Analyzing Absenteeism and Changes in Absenteeism by SES Level in NAEP 2019 and 2022

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Student SES and OTL From the Perspectives of Large-Scale Education Studies (Table 2)

Abstract

The educational disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic led to declines in school attendance across the United States. Given the negative impacts of absenteeism on academic achievement (e.g., García & Weiss, 2018; NCES, 2023), it is important to understand the relationship between absenteeism and other factors, including students’ socioeconomic status (SES). The proposed study investigates how student absenteeism varies by SES and how these patterns have changed pre- and post-pandemic.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessments show that, on average, 17% of eighth-grade and 22% of fourth-grade public schools students in 2022 reported being absent 5 days or more in the preceding month, more than double the percentages in 2019 (tables 1–2). This issue is particularly critical for students from lower SES backgrounds, who have higher average rates of absenteeism (García & Weiss, 2018) and who were disproportionately affected by pandemic-related school closures (Gee et al., 2023).

In this study, we conduct a descriptive analysis of 2019 and 2022 NAEP mathematics data for fourth- and eighth-grade public school students to explore the relationship between student absenteeism and SES. The absenteeism variable is based on an item from the NAEP student questionnaire, which asked students how many days they were absent in the month prior to the assessment administration. In this study, we focus on the percentage of students who report being absent “5-10 days” or “More than 10 days.” The SES measure is based on the NAEP SES index proposed by Broer et al. (2023), which is a student-level composite measure derived from several SES-related NAEP variables. The index ranges from 0 to 12 points at grade 8 and from 0 to 9 points at grade 4, with higher values denoting higher SES. Table 3 provides details about the component variables and scoring.

Preliminary results show that, on average, students with lower SES index scores had higher rates of chronic absenteeism than higher-SES students in both years (table 4 and table 5).
Furthermore, on average, chronic absenteeism rates significantly increased from 2019 to 2022 across all SES levels in both grades. Chronic absenteeism rates more than doubled at most SES levels—e.g., increasing from 4 percent to 9 percent among grade 8 students with the highest SES index score and from 12 percent to 27 percent for those with the lowest SES index score. In absolute terms, however, it was the lower SES groups that saw the biggest increases in absenteeism.

The results of our analyses suggest that rising absenteeism is a challenge faced by students of all SES backgrounds and that it has approximately doubled from pre-pandemic levels for most groups. If NAEP 2024 results will be available ahead of AERA 2025, we will incorporate them into our presentation, investigating any changes since 2022 and if those changes are different across SES levels. We will also explore school-level variables that, in addition to SES, may be related to different absenteeism levels and change in absenteeism.

Authors

• Rebecca C. Shipan, American Institutes for Research

• Markus Broer, American Institutes for Research