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, stay away from endorsing any one method. But both call for standardizing how attendance is counted within each state.
Attendance throughout history
While the first school law in the country is the General School of Law of 1642, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it is not known when schools first started taking attendance. But there’s a good record of the initial attendance complaint. Near the end of Horace Mann’s First Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1838, Mann wrote about the state’s inability to collect even basic “information respecting the number of scholars attending the public schools, and the regularity of that attendance.”
By 1918, all states had laws mandating school attendance, but truancy did not become a federal focus until 2001’s No Child Left Behind bill made it mandatory for all states to report truancy data to the federal government. Fourteen years later, the Every Student Succeeds Act pushed attendance further into the spotlight, when many states recognized chronic absenteeism’s importance in student outcomes. Unlike truancy, this indicator reflects both excused and unexcused absences. As part of ESSA, 36 states and the District of Columbia included chronic absenteeism as one of the markers of educational progress in their states.
The first thing to understand about attendance is how schools use their data. In six states, daily attendance is used to determine state funding; the rest of the states use enrollment counts assessed once or twice a year to decide how much money districts receive. But even within a school there can be different uses for attendance. For instance, at Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy in Norwalk, Connecticut, principal Damon Lewis said the middle school reports its homeroom attendance to the district and state, but uses its period-by-period attendance to keep a closer eye on each student.
Before the pandemic, about 15% of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year or about 18 days. When schools reopened after Covid shutdowns, student behavior had changed, with nearly twice as many learners chronically absent, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Research proves the link between attendance and achievement, Malkus said; for every day a student is absent, the average achievement for that student decreases. “It’s not just kids who are chronically absent,” he said, the effect of attendance on achievement “is pretty much linear. Every day matters.”
A new report from NWEA last month backed up those findings, showing that chronic absenteeism played a major role in students failing to reach pre-pandemic academic levels. “Improving attendance should be part of the academic recovery strategy in most districts rather than seen as a distinct issue,” the report concluded.
While chronic absenteeism is a big issue for many state education leaders, Malkus warned that it can be an arbitrary distinction. “One of the shocking things [about attendance] is that 7% of kids miss over 20% of the school year,” he said, adding that these absences can affect an entire school’s achievement.
Best ways to count
While there is no research that measures one method of counting attendance versus another, it’s also difficult to know even how most schools measure attendance. In an Attendance Works 2026 brief, only eight states require districts to use a per-minute attendance calculation, while 24 states require attendance for a half day or more to count a student as present. But there are some signs that a growing number of schools are opting to get granular and track student attendance per minute. Arkansas and Oklahoma moved to period-based attendance in the 2025-26 school year, and both Ohio and Iowa will make that move in this year.
Jesse Roy, the senior director of education value for PowerSchool, said his customers are trending toward wanting more information. “We see states going from daily to half-daily to per-minute. More data is kind of what you’re after.” PowerSchool is a student information software company used in 90 of the country’s largest 100 school districts.
Oliva of Rhode Island mentioned that counting attendance so closely could have some pitfalls. “More granular methods (like per hour) may better capture instructional time if the data are accurate but may be more difficult to implement consistently at the local level,” she said.
When Rhode Island tried to pass a comprehensive attendance bill in 2024, it was using “at least half the day” method of counting a student present, she said, adding that this method is the more widely used benchmark in education. Even though that bill never became law, the state did implement several components of the proposal and has had success improving its attendance rates. Rhode Island’s chronic absenteeism rate posted the fifth largest decline in the country from 2021-22 to 2023-24, according to a report from the state’s Public Expenditure Council.
Iowa’s push to improve attendance originally focused on how schools must take specific steps to notify parents as students’ absences piled up, as well as a major publicity push to inform the public about the importance of good attendance. But the next year, the state’s legislators passed some smaller changes that specified not only how schools must count attendance, but also what could count as an excused absence.
“They are sweating the details on this, and that is what state leadership looks like,” Malkus said.
Des Moines has been tracking per-minute attendance for years, well before Iowa’s new requirement. “The per-minute calculation really matters,” said Jennifer Stalder, who oversees the case managers who track attendance in district schools. “It allows us to home in on what’s happening and have more meaningful conversations with parents.”
Even though Central Falls, Iowa, had not yet gone to per-minute attendance last school year, Jennifer Van Fleet, the district’s executive director of student services, said she imagined the extra information might help each school discern which student has an aversion to math or highlight a student who is late everyday. “We can match the support and intervention to be specific,” she added.
Ohio is another state that uses the per-minute method as part of its statewide goal to reduce chronic absenteeism in half by the end of the 2028-29 school year. The state has shifted to trying to predict and prevent students from becoming chronically absent, instead of only intervening after they have missed 10% of school. Part of this effort is not only collecting more information about student attendance, but sharing that data quickly and accurately.
The state’s Attendance Dashboard, shows weekly updates statewide, including the number and percentage of students in each district who are both chronically absent and at-risk of becoming chronically absent.
Even though PowerSchool’s Roy wondered if data overload could reach a point of diminishing returns for school officials, he did express wonder at how specific schools can be now when tracking student attendance. “Fifteen years ago,” when he worked in a school district, “I would have to walk around with binders and do two hours of work per student” to find out all this information, he said.
