Online Data Inquiry

Topic

I came into teaching almost two years ago as of writing this at the end of March in 2025. For my first cohort of students, it was evident that the COVID pandemic had a severe detrimental impact on the learning of my tenth graders. A significant number of them could only read at an elementary grade level and some struggled with basic addition and multiplication. I understand that many students who come from a low income background are often overlooked and arrive to high school with low academic levels. However, I believe that COVID compounded these educational shortcomings. One of these shortcomings that I hear often is low attendance. Because I had not taught before the pandemic, I wanted to know if attendance had become a significant issue as my senior coworkers seem to suggest. As I dug deeper into this topic I became curious about the attendance rates of different groups of students, specifically by race.

Questions

I began my inquiry with a simple question:

Did the COVID pandemic have an effect on attendance rates across California?

As I looked at the data, I realized that groups of students were represented at different rates. For example, I saw that Asian students experienced drastically lower absence rates in contrast to African American students. This got me thinking. Race and class have been used to discriminate, segregate, and disenfranchise groups of people in the United States. Many times, this bias begins once a student starts attending school. The area where you live is most often the sole factor in deciding where you attend school. The people of an area and the resources they can access can be unfairly shaped by absurd redlining and the local economic opportunities. That is to say low-income communities of color experience inequity the most often. This guided me to my second, and central, question:

Which group(s) of students have had their attendance negatively impacted by the pandemic?

I also wondered if this disparity had closed since the first few years after the pandemic ended, leading me to my final question:

Have those groups of students who have been negatively impacted recovered their attendance rates to what the levels they were at before the pandemic?

Data Procedures

My main method of data discovery will be done through using the Google search engine. I will use key phrases such as "attendance rates by year" and "attendance rates in California" to look for sites that can offer me this data. I will also take a look at free databases such as Statista, Our World in Data, and the Pew Research Center to identify potential graphs and data I may use.

Once I find this data, I will attach the relevant quantities to a spreadsheet and extrapolate further. I will do so by finding average absence rates and generating graphs to compare the absence rates of different groups of students, sorted by race.

Data Investigation

California Department of Education Absenteeism Data
- I used the "Absenteeism by Reason" link to conduct my research.

Data Analysis

The California Department of Education (CDE) stores absentee data from the 2017-18 school year up to the 2023-24 school year. On the right, I can see the percentage of students who have missed at least one school day. There is no data for the 2019-20 school year, because the CDE could not verify the absence data accurately during online schooling at the height of the pandemic. However, I can see that prior to the pandemic, the rate of absences hovered around 87%. The 2020-21 school year was a year of hybrid learning, so the significantly lower absence rate may not be the most accurate. In other words, students may have simply joined a Zoom class meeting not have participated at all. The three following school years are more accurate as students slowly transitioned back into classrooms. As we can see, the absence rates have been consistently hovering around 92%, roughly 5% higher than pre-pandemic averages.

In figure 1, I disaggregated the absence data from above to look at how different students, grouped by race, were affected by the outcomes of the pandemic. Again focusing on just the three most up-to-date school years, 2021-24, the average absence rates are all higher than pre-pandemic. However, I noticed that four groups--Asian, Filipino, white, and two or more races--fell below the average rate for ALL students (marked by the blue hexagon). I thought it was more critical to instead identify the groups that required the most support to get them interested in school again.

The students who rose above the average for all students included: African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic or Latino, and Pacific Islander. More than 92% of these students were absent for at one day!

The most drastic difference can be seen among Hispanic or Latino students, as I can see an increase from 90% in the 2018-19 school year up to nearly 95% in the 2020s. This would mean out of a class of 100 Latino students, only 5 would attend school every single day.

However, I stayed hopeful even after seeing this data. I thought that perhaps most of these absences were mostly one-off occurrences that arose from "life happening." I needed to look at the average number of absences per student to draw any conclusions.

This graph does not how much hope for my one-off theory. It appears that the pandemic, students have become more comfortable with taking days off. Now I cannot ascertain if these absences are taken out of need or out of desire to be away from school. That is a topic for another day. What I can say, however, is that kids are losing important school and socializing time. It is of note that the average number of absent days seems to be dropping with every year. Starting in 2021-22, the average seems to be dropping by 2 to 1.5 days yearly. Following this trend, I would predict that the average number of absent days would drop back to pre-pandemic days (below 10) in about two more years in the 2027-28 school year.

In figure 3, I once again disaggregate the data. The same four racial groups fall below the average and four that rise above. A trend seems to be appearing. The groups of students that have the highest absence rates also generally take more days off. Let is take a look at the groups with the highest averages.

Focusing on the top four racial groups, I see African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic or Latino, and Pacific Islander again. This time the difference from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic is made more apparent.

American Indian/Alaska Native, African American, and Pacific Islander students missed approximately 10 more days of school in the 2021-22 school year than in 2018-2019. For American Indians/Alaska Native and African Americans, this meant their days out of school nearly doubled. I do not know the reason behind these higher numbers. It may be out of economic hardship, lack of interest, or something else entirely. More research can be done!

