Researchers analyzed nearly 2,700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much they improved their student attendance rates. Students in the top quarter of schools showed up to class about seven days a year than the same students in the bottom quarter. The seven days are significant as a loss of 18 days per year is the limit of chronic absenteeism.
Encouragingly, these attendance gains were not short-lived. Schools that have made progress tend to show improvement over all three years of the survey.
But progress does not mean success. Some of the state’s best-performing schools still had absenteeism rates above 40 or 50 percent, said Jeremy Singer, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and lead author of the study.
The schools that make the most progress tend to educate many poor children, often clustered in the region’s poorest cities, such as Detroit, Flint and Saginaw, or in economically depressed rural areas where farms are quickly going out of business. Across the country, absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities where evictions, addictions, mobility issues, health problems and family obligations interfere with school attendance.
Poorer schools know that absenteeism is a problem and have many programs and staff in place to address it. The researchers wanted to see if there were similar strategies used by progressive schools. So they combined their analysis with a Michigan school survey in which principals revealed how they are addressing the problem.
That’s how the number of home visits keeps going up, which is confirmed by another study in Connecticut. An intensive program of home visits to increase attendance has also shown strong results there.
However, this visit is not a guaranteed solution. Some Michigan schools that conduct weekly home visits have not improved attendance — or even increased absenteeism. In other words, while many schools that used regular home visits were successful, others were not. “They’re not exactly a silver bullet,” Singer said.
The singer says that researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits successful as they are expensive and time consuming. Factors that may include who is conducting the correspondence, what time of day, whether they are scheduled or unannounced, and what conversations are taking place.
The schools in the study tried many interventions, but the researchers did not find a strong connection between most of those efforts and improved attendance. These other interventions include early warning programs, letters home, automated messages and phone calls. Schools that received support from district staff, such as truants or counselors, did not do better than schools without these staff.
Personalized and general text messages were more common among many schools for learning improvement. The researchers also found that schools making progress were less likely to report actively helping families deal with external barriers such as housing and transportation.
Correlations between interventions and schools that are effective in increasing attendance are indicative of what works, but researchers cannot say whether the intervention improves attendance. It’s possible that high-performing schools do other things that aren’t covered in the survey, such as hiring especially talented teachers or building strong relationships with students that make the school feel worth attending.
The findings are a reminder that recommendations for “best practices” often exceed what researchers know. Schools can make a noticeable difference in mobility, but identifying schools that are truly successful is difficult, isolating why they are successful is even more difficult, and simple solutions are rarely identified.
This story is about addressing absenteeism in Michigan was produced by The Hechinger reporta non-profit, independent media organization covering education. Sign up Evidence Points and so on Hechinger newsletters.
