Researchers analyzed about 2,700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much their student attendance rates improved. Students in the top quarter of schools attended class about seven more days a year than similar students in the bottom quarter. Seven days is a lot, since missing 18 days a year is the threshold for chronic absenteeism.
Encouragingly, these increases in attendance were not short-lived. The schools that made the most progress tended to show improvements over the three years of the study.
But improvement does not necessarily mean success. Some of the state’s most effective 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 children in poverty, often clustered in the state’s poorest cities, such as Detroit, Flint and Saginaw, or in economically depressed rural areas where farms are rapidly failing. Across the country, absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities where evictions, addictions, transportation problems, health problems, and family responsibilities interfere with school attendance.
High-poverty schools know that absenteeism is a problem and have numerous programs and staff to address it. The researchers wanted to see if there were common strategies used by schools that were making progress. So they combined their analysis with a Michigan school survey in which principals revealed how they were addressing the problem.
This is how the value of frequent home visits rose to the highest, which is also corroborated by other research in Connecticut. A intensive home visiting program to increase attendance has also shown good results there.
Still, these visits are not a guaranteed solution. Some Michigan schools that conducted weekly home visits saw no improvement in attendance, or even worsened absenteeism. In other words, while many schools that used frequent home visits were successful, others were not. “They’re certainly not a magic bullet,” Singer said.
Singer says researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits effective, since they are expensive and time-consuming. Possible factors include who makes them, what time of day they occur, whether they are scheduled or surprise visits, and what conversations take place.
The schools in the study are testing dozens of other interventions, but the researchers did not detect a strong connection between most of those efforts and better attendance. These other interventions include early warning systems, letters home, automated text messages, and phone calls. Schools that had support from district staff, such as truancy officers or liaisons, did not do better than schools without these staff.
Frequent, personalized text messages were modestly more common among more schools with better attendance. The researchers also found that schools that made more progress were slightly more likely to report actively helping families address external barriers such as housing and transportation.
The correlation between interventions and schools that are effective at increasing attendance is a clue to what works, but researchers can’t say whether the interventions are driving improvements in attendance. It could be that the most effective schools are doing other things that aren’t reflected in the survey, such as hiring specially trained teachers or building stronger relationships with students that make attending school worth it.
The findings are a reminder that “best practice” recommendations often exaggerate what researchers really know. Schools can make a significant difference in attendance, but identifying genuinely successful schools is difficult, isolating why they are successful is even more difficult, and simple solutions rarely hold up under scrutiny.
This story about address absenteeism in Michigan was produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization covering education. Enroll in Test points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
