Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why School Absences Have "Exploded" Across America

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

The other day, I read a statistic about my hometown of Washington D.C. that knocked my socks off. In D.C. high schools, 60 percent of students were chronically absent in the last school year. That means they missed one day of school every two weeks. Among ninth graders, it’s even worse: One-third of D.C. freshmen were absent for the equivalent of six weeks of school. The New York Times reported that, nationwide, one quarter of public school students are now chronically absent. That figure has practically doubled since before the pandemic. And it’s doubled across all sorts of districts—rich and poor, liberal and conservative. Today’s guest is Nat Malkus, a former teacher who is the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. We talk about why school absences have exploded across the country; why some people think this just doesn’t matter; why we think it might matter quite a bit; and what teachers, parents, and lawmakers should do about it. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you ever wondered about the meaning behind your favorite song lyric or why certain melodies make your skin tingle? I'm Cole Kushner and these are the kinds of questions I try to answer on Dissect, a podcast that dives deep into one album per season examining the music, lyrics, and meaning of one song per episode. I've dissected full albums by Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Tyro the Creator, Beyonce, Kanye, and more. Our latest season just launched all about MF Doom's Mad Villany. Listen to Dissect wherever you get your podcast because great art deserves more than a swipe. The other day, I read a statistic about my hometown of Washington, D.C., that knocked my socks off. In D.C. high schools this year, 60% of students were chronically absent.

That means they missed one day of school every two weeks. Among 9th graders, it's even worse. One third of D.C. ninth graders were absent for the equivalent of six full weeks of school in one school year. Many listeners have probably heard about the so-called learning loss problem in American education. The idea that the pandemic setback student progress in math and reading by two decades and widened the achievement gap between poor and rich students, that's been widely reported. A lot of listeners might also have heard about the surge in disruptive behavior in schools. There's been a surge in disruptive behavior just about everywhere, by the way. But what they might not know about, or at least what I didn't know nearly enough about until this week, is that these crises are,

learning and behavior are nested within a much more basic and in many ways much more fundamental problem. Many students just aren't going to school anymore, or at least not nearly at the rate that they did before the pandemic. Nationwide, one quarter of public school students are now chronically absent. Again, that means they miss one in 10 days of school, which in a five-day school week means one missed day every two weeks. And that figure of chronic absenteeism has doubled, practically doubled, since before the pandemic. And it's doubled across all sorts of districts, rich districts, poor, liberal, conservative. It's not just the students, by the way, teachers are also missing more school. The New York Times reports in the 2022-2020-23 school year in

New York City, nearly one in five public school teachers were absent at least 11 days. There are a lot of reasonable explanations for this increase in truancy, absenteeism. There's been a pandemic, of course. And even for people who face minimal threat from COVID today, we've still faced waves of flu and adenovirus and RSV. Maybe people are just sicker than they used to be, maybe. But the full explanation for all these students not showing up to school, I think might be a little bit deeper than just illness.

As one psychologist, Katie Rosenbaum, told the New York Times, quote, our relationship with school has become optional, end quote. It seems like there's been a fundamental change in the value that we place on going to school, a fundamental change that in some ways mirrors the vibe shift in, say, going to the office. With the important distinction, I must add, that people can actually work from home. I'm literally working from home as I record this open. but an 11th grader who misses one-third of his classes is probably not deeply engaged in remote school from his basement.

Today's guest is Nat Malkis, a former teacher who is the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in empirical research on K-12 schooling, and since the pandemic, he's been tracking its various impacts across schools. We talk about why school absences exploded across the country, why some people think this just doesn't matter all that much, why we think it matters quite a bit, and what teachers and lawmakers can do about it. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Nat Melkis, welcome in the show. Thanks for having me. Let's start before the pandemic. Chronic absenteeism is something that you guys have been tracking for a while. The definition of chronic absenteeism is when students miss 10% of school days, which is about 18 days a year or roughly one day out of every two weeks of school. Tell me what kind of a problem was chronic absenteeism in 2017, 2018, 2019

