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Dan Walters
CalMatters

Good news is a rarity in California’s massive public school system, which purports to educate nearly 6 million students but struggles to improve chronically subpar academic achievement levels on state and federal tests.

The most recent round of “Smarter Balanced” assessments showed fractional improvement at best, with fewer than half of all students meeting or exceeding state standards in English language skills, and scarcely one-third doing so in math. Meanwhile, California continues to fare poorly compared to other states in the tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

We did get a bit of positive news about California schools recently. After decades of what were termed “reading wars,” California’s political establishment is finally embracing phonics, a proven technique for teaching children to read that could boost the state’s low reading scores. It’s a minor miracle that pushes aside years of trendy reading instruction that had failed.

Another miracle may also be occurring: California is making progress on its exceedingly high levels of chronic absenteeism.

A few years ago, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly one-third of the children enrolled in public schools were chronically absent from classes. You can’t learn if you’re not in class, and the absences negatively affected overall academic achievement, the futures of millions of kids and the state’s need for trained or trainable workers as those in the huge Baby Boom generation retire from the workforce.

Chronic absenteeism also adversely affects the finances of local school systems because aid from the state is calculated on attendance, not just enrollment. Schools with high absenteeism rates also tend to have low levels of learning and lose the money they need to raise achievement.

California wasn’t alone, of course. However, it kept its public schools closed longer than most in other states, and the makeshift online classes were a poor substitute for classroom instruction.

Children from low-income families, whose parents could not work from home to monitor participation or afford private tutoring, suffered the most from school closures. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s education establishment were responsible for unnecessarily prolonging them.

From 30% chronic absenteeism in 2021-22, California dropped to 25% in 2022-23 and 20% in 2023-24, according to a new state-by-state report on absenteeism by SchoolStatus, a company that provides consulting services to school systems. California’s 18% decline over the last two years was the third-most of any state surveyed by SchoolStatus, behind just Nevada and New Mexico. Nationally, the decline was just 6%.

The report bolsters what Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of schools and a 2026 candidate for governor, hailed last week.

“Due to historic investments in student supports and family engagement, California has cut TK–12 chronic absenteeism levels by one-third, from 30% in 2022 to 20% in 2024,” Thurmond said. “We are on track and committed to reduce chronic absence by 50 percent over five years.”

The SchoolStatus report did have one caveat: that reducing absenteeism is relatively easy in elementary grades but becomes progressively more difficult in middle school and particularly among high schoolers.

“Student attendance deterioration accelerates systematically from the middle school transition onward,” the researchers noted. “Chronic rates more than double from 5th grade (14.22%) to 12th grade (32.13%).” They called for “targeted intervention when districts track early warning indicators like partial-day absences, tardiness patterns, and family communication response rates during those critical transition years.”

Lasting progress will depend on keeping kids in danger of dropping out of high school in class and learning what they need to survive in a competitive world.

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This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.