Research
Check out our academic publications, policy reports, and working papers. Browse all of our work, or search by topic or type.
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Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve it Alone
In Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer reframe chronic absenteeism as a symptom of a complex set of factors affecting the student, family, and community rather than simply an accountability metric for educators, schools, or districts. Lenhoff and Singer identify chronic absenteeism—often defined as missing 10 percent or more of instructional days—as an issue of social and economic inequality as much as an educational one, and they explore the role of K–12 schools and other organizations in solving this growing problem. The book is based on research conducted over eight years as part of a research-practice partnership with urban school systems in Detroit. Their results show the challenges of relying on school-based approaches to improve attendance, particularly in high absenteeism contexts where the causes of absenteeism are due to inequalities that are outside the scope of schools or districts to address. Purchase from our publisher and use code HCPR25 for a 20% discount: https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781682539613/rethinking-chronic-absenteeism/
What are Michigan Schools Doing to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism?
What are schools doing to reduce chronic absenteeism? In this brief, we summarize the results from our recent study of school attendance practices in Michigan. We sent surveys to every school leader in Michigan, asking a range of questions about their school attendance strategies and systems. (A full discussion of the results, as well as details about our survey methodology, can be found in the technical report.) The findings from this statewide survey offer a greater understanding of how Michigan schools are responding to the challenge of chronic absenteeism.
How are Michigan’s Schools Addressing Chronic Absenteeism?
This report provides comprehensive evidence about school attendance strategies in Michigan. Our findings come from a representative survey of Michigan school leaders during the 2024-25 school year. We address the following questions: What practices are Michigan schools using to improve attendance? What organizational systems are they developing and what staff members do they have in place to support their efforts? How do these vary across different contexts in the state, and to what extent have they changed over time? The responses will also allow us to measure the effectiveness of specific attendance practices in future research.
Chronic absenteeism in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood: addressing systemic & structural inequities through participatory action research
This study highlights the efforts of a Detroit-based community research group to understand chronic absenteeism in a way that acknowledges its underlying complexities. Employing Participatory Action Research, an intergenerational team of community members and university researchers examined the disconnect between educators’ strategies for addressing chronic absenteeism and students’ lived experiences with barriers to regular attendance. The findings reveal a school environment characterized by a punitive attendance framework that constrained teachers’ ability to address absences effectively and allowed school leaders to shift responsibility elsewhere. In contrast, students who experienced chronic absenteeism articulated a vision for improving attendance through specific structural pathways, school improvement, and social-emotional support. The discussion emphasizes the need for strategies that uphold students’ dignity and support educators’ capacity to move beyond punitive attendance policies.
How Has Attendance in Michigan Changed Since the COVID-19 Pandemic?
This brief provides a closer look at how chronic absenteeism and average attendance rates have changed in Michigan since the pandemic.
Detroit’s Educational Outcomes and Opportunities Across Race and Gender
Contemporary education policy is dominated by narrow representations of student data, resulting in a limited understanding of school inequalities. This study aims to show how educational outcomes and opportunities are differentially experienced when race and gender are simultaneously accounted for in Detroit. Analyzing educational outcomes and opportunities for students who live in Detroit, we examine differences by race and gender in areas such as math and reading achievement, high school graduation, chronic absenteeism, access to advanced coursework in high school, and special education.
Chronic Absenteeism in the School-Prison Nexus
This qualitative case study examines how attendance management practices are designed and implemented in a large urban school district and explores the empirical and conceptual relationship between student behavior and attendance management within the “school-prison nexus.” We use interviews with parents, high school students, and staff charged with reducing chronic absenteeism to demonstrate how managing students’ attendance through intervention plans, student monitoring, and threats of legal action have implicit and explicit parallels to the management of student behavior in schools and could be considered a potential mechanism through which the school-prison nexus functions. We conclude with implications for schools and districts as they seek ways to reduce chronic absenteeism without contributing to the over-surveillance and punishment of high school youth.
Gaps in Identification and Support for Students Experiencing Homelessness and Housing Instability in Detroit
Homelessness and housing instability can have significant negative effects on students’ academic and behavioral outcomes. Schools that endeavor to support students who are experiencing housing instability can only do so if they accurately identify students facing these challenges. This mixed-methods study provides deep, contextualized data on the experiences of housing unstable youth and families in Detroit traditional public and charter schools, whether and how they are identified as housing unstable by their districts, and what schools are doing to support them. We find that 16% of Detroit students were housing unstable in 2021-22, but Detroit schools only identified 4% of students as homeless under the McKinney-Vento Act. Our qualitative data suggest that this undercount is predominantly related to parents’ feelings of stigma and shame associated with discussing their situation with their schools and in some cases a lack of follow-through when parents do divulge their housing issue. Housing unstable students who were not identified by their districts as such were more likely to have been suspended; identification was not associated with attendance or student mobility, compared to other housing unstable students.