before COVID? Yeah, we collected all this data. In 2017, you know, it wasn't universally available and not everybody was collecting it. In 2018 and 19, we have better data. In those two years, it was at 15%. So that's one in six kids, that's K through 12, missed 10% of the school year. And that then was characterized as, you know, this is a problem. This is a lot of kids missing a lot of school. It's not that complicated. Missing a lot of school. Not good for school kids. So it was a problem before the pandemic and it was just getting started. And even before most people understood what learning loss was, what were the problems associated with chronic absenteeism in 2018, 2019? It's worth asking that because we have sort of a different level and maybe sort of different kind

now. So a lot of what we know about chronic absenteeism is based on research done pre-pandemic. That's important. Chronic absenteeism is not great for kids, not surprising. If you miss a lot of school, it's not good for your academic outcomes. So if you're missing a lot of school in ninth grade, it's not good for your ninth grade scores. It's not good for your high school scores. Chronic absenteeism in eighth grade is one of the strongest predictors of whether you're going to graduate high school or really whether you're going to not graduate high school. And then there's other research that connects this to long-term outcomes. This isn't totally surprising, right? I mean, you know, it's part of the behaviors that

not only go towards learning, but also negotiating schools or systems and what's rewarded in the workforce. Right. It seems like it would connect not only to achievements, but also to underlying values like conscientiousness, right? Just showing up to work, just showing up to relationships, just showing up to school. Tell me about the geographical variation here. I thought this was interesting. So in 2017, we're still before the pandemic, students were most likely to miss school in Alaska and Arizona. Colorado was also pretty high when it came to absenteeism.

What factors across the country? And you can fold in rural versus urban. We can talk about class. We can talk about race. What factors did you find to predict chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic? Yeah, you know,

you see very different rates across states and you really got to be careful making cross-state comparisons because these aren't uniform data. So just as an aside, in California, districts can decide whether missing half a day counts as a day absent or as half a day absent. And in other districts, so when you make these basic building blocks, like, what is an absence? And some people will count an hour and other people will count the whole day. You can get to very different standards based on decisions made at a state legislature level that didn't really have anything to do with measurement.

So when you ask, like, what's the difference between states? I don't, I can't see it from the data. But there are a bunch of other differences that we can see across the board that are sort of more like the type of districts and the types of students. And there we see some variation that I think we can be pretty confident actually exists. Well, tell me about that variation. I mean, I would guess that you'd see higher absenteeism among lower income districts, among non-white students, maybe among students in single-parent households. Are those assumptions borne out by the data, or are those assumptions wrong? No, those are right. To be technical about it,

we only have the kinds of districts nationwide. But yeah, the lower achieving districts have much higher chronic absenteeism. Higher poverty districts, higher chronic absenteeism. We do have some data at the student level, black students, Hispanic students have much higher. And this is all the case before the pandemic. These differences existed. Asian students quite a bit lower in sort of like the inverse correlation with academic achievement patterns. So then the pandemic hits and schools are shut down for a variety of reasons. There are some districts where the school leaders are the ones that seem to be pushing the school shutdowns. In other districts, it seems to be parents that are demanding that schools are shut down. In other districts, you have teachers joining the fray and saying,

we don't want to put ourselves in harm's way and put our family in harm's way by showing up to schools that might be transmitting the virus. There's so much to describe here. Obviously, there's no such thing as American education policy as a singular noun. There are thousands of districts and schools that determine their own policies. But how in the biggest picture would you describe what happened during the pandemic? There's a few key parts to get right here. One is, well, what happened right when the pandemic struck. And that was pretty universal. We shut down schools for the rest of the year. And so that's a big chunk. So when we talk about learning loss, we often handicap it is like the percentage of a year. Well, most kids spent a lot of that basically quarter of a year left thereabouts

in a very not good educational environment. So that's the first thing. And that was across the board. The next year we had and we tracked weekly closures at the district level and have a lot of data about what went on that year and the next year in masking. And look, there's big differences in the length of time that schools were closed. Some were not closed at all. A lot of them were sort of in a quasi-closed. You know, we have some people part of the week, that sort of thing. But those differences cleaved strongly across red and blue lines and also along cosmopolitan lines, right? So urban districts tended to be closed longer. There were a lot of large differences there. But the other key thing to remember here is because, you know, we love to, like,

