Roll Call: Describing Chronically Absent Students of Color and Implications for Accountability

• In Event: 15.030 - Exploring the Every Student Succeeds Act's Fifth Indicator: Addressing Absenteeism Issues for Diverse Youth

Abstract

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) makes sweeping changes to the way school performance is measured and shifts to the states many of the decisions about what to measure, how to identify schools for support, and what types of support to provide. ESSA requires a more comprehensive approach to measurement than was required under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), with the intention of including more measures and moving away from adverse consequences of NCLB’s measurement system, namely the narrowing of the curriculum towards tested subjects and content, strategic gaming of accountability structures, and cheating (Figlio & Getzler, 2002; Jacob & Levitt, 2003; Lauen & Gaddis, 2016; Neal & Schanzenbach, 2010). Specifically, ESSA requires states to include multiple measures of student achievement, including: academic performance as measured by proficiency on English Language Arts (ELA) and math tests; academic growth; graduation rate, development of English Learner (EL) proficiency; and at least one additional indicator of “School Quality or Student Success” (SQSS), often referred to as the “fifth indicator.” The SQSS indicator can include measures of student engagement, educator engagement, student access to and completion of advanced coursework, post-secondary readiness, or school climate and safety.

There is a growing understanding that chronic absenteeism can severely interfere with academic achievement, and that increasing attendance rates among at-risk youth can decrease achievement gaps (Chang & Romero, 2008; Ginsburg, Jordan, & Chang, 2014). The majority of states have chosen chronic absenteeism as their SQSS indicator, both due to the growing awareness of the importance of student attendance and because attendance data is something most schools, districts, and states have collected for many years as a way to track school enrollments (Jordan & Miller, 2017). However, chronic absence represents a very different approach to tracking attendance. Chronic absence as an indicator highlights the number of students missing large amounts of school, as opposed to how many students attend on average, which is what Average Daily Attendance (ADA) has measured. Because reporting chronic absenteeism at the state level is so new, many questions remain about what such measures tell us about student and school performance.

Given the interest in measuring chronic absenteeism, there is much to learn from California’s CORE districts about how such measures can be used to understand and improve school performance. The CORE districts—a network of school districts that serves nearly one million students in over 1,000 schools in California—are best known for the multiple measures accountability system they developed under an NCLB “waiver.” In this paper, the authors analyze multiple years of chronic absence data in CORE’s measurement system to better understand differences across students and schools, comparing these measures to a broader set of school performance indicators. First, they describe attendance at the student level and how it varies by student race and ethnicity. Then, they describe how schools perform on this metric, by school type, by race and ethnicity subgroup, and across time. Finally, they describe how schools’ performance on chronic absence metrics corresponds to other accountability metrics and the related implications for reporting school-level accountability measures under ESSA.

Author

• Heather J. Hough, Stanford University