Four years after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shuttered schools to in-person learning amid the pandemic, Michigan continues to struggle to address one of the highest chronic absenteeism rates in the nation.
A new analysis by The Detroit News and The Associated Press shows Michigan had the seventh highest student absenteeism rate among states during the 2022-23 school year, with 30.8% of K-12 students missing 10% or more of the school year.
The data collected from 42 states and the District of Columbia by the AP and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee shows that figure is a 7.7 percentage point drop from the year prior, but it remains more than 5% higher than the national rate.
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It’s also significantly higher than Michigan’s 19.7% chronic absenteeism rate in the 2018-19 school year.
“About one-third of Michigan’s K-12 students – or 434,241 – missed 10% or more of school last school year, a level that remained far above absenteeism rates experienced before the COVID-19 pandemic,” The News reports.
The reasons why are largely tied to students’ home life, with many experiencing poverty, physical and mental health issues, and homelessness.
“Some students aren’t in school because they have to watch younger siblings or care for parents with medical problems. Others need to continue working at jobs they started during the pandemic. Some kids are overcome by anxiety and can’t leave the house, let along spend a full day in school,” according to The News.
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“Some have become homeless for part of the year or changed school several times. In many cases, kids said they simply don’t want to go to school and parents let them stay home.”
The problem persists despite more than $5 billion in federal funds Michigan received to help schools address the issue and learning loss during the pandemic, which research analyzed by The New York Times correlates with the amount of time schools were closed to in-person learning.
Other research suggests many of the mental health issues keeping kids from school now were exacerbated by more screen time, less physical activity, and stress during pandemic school closures.
In Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banned in-person learning from March 16, 2020 to January 2021, one of the longest closures among states, fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress went from 32nd in the nation in 2019 to 43rd in 2022.
“Today, there is broad acknowledgement among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting,” according to the Times.
A February report from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities showed that while Michigan’s statewide student achievement increased by 7% of a grade level in math and 1% in reading over the last year, “full recovery will require five additional years for students to recover in math and decades to recover in reading,” according to The News.
Michigan education officials have championed an array of ways they’re working to address both the learning loss and chronic absenteeism, with the latter involving calls to parents, conferences, mental health interventions, home visits.
Whitmer’s Department of Education pointed The News to its Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System, a seven-step process spokesman Bob Wheaton insisted is making a big difference.
“The Michigan Department of Education has provided support to efforts that have paid off, with Michigan being identified in a national report as improving chronic absenteeism rates the most of any of the states included in the study,” he said.
Other states with the highest student absenteeism rates for 2022-23 included Alaska at 45%, Washington, D.C. at 44%, New Mexico at 39%, Oregon at 38%, Nevada at 35% and Colorado at 31%. States with the lowest rates were New Jersey and Idaho at 17%, Alabama at 18%, Indiana at 19%, and Wisconsin at 20%, according to The News.
Nationally, roughly one in four students were chronically absent from schools during the 2022-23 school year, up about 10% from the pre-pandemic rate of 15%.