Tackle Chronic Absenteeism by Keeping Families Engaged

During fall 2020, about six months after the pandemic shut down schools across the country, Professor Karen Mapp, Ed.D.’99, started hearing stories from her superintendent friends about drops in learning. Specifically, schools with a strong culture of engaging with families weren’t seeing the same drops that schools without were seeing. The stories didn’t surprise Mapp. They were proof of what she had been teaching and talking about for years: Family engagement matters. 

But there was another piece of these stories beyond academics that began to pique her interest: Strong family engagement also seemed to be having an impact on student absenteeism once schools started to reopen their doors.

“Schools with strong family engagement didn’t see the same challenges around getting kids to come back to school,” says Mapp, a former deputy superintendent for family and community engagement in Boston Public Schools. “They didn’t see the same rates of chronic absenteeism. I was really interested in trying to figure this out.” 

It’s a critical issue to tackle. The U.S. Department of Education defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10% or more of school, or about 18 days. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a policy think tank in Washington, D.C., chronic absenteeism surged from 15% of K–12 students in 2019 to more than 28% in 2022. By spring 2024, that number was still around 23%.

With these sobering figures in mind, Mapp decided to join forces with TNTP (originally the New Teacher Project) and Learning Heroes, two national education nonprofits, as well as Eyal Bergman, Ed.M.’14, Ed.L.D.’21, a strategic adviser for Learning Heroes, and Todd Rogers, a professor at the Kennedy School, on a three-phase study to explore why — and how — schools with strong family engagement prior to the pandemic were seeing lower rates of chronic absenteeism. 

In phase one of the study, the team analyzed data from more than 3,000 schools in Illinois — a state chosen because they believed “it strongly reflects the diversity of the entire country” in terms of race, income, age, religion, and education. To determine a school’s level of family engagement, the team used each school’s “family involvement” score from the state's 5Essentials survey, an annual survey of teachers, students, and parents. The survey measures five areas that impact student achievement, including: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, supportive environments, ambitious instruction, and involved families. The latter measures, among other things, how much parents are included in school decisions and the trust level between parents, teachers, and staff. 

“What our study found was that strong family engagement is clearly associated with better student outcomes,” Bergman says. “Schools with strong family engagement scores pre-pandemic experienced a far smaller increase in chronic absenteeism post-pandemic. This is with more than 3,000 schools in our data set, and after controlling for dozens of school and community characteristics.” 

For example, they found that schools with weaker engagement had a 15.95% increase in students’ chronic absenteeism when comparing outcomes from 2018–2019 and 2021–2022. This has an impact on state test scores: Schools with stronger family engagement, for example, performed 27% better in English and 37% better in math, on average, on Illinois state standardized assessment tests. As the team noted in a recent report shared on their website, “the difference we observe for schools with stronger family engagement is so large that it is comparable to having 114 additional days of in‑person learning in ELA and 96 additional days in math.” 

For the second stage of the study, the team wanted to analyze and unpack what schools with strong family engagement were actually doing — the “how” of their success. 

“What is it that those schools do when they say that they’re engaged more with their families?” Mapp says. “What does the ‘more’ actually look like? What is it that these schools are doing?” 

She says so far what they are uncovering aligns with a document called Partners in Education: Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships that she helped develop in 2010 for then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The document’s framework was meant to help the U.S. Department of Education understand and develop ways for schools across the country to build stronger family relationships. 

“What we’re finding out is exactly what’s in the dual capacity- building framework,” she says. “It’s absolutely perfectly aligned with what we say are the essential conditions for strong partnerships.” One common condition that schools with strong family partnerships have, for example, is being proactive, consistent, and persistent in how they communicate with families, and that doesn’t mean just translating material into various languages. Successful schools also offer student-led parent-teacher conferences and have families sign off on reading time and homework. Successful schools emphasize a schoolwide mindset that sees families as equal partners on the same team as the communischools. As one principal told them, “The ‘why’ is pretty simple: We don’t achieve our mission without our families. It’s as simple as that.” 

For the final stage of the study, the team will design a new tool that educators, policymakers, and researchers can use to fully measure the strength of a school’s family engagement efforts. Currently, no reliable tool like this exists. 

“In the first phase, we identified that yes, family engagement makes a difference; and here’s how during COVID these kids still had better grades and test scores and chronic absenteeism wasn’t as bad,” Mapp says, compared with schools with weaker family partnerships. “Phase two, we found out what exactly those schools did. Now we’ve got identifiers of what best practice looks like, and we want to develop a tool that schools and districts can use to actually measure the strength of their engagement.” 

Bergman says the plan is to test the tool in a national sample of schools. 

“Ultimately,” he says, “we hope this field-wide measurement tool will provide schools and districts with a practical instrument to support implementation of research-informed strategies that make a meaningful difference for students.” 

Mapp says it’s clear that educators want and need this kind of tool because, without it, they are left doing what they have always done to engage families: the mandatory parent-teacher conference, for example, where teachers talk at parents for 15 minutes, or hosting monthly PTA meetings in person and at night that don't mesh with busy parent schedules. 

“There are a lot of reasons educators keep doing what they do, but one is because they haven’t been trained on what effective practice looks like,” says Mapp. “So quite frankly, that’s why people like me are still in business: People have to unlearn a lot of the bad practices that they’ve learned over the years. The bottom line is they haven’t learned what works. 

“What I’m trying to do and others are trying to do is both the prevention part, which is to make sure that our new teachers have this knowledge and the right mindsets, and then we’ve got to do the rehab part, which is taking the folks that are already in the field and providing them with professional development so that they don’t keep making the same mistakes around engaging with their families,” she says. “We know that these partnerships between schools and families really make a difference. And now we’ve got even more evidence about what those partnerships should look like.”