Extended school non-attendance, commonly named truancy or school refusal, has over the last decade attracted attention among educational researchers. This article points to a need for theoretical perspectives that can account for the complexity and ambiguity of the phenomenon. The article presents a critical analysis of the research field of…

Using newly released detailed data on absence from school, we find a 'Friday effect'--children are much less likely to attend schools in England on Fridays. We use daily level data across the whole of England and find that this pattern holds for different schools and for different types of absence, including illness-related authorised and…

Research shows that chronic absenteeism can affect academic performance in later grades and is a key early warning sign that a student is more likely to drop out of high school. Several states enacted legislation to address this issue, and many states are currently discussing the utility of chronic absenteeism as an indicator of school quality or…

The 2021 Tribal Education Status Report presents information and data related to students, teachers, funding, and other indicators regarding American Indian students attending New Mexico's public school districts for the 2020-2021 academic year. This report was prepared by the New Mexico Public Education Department (NM PED) and the PED's Indian…

Truancy laws have an interesting history in America. In the past, truancy laws were rarely enforced and resulted in the student's removal from school rather than troubleshooting the bigger issues that led to their absenteeism. Today, legislators are holding the families of truant students accountable and requiring school districts to keep a close…

This brief maps the national attendance gap--the who, what, when, where and why of absenteeism--using research drawn from national sources as well as attendance data gathered across states from students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Health emerges again and again, both as a challenge and as a solution to improving…

Although mandatory attendance is easily determined in a traditional, brick-and-mortar school, monitoring and enforcing attendance and truancy in an online environment is less obvious. Despite this challenge, virtual schools, especially those that are publicly funded, have a requirement to ensure that students who are enrolled are actually logging…

When many students are tardy at the secondary level, teachers must continually restart instruction or delay beginning instructional periods throughout the school day. To address the considerable amount of instructional time lost caused by high rates of tardiness, the authors investigated the results of schoolwide intervention to reduce student…

The effectiveness of a school-based truancy court intervention in four middle schools in a mid-sized school district was evaluated. Cumulative data from 185 youth attending a truancy court from 2004 through 2008 were included in the analyses. Results indicated a differential impact of the truancy court intervention depending on truancy severity at…

Communities face powerful challenges that require powerful solutions: a high-school dropout epidemic, youth unemployment, teen pregnancy. In an era of limited resources, those solutions must help communities to achieve more with less. A new kind of community collaborative--an approach that aspires to significant community-wide progress by…

Children in communities across Colorado--whether large or small, rural or urban, on the Eastern Plains or the Western Slope--face opportunities and obstacles to reaching their full potential. While some challenges are similar, many are very different depending on the community environment and the resources available to support children and…

For a multitude of reasons candidates do not always complete all assessments in the examinations they are entered for. Using examination data across a range of GCSE specifications offered by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, this article details the impact of "unaccepted" absence on educational attainment, and explores absence…

Background: Truancy is a serious concern that affects most school districts in the United States; however, we do not have accurate estimates of the prevalence of truancy due to inconsistent tracking and reporting practices of schools. As a result, our best current estimates of the national state of truancy may be from self-reported data. In this…

This article begins by examining the Scottish Executive's published figures on exclusion from school to argue that while they show small reductions in the use of temporary exclusions from year to year, there is as yet no evidence of a substantial reduction. In addition it argues that the published data fail to give an accurate picture of the…

In a survey on attitudes toward skipping class given to 75 undergraduates at a prominent state university in the Midwest, 84% of 38 respondents answered that they have been or may be inclined to skip a class because of reasons associated with "health": they are tired or just not feeling well. All women (n=20) chose this option, while…