School Transportation Mode and Student Attendance Across Schools of Choice
The availability and reliability of school transportation is essential for regular student attendance at school. Yet, school transportation resources are stretched for both families and school districts in cities with widespread school choice, where students’ residences do not determine where they enroll in school. This study provides some of the first evidence on how Detroit students get to school. Going beyond eligibility for the school bus, we use linked survey and administrative data to determine how students get to school, the student and school characteristics associated with riding the school bus, and how mode of transit is associated with attendance.
Exploring the Relationship Between Parental Work Schedules and Their Children’s School Attendance
Regular school attendance is associated with student academic achievement, while chronic absenteeism is a growing problem negatively associated with academic and socioemotional outcomes. While research has documented the significant influence of family socioeconomic conditions on student attendance, there is little empirical evidence documenting the potential mechanisms driving this relationship. This study illuminates one such mechanism by examining associations between parental work schedules and children’s school attendance. Using survey data on Detroit parents’ work schedules (N=1,390) linked to district-provided data on their children’s attendance, we find that, for two-parent households, children whose parents both worked nonstandard schedules were more likely to be chronically absent. Meanwhile, children with one unemployed parent and the other working a nonstandard schedule were less likely to be chronically absent. These findings add to our understanding of the distal impact of job inflexibility in the interconnected lives of working parents and their children.
Beyond the Bus: Reconceptualizing School Transportation for Mobility Justice
This essay combines an ecological perspective with a mobility justice theoretical framework to reconceptualize the relationship between school transportation and educational access. Authors Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Jeremy Singer, Kimberly Stokes, James Bear Mahowald, and Sahar Khawaja document the problem of “getting to school ”that is at the intersection of students’ family, community, and social contexts and how it goes beyond whether there is a reliable mode of physical transportation. Bringing together a historical analysis of the policy landscapeand interview data from parents and students in Detroit, they find that school transportation problems reflect the unequal political, social, and economic context in which families navigate enrollment and attendance. They discuss how policymakers can advance mobility justice in school policy by equitably distributing transportation resources, engaging students and parents as experts in developing and communicating transportation policy, and using institutional power to remedy structural barriers to educational access.
School Transit and Accessing Public School in Detroit
Students in the Detroit Public Community Schools District (DPSCD) have the highest rate of chronic absence (missing 10% or more of school days) among large districts in the United States. Additionally, students in DPSCD are among the poorest students in the country, often lacking access to reliable personal transportation or public transit to facilitate getting to school. Although DPSCD offers school-sponsored transit, only 30% of K-8 students were eligible for such transit in 2018-19. Through the use of multilevel modeling, we sought to identify the association between eligibility for school-sponsored transit and attendance. Our findings indicated that there was a negative association of small magnitude between eligibility for school sponsored transit and school attendance. This counterintuitive finding may highlight the fact that transit eligibility is not sufficient to mediate the negative relationship between student poverty and attendance, and transit eligibility does not guarantee regular use of school-sponsored transit.
Promoting Ecological Approaches to Educational Issues: Evidence from a Partnership around Chronic Absenteeism in Detroit
Many problems that we conceptualize as “educational” have multiple causes that cut across students’ ecosystems. Yet, most education reforms are targeted narrowly at schools, educators, and students. Supporting educators and community leaders in conceptualizing educational problems from an ecological perspective and designing policies in alignment with that conceptualization is critical to improving student outcomes. This study documented the macro-, meso-, and micro-level institutional conditions that shaped how educators and community leaders conceived of the problem of absenteeism in response to research framed ecologically. Our findings highlight the challenges researchers may have in influencing ecosystemic policy solutions, but they also provide insight into potential pathways for doing so through research partnerships.
Detroit Families’ Experiences with COVID-19 and School Attendance
How much school students attend is a powerful indicator of their wellbeing and a strong predictor of their future success in school. During the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21), most Detroit students attended school online and many experienced significant challenges at home and school. This research report summarizes the key findings from a representative survey of Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) families at the end of that school year. By linking survey responses to students’ attendance records, we were able to identify how experiences during the pandemic and socioeconomic circumstances in general shaped attendance during this critical school year.
Third Grade Reading and Attendance in Detroit
Potential student retention under the Read by Grade Three Law is a critically important issue to better understand and address in Detroit. Detroit students have historically been retained at much higher rates than their suburban peers. Nearly 15% of Detroit third graders would have been subject to retention under the Third Grade Reading law had it been in effect in previous years. There is a significant relationship between third grade reading scores and chronic absenteeism.
