Post-covid, American children are still missing far too much school
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the first bills calling for universal, publicly funded education. He wanted all the children in his state of Virginia to attend classes. Not everyone was convinced. His bill never passed, and it took over 100 years for school to become compulsory across the whole of America.
For most of the past century, attendance grew. Then the covid-19 pandemic happened. For the best part of two years, children were forced to learn at home, staring at laptops. As they start the 2023-24 school year, a terrifying proportion still seem barely to be back.
According to a study published in early August, in the 2021-22 academic year 28% of schoolchildren missed at least three and a half weeks of school. The study, conducted by Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University, found that “chronic absenteeism”, defined as when an enrolled pupil misses 10% of the school year, almost doubled overall between 2018-19 and 2021-22. It went up in all 40 states in the study as well as in the District of Columbia. In Alaska, the state with the highest rate of chronic absenteeism, nearly half of all pupils missed enough school to be counted.
2023-08-24 07:47:07
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