Researchers analyzed roughly 2,700 schools in Michigan between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much they improved their students’ attendance. Students in the top quartile of schools show up to class about seven more days a year than similar students in the bottom quartile. Seven days is significant, as missing 18 days a year is the threshold for chronic absence.
Encouragingly, these increases in attendance were not short-lived. The schools that made the most progress showed improvement in all three years of the study.
But improvement does not necessarily mean success. Some of the state’s best-performing schools still have 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 making 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 quickly failing. Across the country, absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities, where evictions, addiction, transportation problems, health problems and family responsibilities prevent school attendance.
High-poverty schools know truancy 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 study of a school in Michigan, where principals revealed how they were dealing with the problem.
This is how the value of frequent home visits rose to the top, which also confirms others studies in Connecticut. Ann intensive home visiting program to increase attendance also showed strong results there.
However, these visits are not a guaranteed solution. Some Michigan schools conducting weekly home visits saw no improvement in attendance — or even worse absenteeism. In other words, while many schools using frequent home visits were successful, others were not. “They’re definitely not a silver bullet,” Singer said.
Singer says researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits effective because they are expensive and time-consuming. Possible factors include who conducts them, what time of day they occur, whether they are planned or surprise visits, and what conversations are held.
Schools in the study tried dozens of other interventions, but the researchers did not find a strong link between most of these efforts and improved 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 or liaison officers, did no better than schools without these officers.
Personalized and frequent text messages are slightly more common among more schools with improving attendance. The researchers also found that schools making more progress were slightly more likely to report actively helping families deal with external barriers such as housing and transportation.
The link between interventions and schools that are effective at increasing attendance is a clue to what works, but the researchers can’t say whether the interventions spur improvements in attendance. It’s possible the top-performing schools are doing other things not covered by the survey, such as hiring especially qualified teachers or building stronger relationships with students that make the school feel worth attending.
The findings are a reminder that “best practice” recommendations often overestimate what researchers actually know. Schools can make a significant difference in attendance, but identifying truly successful schools is difficult, isolating why they succeed is even more difficult, and simple solutions rarely stand up to scrutiny.
This story about addressing absenteeism in Michigan is produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Sign up for Evidence points and others Hechinger Bulletins.
