Key Attendance Trends from the 2025-26 School Year: Insights from 1.1M Students
Three consecutive years of attendance data from 142 districts and over 1 million students show a pattern that holds steady year after year, even as the numbers underneath it shift. Here's what it reveals about grade level, demographics, and the interventions that are driving improvement.
Get the full breakdown!
Highlights:
- Chronic absenteeism is highest in the earliest grades, lowest between third and fifth, and measurably jumps in sixth grade
- Every demographic group tracked improved over two years, but not at the same pace
- Socioeconomically disadvantaged students posted an 11.6% improvement, among the strongest gains in the panel
- Along the way, districts in this data set landed a couple of percentage points below the national chronic absenteeism rate
- SchoolStatus partner districts saw stronger results, beating the national average by two percentage points