throw stones about what did you and yours do during the pandemic and me and mine did it right. But understanding what happened to kids and schools, you need to understand that remote schooling was not good for kids and I don't think it was good for schools. But being in school didn't mean everything was smooth. In fact, it was a super bumpy year on all kinds of things. Quarantines, kids being out sick, staffing problems, masking wars and fights, and more actually involved with just the culture war stuff that was going on. So that 21 school year, that was a bumpy ride across the board. And I think that we sort of see that bumpiness across the board in the numbers on chronic absenteeism that came later. I do not want to make this a podcast about school

closure policy, not because I'm not interested in that, but because I really do think that is its own show, and for listeners who want to check that out, we've done shows on school closure policy and masking in schools, and you can go back to the archive and search those out. But maybe just one or two questions on the pandemic itself before we go into the long-term effect that it's had on absenteeism. It seems like it's a generally understood fact that liberal school districts, because they were more, let's say, neurotic about COVID transmission, were more likely to shut down schools and have remote work. And then there's furthermore, it seems to me, an assumption, that schools that were more remote had the larger amounts of learning loss, are those assumptions

true? And just to restate the assumptions, number one, liberal districts did more remote learning, that is, they shut down in-person schooling more. And number two, that more remote learning correlated with larger learning loss. Yes, I can go into the details, but yes, everybody had learning loss, no doubt about it, but the learning loss was greater for districts that were more remote. And we've used our data with the Stanford data and the Stanford Education Data Archive. It's pretty clear that there were big differences. Okay, so now we have schools opening up. It's 2021.

They're opening up at different rates in different places. Like I said, there's no such thing as a national education policy in the U.S., just thousands of districts and schools that control or try to control their own schedules. As you said, it's chaotic. so control might be a euphemism here. Immediately after the pandemic, it's clear that students aren't showing up to school. Not shocking, there's still a very serious health crisis going on.

And maybe a lot of families and students don't want to fully normalize immediately. But then, in the fall of 2021, schools across America almost entirely reopen for in-person schooling. What happens to absenteeism in the fall of 2021? or maybe I should say in the school year of 2021 to 2022. Yeah, so I usually talk about this is the 22 school year. And the thing to root this is the fact that that was the year of Omicron, right? So this is the highest COVID infection rate. We had it's extremely bumpy with all kinds of quarantines and challenges.

And absenteeism went through the roof, right? So if it was 15% pre-pandemic, it went up to about over 28%. It increased about 90%. That's a huge jump. That means a well over. one and four students, K-12, missed a tenth of the school year for either excused or unexcused absences. That's just another important part to put on this. It's any absence from school. It's not truancy. It's absences. And that was pretty even. So whatever your absenteeism rates

were pre-pandemic, you went up about 90%. It wasn't perfectly even because there are 14,000 school districts, but when you look at it at the state level or by any large group of districts, you see very similar proportional increases. So just a few minutes ago, I asked you about the mainstream interpretation of COVID in schools. Number one, did liberal districts really close their schools more? And number two, did school closings and remote schooling really correlate with higher levels of learning loss? You said yes and yes. Now, I think if we sort of push this idea forward, I think most people will similarly expect that the school districts that close school is the longest and had the longest periods of remote work were also clearly the ones with the largest increases in absenteeism.

How does that interpretation compare with the data you see? So if you squint at it, you do see the relationship. But, you know, I gathered that date on closure. So if anybody's going to tell you, yeah, it was the closures, I'm going to be the guy. And it's, it is there. It's just not very powerful. It's not a powerful explainer of what happened with the increase in chronic absenteeism. So there's two or three points additional growth if you were in the most remote third of school districts.

And that's consequential, but it just doesn't explain the bulk of what we're seeing. And this is super important. This is super important for people to understand. This is not a problem of remote schooling. And I can establish this other ways. It's not a problem of those schools. It is a problem that is across the board, and that is what scares me. I have to say, this is the fact that surprised me most from your report, that the spike in chronic

absenteeism is so widespread and that it is so hard to see the relationship between more remote schooling equals fewer kids showing up to school these days. Because, you know, I would think that maybe high achievement districts were spared from the increase in student absenteeism. No, they're up 10% in chronic absenteeism. I would think maybe low poverty districts were spared. Nope, they're up 11%. I would think maybe the districts with the least remote schooling during the pandemic were spared.

Nope, they're up 12%. So, you know, I want us to keep this fact in the air that the surge in students not showing up to school is practically universal across the country, which means to your point, it seems like we should be looking for universal or more universal explanations. where would you begin in listing the more universal explanations for why we've seen this huge surge in students not showing up to school? Yeah, so it's complicated. And I wish I had better sort of diagnostic data, but we just don't, right?

