How Rhode Island Reduced Chronic Absenteeism

On a Thursday in early spring, Daniel McKee stood at the free throw line in the gym at Woonsocket High School in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, ready to take a shot. At 72, McKee was no longer the player or coach he once was. He had come to Woonsocket as Rhode Island’s 76th governor. And a school gym, along with local community centers and anywhere else people gather in the towns and communities of Rhode Island, is the type of venue he likes best.

McKee was in Woonsocket to speak about the importance of school attendance during halftime of the annual Police Department-Fire Department basketball game. And he’d agreed to compete in a friendly free-throw competition with Woonsocket Mayor Christopher Beauchamp.

Governor McKee was happy to take his best shots that day, but the outcome he really cared about was raising academic achievement in Rhode Island by prioritizing attendance in every town and school district in the state. Like every state, Rhode Island experienced a tremendous spike in chronic absenteeism in the wake of the pandemic, leaving students less likely to graduate from high school and threatening to depress student achievement well into the future. Chronic absenteeism—missing at least 10 percent of the school year—ballooned from 19 percent in the state pre-pandemic to 34 percent in 2021-22, even after vaccines became widely available and regular in-person school resumed.

In response, McKee launched an unprecedented statewide strategy in 2023 to increase attendance. He began tracking and widely publicizing real-time student attendance data—making Rhode Island the only state to do so—in order to engender a collective sense of urgency among Rhode Island stakeholders. These included not just schools and school districts but mayors, hospital systems, business leaders, and others.

The effort is paying off. Rhode Island’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped to 24.7 percent in 2023-24, the lowest it’s been since the onset of the pandemic. Eighty-nine percent of the state’s 64 school districts lowered their chronic absenteeism rates from the previous year, as did 82 percent of Rhode Island schools.

Importantly, Rhode Island has also made strides in closing the absenteeism gap between low-income and more affluent students. In 2021-22, the year the state’s absenteeism rate peaked, almost half of Rhode Island’s low-income students were chronically absent compared to 22 percent of their higher-income peers—a gap of 27 percentage points. Since then, the gap has shrunk to 18 percentage points, suggesting that Rhode Island’s approach to tackling chronic absenteeism is working for its most vulnerable students.

It is too early to know whether Governor McKee’s strategy will ultimately lift student learning in Rhode Island. But its success in bringing students back to school is both a model for other states and a testament to the power of political leadership, data, and community-wide collaboration to address challenges in the education sector.

Tracking The Data

McKee’s education department created a public website, the Student Attendance Leaderboard, that displays the percentage of chronically absent students in every Rhode Island public school. The dashboard is updated every night through a direct link between each district’s data system and the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE). Two RIDE staff members check the data every morning, looking for obvious errors.

The state data system pushed detailed absenteeism information into every corner of the state and led to some unpleasant surprises for local leaders newly confronted with the information. One municipal leader met with the RIDE team, confident he knew the two schools in his town with no attendance problems. A RIDE staff member recalls the leader describing one of them as a “rock star school” because it had a new facility. “But then we showed him the data,” the staffer told me, “and he said, ‘Oh my God this is a crisis. The schools I thought were fine are the schools that are the most troubling.’”

In addition to the public website, principals have their own dashboards that allow them to look at specific students, see patterns in attendance over a school year or longer, or click a button to send a “nudge.” The nudge, first proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge, is a method to guide people in a particular direction without inhibiting their freedom of choice – to suggest a beneficial action without mandating it. Nudging students and families quickly caught on nationally as a cheap and easy intervention to improve student attendance, with research suggesting that it reduces chronic absenteeism by as much as 15 percent, at a cost of about $5 per student per year.

Rhode Island principals can send a nudge either via a text message—automatically delivered in the student’s home language to a parent or caregiver—or a printed letter sent home in the student’s backpack. Text messages are faster, but delivery is only guaranteed if the school has a working cell phone number for a parent. At least 250 of Rhode Island’s 271 public schools have used the nudges offered through RIDE’s dashboards since 2023.

Deepening the Bench

The second part of Governor McKee’s strategy is enlisting local leaders outside of education to help lower absenteeism.

He began with listening sessions, talking to stakeholders across the state about what could move the needle for students. During these conversations it became clear that attendance had become a stumbling block for other initiatives. Ultimately, attendance became one of three stated goals, along with college financial aid applications and student achievement, in LEARN365, McKee’s education policy blueprint.

The blueprint, framed as a compact with Rhode Island’s mayors, asks municipal leaders to commit to improving attendance along with math and reading test scores. Each signatory agreed to host a community education forum, review data on educational outcomes, and form a Municipal Youth Commission to connect students with leadership opportunities in their hometowns.

“What we can do is change the culture of a family’s decision making. Schools can’t do that in the same way that mayors and municipal leaders can,” he told me last spring in his Providence office.

Fully 38 mayors or municipal leaders out of 39 in the state have signed the governor’s compact. Some valued access to additional resources for their communities, even if they were not politically aligned with the governor.

The Effects of Absenteeism

It’s not a surprise that severely absent students learn less, but the magnitude of the relationship between attendance and achievement is striking. Chronically absent students comprised 25 percent of the students taking the state’s standardized math test in 2023, but 40 percent of students scoring at the lowest level. On the other end of the performance spectrum, only 6 percent of students who exceeded expectations were chronically absent.

Rhode Island leaders are waiting for the results of the state’s 2024 standardized tests to learn whether students attending school more regularly has translated into higher achievement. But they’re pleased by another progress marker. In early 2023, just 55 percent of parents responding to the state’s annual survey of public school parents believed that missing at least two days of school a month throughout the school year—the threshold for chronic absenteeism—reduced a student’s chance of graduating high school. By early 2024, less than a year into McKee’s crusade, the number had trended up to 57 percent, a small but important improvement to Infante-Green.

At the Woonsocket High School gym last March, Governor McKee took to the court at halftime to remind the audience that every student needs to be in school, every day. “Education is a community priority,” he told the assembled firefighters, police officers, families, and students. He encouraged Woonsocket to continue building opportunities for students to engage in learning, both by attending school regularly and by attending high-quality out-of-school opportunities in the community.

The governor’s willingness to travel to the high school to highlight the chronic absenteeism crisis in Rhode Island—to recruit allies and to buttress his messaging with a widely publicized statewide scoreboard on absenteeism—demonstrates the often-untapped power of state leadership to galvanize school reform. It also highlights the fact that many school issues are best addressed by communities working across traditional agency boundaries—an often-under-appreciated concept in education policy circles.

This article was adapted from a report by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, where Liz Cohen is policy director. Read the full report.