2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

268 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
better comparisons of what works across communities and make integrating
chronic absence into tools for schools and communities much
simpler, whether the tools are student information systems or school
district report cards.
Why Is Chronic Absence Overlooked?
A significant challenge is the lack of awareness among schools and communities
about the extent to which chronic absence is a problem. Why
does chronic absence go undetected even though most teachers take
roll every day? First, chronic absence can be hard to notice if communities
rely only on teacher observation. Especially with increasingly large
classes, teachers can easily overlook a child who is chronically absent,
especially if absences are sporadic, occurring once every few weeks rather
than all in a row. Fortunately, most districts can now take advantage of
their electronic data systems to track and monitor attendance, though
often some extra steps are needed to ensure their systems calculate
chronic absence rates and generate a list of the students who are at risk
due to missing too much school.
Second, many schools and districts may not realize they have a significant
chronic absence problem because they use the average daily
attendance rate as the yardstick. Average daily attendance refers to the
percentage of students who typically show up every day. Unfortunately,
even an average daily attendance rate of 95 percent can mask chronic
absence. Consider a school of 200 students. Ten students aren’t in their
seats each day, leaving the school with 95 percent average daily attendance
(a level typically seen as good). Over the course of a year, those
10 students aren’t the same or they would be disenrolled. The question
to answer is whether the 10 empty seats reflect most of the students
missing a few days or whether they are typically the seats of a small
but still significant minority of students who are each missing nearly
a month of school (i.e., are chronically absent) over the course of the
school year.
Consider these data from Oakland, California (figure 6.2.1), which
show the range in chronic absence across elementary schools, all of
which had average daily attendance of 95 percent. Although chronic
absence was only 7 percent in school A, it was more than twice that level
in school F.