This is over a huge wide area. And I don't think it's monocausal. I don't think there's just like one thing that's doing this, right? We did have, now, I don't think illness was as big a factor in 2020. when the rates were still very high, still more than one and four kids, compared to when COVID was at its highest. But illness has been up. It's probably part of this equation. And there's other classic problems like, you know, transportation difficulties and student connectedness. All those things could be contributing to this. But I think the underlying challenge that makes all those

factors translate into inflated chronic absenteeism is the idea. The idea, the idea of the idea. that, well, we did these pandemic exceptional policies where missing school was not as, it just wasn't as big a deal because of the pandemic. And then when we reopened schools, we didn't take a hard pivot off that and say, we need to get back to the same culture, habits, and routines of attending school as before. And lo and behold, we haven't. And it's that kind of culture. And when people hear that, they say, well, what do you mean by culture? I mean sort of like the basic common sense of what it means to go to school every day. There's no mental health days unless there's an acute mental health need. There's no like, well, we'll just go

tomorrow because it was hard to get moving this morning. It's not just, well, they don't feel that well, so I'll let my kid stay home. I mean, I think it's all these things, but the permission structure to stay home just expanded. This is really interesting because it somewhat clicks into the theory that was germinating in my head as I was reading your research and the reporting in the New York Times. And my theory is profoundly unscientific. It sounds like maybe all theories right now are a little bit unscientific because we don't have really good correlative or causative data. But the concept that kept coming up to me is that the pandemic increased the phenomenon of and the permission for flaking out. Right. This has nothing. I have no idea how you would measure flaking.

out, but you just put together a few facts. People are going to the office much, much less than they used to. Even offices that are hybrid, people are showing up to the office significantly less than they used to. Remote work is way, way up. So there's less of a pull toward this institution of the white-collar office than they used to be. People are socializing less. People are going out to maybe restaurants and movies less. They're seeing significantly less of each other. They're staying home. They're going to church less. I was just looking at some Gallup survey on the decline in church going during and after the pandemic. So you have all of these institutions that used to be congregating institutions, the office or restaurants or church, and they all have a decline in participation. Or I kind of like the way that you put it, this increase of permissiveness to flake out of obligations that we once thought of as somewhat binding before the pandemic.

And then you fold into this the fact that there are fewer students showing up to school. And I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying that the phenomenon of remote work is just like the phenomenon of chronic absenteeism for students. I think there's lots of differences between them. But there seems to be a sort of general increase in the phenomenon of flaking out for various reasons. and it seems so silly and light maybe to put it that way, but I kind of don't know how better to put it. To what extent do you see this as at least touching plausibility in your estimation? Well, I think it's consistent with what I've been saying, right? You asked, what's the change?

I said, well, it's sort of changed with all the different elements that can contribute to a large increase for lots of different reasons. So I think that it's certainly the case. And look, when there's big phenomena that happen that are so, sort of, of shot through life. Our response is, you know, what's the water, right? Like, it's hard to actually name and see. I think this is certainly true about churches. I'm actually doing other work on churches to look at that.

Now, I think there are some differences when it comes to chronic absenteeism that are worth pointing out that doesn't really push back about what you're saying. But look, if you're a company and you're struggling with getting your people back to work, they are adults and their productivity may not suffer as much. That's not going to be the case for children. Like we have seen this both in the remote schooling, but also just in the disconnectedness of youth. I love schools.

I think schools are great. I think we need to maintain those institutions. And this is depriving our kids of one of the central institutions that they enjoy and mature, not just in, it's not just that they go to. They mature through those institutions. So I think that it's definitely a poverty. in schools' lack of connectedness or flakiness that is, I mean, I have a lot of importance on churches and workplaces myself, but for kids, I think it's more fundamental and they have less sort of margin to

get around the problems that are going to be presented by not having sort of a connection to schools. Adults are just going to have an easier time. We're talking about norms here. Maybe that's a little bit more of a appropriate term than the concept of flaking out. But we're talking about norms. And we're talking about the fact that remote schooling and remote work remove people from pre-pandemic routines of going to school and going to work. And when those routines are loosened, norms for attendance change. I also think that in both school and the office, I don't go to church, so it's harder for me to say that I'm sure this dynamic plays out there. There's a coordination problem if the office is only going to have a third of its pre-pandemic attendees, then for each marginal person, the congregation feels weaker. The gravity pulling them to