A positive trend I see is that the average is falling, like in figures 2 and 3. It seems that schools are catching those who have been missing school and getting them back into the routine.

One last thought to leave you on: these are only the averages. There are some students who have missed more than 23 days of school! How can schools support these children, who seem to need the most support, when they are not in school nearly enough? A strong start is getting them back into the classroom, which is exactly the direction things seem to be trending towards in the most recent years.

This last set of data may be the most complicated, but I will try my best to elaborate on something I came up with: the "Two Variable Combine." As the name suggests, this metric combines two variables: the percent of students who missed at least one day of school and the average number of days absent. These are the same variables as found in figures 1 or 2 and figures 3 or 4, respectively. I multiplied both variables together for each year to determine which groups of students need the most support. The target group will need support in both minimizing the number of students who want or need to take an absence as well as reducing the number of days that an absentee may stay absent. This way, schools can use this metric to target both attendance issues rather than picking only one.

The expected averages for all students are presented in the figure to the right. The most recent year, 2023-24, suggests an average of 1205.2 to be the standard.

Unsurprisingly, the four groups that fell below the average of all students were the same. Similarly, the four groups that rose above the average were the same as before. These four groups have shown up over and over, so this data suggest that they should be the focus group of students in schools and school districts. Let us zoom in.

The top three groups of students seem to have followed one another closely. These students are generally African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, or Pacific Islander. Their academic progress seem to have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. From each group, a large portion of the students take absences and are often missing multiple days of school time.

This two variable combine can be useful for identifying whether a group of students is experiencing one attendance issue or multiple. As we can see with the Hispanic or Latino group, the data points are not grouped as close to the top three. Looking at figure 2, the Hispanic or Latino group are at the top. While in figure 4, they are still above the average of all students, but well below the top. This data let me know that nearly all Hispanic or Latino students tend to take a day off, but most of these students are not chronically absent in comparison to the top three groups.

Figure 7 shows the total student enrollment in California school systems since 2017. The 2017-18 school year saw an enrollment number of 6.3 million students. Now it has dropped to below 6 million in the 2023-24 school year. The trendline for this graph predicts that nearly 80,000 students will continue to unenroll yearly as long as their needs are not met.

California seems to be experiencing a significant absenteeism challenge in its statewide school system. Some groups, such as African Americans, American Indians/Alaska Natives, or Pacific Islanders, are absent more frequently than others. If the root cause(s) for this issue is not addressed in a timely and equitable manner, the state will continue to see decreased school enrollment as we have seen since 2017.

Discussion / Answers

After looking at the previous figures, I can use this data to confidently say that absences are not spread uniformly throughout student groups. Some groups--like African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, or Pacific Islander students--experience higher rates of absenteeism. To answer the questions that began this inquiry:

The COVID pandemic did have an effect on absence rates in California. The figures before figure 1, 3, and 5 show the changes in absence data after the pandemic. The two variable combine show that the transition back to in-person classes during the 2021-22 school year was especially detrimental to attendance rates. It seems that schools were not prepared to bridge the gap from online or asynchronous learning to in-person interactions and learning.
Out of all students who were negatively affected, African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Pacific Islander students experienced the worst of the transition. Perhaps being stuck at home for over a year did not make for the most productive learning environment for these kids. They may have needed the social interaction and physical space to succeed, and this even applies to schooling before the pandemic. Hispanic or Latino students seem to also have been negatively impacted, but to a lesser degree.
All student groups seem to be in the process of recovery to pre-pandemic absenteeism. However, there is a great deal of improvement and progress that needs to be made before California gets there (and hopefully even lower). Looking at the Hispanic or Latino population these students represent half the students across California, yet their absences still fall above the average. This is an indicator for failure. California has provided ample and effective support for certain groups of students like Asians and whites, so it stands to reason that the state should be able to support their Latino students as well.

If California truly wants a future characterized by hope and success, it needs to step up. Only an equitable and effective education for all students can take us there. I think a good first step is to see where and who we have failed and give those students the best education they deserve.

Future Lines of Inquiry / New Questions

What are the root causes for absenteeism in California, both in and out of the classroom?
How can California support its large Hispanic and/or Latino population academically?
Why do white and Asian students experience lower rates of absenteeism?
What happened to California schools in the 2019-20 school year?
Look at other groupings on the CDE site.
1. How has the COVID pandemic affected the absenteeism rates of different yearly cohorts? For example, has the group of students who experienced online learning in fifth grade experienced different absenteeism rates than their older sixth grade cohort?
2. How has the COVID pandemic affected the absenteeism rates of students with 504s and IEPs?
3. How has the COVID pandemic affected the absenteeism rates of multilingual learners?

Appendix A: Spreadsheet Data

Module 4 Online Data Inquiry

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