that place feels weaker. And I think there's data bearing this out that if there are fewer people who turn up to school, it increases the likelihood of absenteeism for the next marginal student. I do want to fold in parents and teachers here and ask if you have anything to add on new problems or challenges that parents and teachers face. Because one thing that I could, throw into the jambalaya here is that there have been more illnesses in the last few years. COVID, of course, but also higher levels of adenovirus and RSV and other kinds of serious colds and viruses like that. And if parents are dealing with more illness, even if it's not for the student that's absent, if it's just for, you know, the younger kid, then that discombobulates

family life in a new way that might lead to the normalization of students and being pulled out of school for that day. And then teachers themselves might be facing this problem, both within their family or might be facing other problems that I can't think about. So on the subjects of parents and teachers, any change in norms or behaviors there that are worth folding in here. So in the process of getting teacher absenteeism data over the same period. I don't have it for as many places, but it's up. Right? So teachers are else. So what's the reason behind that? Is it deterioration in that sort of school where you see are that state, or is it more of this general permission structure that also affects

teachers? I don't know, but it makes it tough. It makes it really tough when I, to some degree, count on teachers to connect with families to turn around these norms. Who's watching the watchers? If the teachers are also absent more, that's just part and parcel of how difficult it is to make cultural change when it's the culture. It's not the kids only. That said, I do think that There's a number of things that came through the pandemic where teachers took it on the chin. And I think that they're just a little tired. I think that part of the permission structural changes is that teachers do feel set upon and that that is a more salient part of being a teacher in post-pandemic America.

You know, I was a teacher. I didn't go through COVID. So I don't know what that was like. but they are central to setting sort of norms and expectations. And so we're in a much worse problem if the teacher absences where I've seen them are universal. The parents, you know, a lot of people will ask me, what are you blaming parents? And look, I understand parents are affected by the same cultural changes. But if there's a cost to this absence for children, there is.

then who bears responsibility for it? If there's another danger to the children, we charge the parents with making sure that the kids are safe and kept from harm. And so, you know, when I see chronic absenteeism in second, third, and fourth grade, much, much higher, you know, 80% higher than pre-pandemic,

who am I going to go to? I'm going to go to the parents. So, yeah, a lot of parents, parents I know, parents I'm friends with that I have, you know, they'll say, well, actually my kids, it's chronically absent. And I have to say, yeah, well, they shouldn't. They shouldn't be.

It's not good for your kid and it's not good for your school. And I really think that we kind of, if we expect this to turn around, we're going to have to push parents very, very hard. Because as we speak, it's becoming normalized. It's becoming like the way it's okay now. And if it's okay now, the parents won't pay the price the kids will. I want to hold on that for a bit because that's so interesting. You know, you talking to friends who say almost blithely, yeah, my student's chronically absent,

what's their defense? Like, what is the steel man defense for a parent today being somewhat ho-hum about the chronic absenteeism of their child? I mean, I think that it is not, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, you talk about this culture thing and it's not, it's not, you don't have any date on that, you don't know that. And it's true. I have to infer from what I'm seeing. but I also think it's a response to this sort of culture if you say, well, it's really not that big of a deal. And it's not just my friends. It's other people that I've interviewed and so forth.

They are actually saying, well, it's not as big of a deal as I used to think it was. That's what culture change is. It is the changing of norms and admitting to them and saying, we don't actually need to do that. And I think that it's important for everybody to know that's what this struggle is about. It's about changing minds. back because I'm sure there's lots of causes, but to the degree that I'm right, that this is at least substantially cultural change, it is very difficult to counter. I mean, you can come out with your policies, but culture eats policy for breakfast every single day in schools and in other places. And it's the biggest problem facing public schools. Do you think that the phenomenon of

chronic absenteeism today might be upstream of something like the rise in homeschooling. Because I feel like I could imagine, I've seen statistics that show that if you have sort of graphs of annual percentage growth of different kinds of school attendance, whether it's private or public school and then homeschooling. And the last time I looked at one of these graphs, public and private schooling attendance was down and homeschooling was really. way up. It's way up from a small number, but it's way up. Is there a possibility that what we're looking at here, what we're talking about here, is part of another story, which is lots of parents sort of pulling away from the public school system and deciding that some other way of

educating their kids, including homeschooling, is just preferred for a variety of reasons. That definitely is the case. So homeschooling did jump a lot. Homeschooling enrollments jumped quite a bit. still only account for a small portion. It's like 7% now? What is it now? Yeah, somewhere in there. Look, nobody has great data about it, but it's probably five and a half to seven percent. That's a pretty big confidence interval over a percentage of kids, but it's hard to count homeschooling kids. It's also hard to count private school kids because there's no sort of machine setups to it. But those growth patterns are hard to doubt, at least in their general directions. But they're not enough kids to sort of explain these kind of jumps in chronic absenteeism.

So if the question is, well, what if the consistent attenders defected to homeschooling, is that explaining part of this? It may be explaining part of it, but it's a rounding error on the, on the whole. Last summer, the National Assessment of Education Progress, which in media reports is often called the Nation's Report Card, found that national test scores plummeted for 13-year-olds including the single largest drop in math scores in half a century. The New York Times has now said in an editorial that school closures might be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. I feel like I'm setting you up here.

But when you hear from friends and parents saying, oh, what's the big problem with chronic absenteeism, and you have these two statistics side by side, maybe without a perfect causal link, but you have these two statistics side by side, Number one, the 8 to 90% increase in chronic absenteeism across the country. And number two, this historic jump, unprecedented jump in learning loss across the country. What is the case that you make to parents about why chronic absenteeism is such a problem?

So it really depends on the level you're talking about. So if you're talking to a parent, they don't get this because they just don't believe it about their kids. In part because they don't evaluate their kids' well-being based on test scores that give you a real nice pre-post, right? They should be here. This is where they are. So they look at their kids, and the differences that we're seeing are, you know, a letter grade or so. We have a lot of grade inflation. So that also hurts this accurate representation. But I think that by and large, a lot of parents feel, A, sort of bulletproof on this and be like, well, I'm really glad the schools are open and they're just, they're going to be okay. And that kind of logic is a collective

action problem. And it's central to this. If I want to talk at a policy standpoint, I usually try and frame this as well. Everybody, you've heard about pandemic learning loss. It's huge. And it's probably worse than you imagine because it's actually worse for our neediest kids, the same kids that have the worst chronic absenteeism. That's an important connection. And that's not the number one problem that we're facing. The chronic absenteeism is for a couple of reasons. One is, well, if it becomes a new normal, it'll make schools less productive over the long term. That's a real hit. I'm really interested in this.

I'm really interested in the stakes here about why we should care about chronic absenteeism beyond learning loss and achievement scores. But what does the concept of school productivity mean here? Well, I just mean, you know, how much do our kids learn in a given year? Right. I mean, how much do you learn in the average school year? We talk about how much kids learn often. will just frame it in those terms. This program was put in this school,

and they learned an extra two weeks of math this year, right? So a more productive school, you just make more academic progress in a year. And it's not hard to tell that if a good chunk of kids are missing a good chunk of school, then we're going to get less out of each year that they spend in school, which seems like a loss for everybody.

Those achievement scores, and people will say, oh, you know, I'm against the test. Look, the test reflect how well your kids doing and how they reflect how well students are going to do in the labor market and how whether they'll be unemployed and the likelihood of going to prison and their long-term weight. So I don't have much patience for people who say that test scores are totally unimportant. But bringing those test scores back to kind of where they were pre-pandemic for the same sorts of kids means that over time, we have to have kids learning more than they used to in an average year. That's the only way to catch

The good news is that happened to some degree last year, and we made up some ground. But the first steps back, the initial part of the regression to the mean, is the easiest step. The hardest steps are going to be the last mile to close these gaps. And chronic absenteeism means kids are in school both less time, but also with less consistency on their road to try and make up for that lost ground. So even if learning, loss was more important than chronic absenteeism, and I think you could argue that. I think making up with the learning loss, that road runs through addressing the chronic absenteeism. And I'll just add one last thing here. Look, students who are poor and who were low achieving, you know, are disadvantaged students, they got hit harder by the pandemic. They are catching up more slowly. And they had a similar proportional increase in chronic absenteeism. But still, there, as an absolute percentage, the numbers are just gobsmacking. How much chronic absenteeism there is.

In the highest poverty districts in 2022, if memory serves, it was 36% of students in those districts. We're talking about 16 million kids were absent. And that's where you have both the problem of, a lot of, lot of kids who are chronically absent and a lot of density of chronically absent kids. And that is not the kind of cultural norms that you can build an academic recovery off of. Where does the fix live? Is it school districts who should be responsible? Is it, I mean, I'm not for, you know, throwing 16-year-olds in prison for not showing up to school. But is there some other enforcement agency outside of schools that we think is necessary for, you know,

necessary to bring in here in order to fix the truancy problem. Where does the fix live and what do you think it is? Yeah. So, I mean, there is, this is growth in truancy, but it's not only growth in truancy. So there's, and there's a lot of things going on here. So, yes, we need to push back on the truancy, but we also need to push back on excessive, sort of excused absences. We're more permissive with staying home for illness. We do need to correct that too. So this is a multi-layered problem. I don't have three quick fixes that all school districts should do.

And neither do I have three quick policies that locals should do. But look, in D.C., where I am, they have rules on the books for truancy. And they refer kids to the Attorney General's office. And the Attorney General's Office just doesn't do anything about it, generally speaking. In fact, they're talking about laws now to mandate that they do something about it. I don't know that that's going to be the fix. but we have a lot of things on the books. What we really need to do is increase the pressure on this,

and I think we need to do it across the board. I see some vacuum here across the board, but I really think that it's governors that are keys to pushing on this. Because we have to pierce the noise so that parents actually are going to start thinking, oh, yeah, maybe I need to take this seriously in my house. They're talking about it.

And also, if the state superintendent and the governor is banging gongs about it, that's when the principal and the teacher can feel like, well, I have the powers that be at my back. We're all singing at the same tune. And then I think that we can try and turn things around. I mean, bully pulpits aren't good for that much most of the time. But this is actually one case where I think it's sort of an essential, if not sufficient thing. And we need to hear that this summer. I see the benefit of raising this the level of the governor of the state because they oversee a lot of different school districts. They can use a bit of the bully pulpit. There's funding that comes from the state level and not just a local level. It gets a little bit complicated, I suppose, when you threaten to withhold funding from the districts that have the highest truancy because a lot of those districts already are teaching the most disadvantaged students and you don't want to be putting those school districts in the position of creating poverty on top of poverty. but I like the idea of even if this has a low likelihood of moving the needle in a large way immediately, I like the idea of elevating this, the bully pulp, and the level of language.

And simply having governors and mayors focus on this problem more, just talking about the problem more, I think is really important. And raising awareness to this problem seems really important because words help to shape norms. You know, words don't have the power of the purse. and they don't diminish school funding in District 7 by 15% in an annualized basis. But they do shape norms. And I agree with you that I think what we're looking at is a norm shift in the last five years of congregating in all sorts of spaces, not just schools, but also offices, churches,

and that has had different causes and different consequences. But we have a norm change, and I think that words make norms. And I think that there's a couple of things to add on here with. we have laws here. There's no law that you have to go to church and there's no law that you have to be in. But we actually, there's a legal obligation to send your kids to school. So we have this sort of, it's a special case and we have some good reasons for it. And I don't necessarily think, when I say bully pulpit, I'm not necessarily encouraging governors to threaten withholding funds or anything like that. But look, for governors, just think about it like this. In almost every state, your largest local and state expenditure is schools.

Most states by a long shot, are you really going to be okay with your populace just making that whole enterprise much less efficient? That seems like bad policy. If you're going to govern, let's govern there, right? We're taxing you. We don't want to tax you more to get to the same place. So why don't you show up at school? Even if it's not what they say in public, I think at the governor's mansion, that should make sense. And as far as the power of words, look, if parents are not convinced because they don't hear, about it enough, that this is the number one problem that schools are facing. They're less likely to act on it. But it's easier for parents to act on this than it is on test scores or to know how to help their kids do trig or whatever the learning model is. This is pretty basic, you know, basic school hygiene. And so I think words can be more effective here than in your average policy problem for schools. Nat Malchus, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode was produced by

Devin Ronaldo. We're back to our two times per week schedule next week with episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays. We'll see you that.