Students missing school has always been a challenge, but since the pandemic it has become a national crisis. High rates of absenteeism are undermining student learning and increasing the chasm between schools and families. Yet, as researchers who study family engagement, we have seen how schools can build productive relationships with families that can actually reduce absenteeism.
Parents have the most influence over their children’s lives. Enlisting them as true partners in student success is a critical—but often overlooked—attendance strategy. Here, we discuss how educators can do this in both strategic and tactical ways.
Family Engagement Goes Both Ways
Let’s start by describing the framework for how we think about strengthening the productive connection between schools and families. Karen developed the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships in 2013 while working with the U.S. Department of Education and revised it in 2019. This research-based framework identifies the “essential” conditions that must be met to develop and sustain effective partnerships between families and schools. The “process conditions” describe the practices that must be deployed to build trusting and respectful partnerships between families and educators, while the “organizational conditions” describe the leadership commitment and required systems and structures that must be in place to support and sustain the process conditions (Mapp & Bergman, 2019).
A central philosophy of the framework is that both schools and families require development in key areas—such as understanding each other’s expectations and overcoming barriers to communication—to foster a collaborative environment that supports student success, including reduced absenteeism. By emphasizing reciprocal capacity-building, the framework offers a strategic approach to enhancing family engagement, recognizing that both educators and families play critical roles in achieving the shared goal of student success.
It’s worth underscoring two points from the updated framework that are often overlooked. First, family engagement in schools should be focused on student success, not merely involvement in school events. Showing up for bake sales is good, but genuine partnership between families and educators about student goals and student learning is better. Second, successful family engagement is an explicit strategy, not an aspirational goal. This means districts, schools, and educators must prioritize building relationships and trust with families. It means making the family-school connection a core area of accountability, planning, professional development, and practice.
The Link to Absenteeism
While productive family engagement has been shown to increase student academic success, until recently there has been no research on its impact on attendance. That’s why we joined a research team that produced a powerful study showing exactly this connection. In collaboration with the family engagement advocacy organization Learning Heroes and the nonprofit education research and consulting group TNTP, we looked at the link between family engagement and chronic absenteeism in schools before, during, and after the pandemic (Learning Heroes/TNTP, 2023). We found that schools that had established strong connections with families before the pandemic—with its massive increase in chronic absenteeism—tended to be buffered from the most extreme increases in chronic absenteeism after the pandemic. In fact, compared with schools that had weak connections with families before the pandemic, these schools had a 39 percent smaller increase in chronic absenteeism post-pandemic. We saw similar effects for English language arts and math proficiency—strong family relationships powerfully muted the detrimental effects of the pandemic.
To measure family engagement, we used teacher-family surveys conducted before the pandemic. They documented the level of trust between parents and teachers, the extent of parent involvement in school activities, and the degree of influence parents had on school decision-making processes. While this study showed how strong family engagement mitigated the pandemic’s effects on absenteeism, additional research is shedding new light on how schools can enhance family connections to reduce absenteeism moving forward.
Family Engagement as an Attendance Strategy
To use family engagement as a strategy for reducing student absenteeism, we must think of families as partners and invest time, attention, and money to support staff and families. Caregivers are the experts on their own children. Rather than sidelining them or focusing on what these caregivers are perceived to lack, it’s more productive (and more inclusive) to create a collaborative environment where families feel valued and are more likely to engage actively, productively, and supportively in their child’s education.
Strategic family engagement requires the attention of school leadership, money for personnel and interventions, and ongoing educator professional development. Principals must set clear expectations for teachers and staff regarding the importance of building relationships with families and provide the necessary training and resources to do so effectively. They must also be innovative in overcoming barriers to family participation, whether logistical, linguistic, or cultural.
Likewise, teachers need to develop and refine skills in effective communication, cultural competence, and collaborative problem solving. They must move beyond traditional parent-teacher meetings to more meaningful interactions that leverage the insights and strengths of families to support student success.
'Attendance nudge' programs have been shown to reduce chronic absenteeism by 10 to 15 percent districtwide.
Family engagement also requires deliberate and sustained commitment from the district; it serves students best when it is integrated into a district’s strategic framework. This requires allocating resources—both financial and human—to support schools in their engagement efforts. It may well require a formal senior-level position focused on this work.
Districts should invest in systems that facilitate regular, meaningful communication with families. This can take the form of routinely delivering information that families find valuable and actionable, like “attendance nudges.” It can also mean facilitating more meaningful two-way communication between teachers and families.
Finally, district leaders can support policies that recognize, reward, and expand effective family engagement practices—from individual teacher practices that build trust with families to districtwide attendance-nudge programs.
Two Key Tactics
Exactly how to make family engagement a central pillar to reducing absenteeism will vary by district, but the general approach is going to be the same: investing in and prioritizing relationships with families. Consider how Richmond Public Schools in Virginia has approached this challenge. Like districts around the country, Richmond has struggled with high rates of chronic absenteeism. To change this trajectory, the urban district committed to strengthening family engagement—hiring its first chief engagement officer, Shadae Harris—and saw impressive improvements. As a result of the multi-tiered approach she has overseen, chronic absenteeism has decreased by nearly two-thirds in some schools.
The district used the Dual Capacity-Building Framework as the foundation for the creation of their engagement strategy to reduce chronic absenteeism. One component of the strategy was to repurpose “attendance officers” into “family liaisons.” The title change came with a job description change as well. Instead of taking a more punitive approach, family liaisons were asked to foster personal, trust-based relationships with families. They were embedded within communities and tasked with understanding and helping families with their unique challenges and aspirations.
These liaisons do more than pro forma outreach, too; they address real barriers to attendance. For example, they provide direct aid to families to reduce housing insecurity. The district also works with the local justice system to focus less on its punitive role and more on offering support and access to resources. Finally, Richmond has centralized its data into a dashboard to better understand and target their outreach efforts.
1. Attendance Nudges
One tactical way the Richmond district used this data was to implement “attendance nudges”—communications to families on a regular cadence about their student’s absence record (EveryDay Labs, 2022). (See Figure 1) To execute this, the district partnered with EveryDay Labs, an organization we are both affiliated with that helps districts reduce absenteeism by engaging families. These interventions have been tested, replicated, and optimized to reduce absenteeism based on more than a dozen randomized controlled experiments conducted in school districts around the country. Overlaying nudges on top of other strategies consistently reduces chronic absenteeism by another 10 to 15 percent districtwide (Robinson et al., 2018; Rogers & Feller, 2018).
In districts that partner with EveryDay Labs, families of students who miss more than a few days of school ly receive a personalized “attendance nudge” every 4–6 weeks by mail, as well as supplemental text messages. Example courtesy of EveryDay Labs.
How do they work? Attendance nudges are a series of personalized messages delivered throughout the year, such as, “Karen has missed 7 days so far this school year.” They can also include comparisons to peer absences; grade-specific information about why attendance matters; and useful information about absenteeism, health support, and transportation resources offered by the school district. Which specific message a family receives is tailored to their unique circumstance—there are more than 10,000 versions of these messages, depending on factors like the time of year, grade level, and language spoken at home, to name a few. The messages are delivered by U.S. mail and by text; the greatest impact comes through the printed mail nudges.
2. Better Truancy Notices
Another easy-to-implement tactic to support family engagement as an attendance strategy is to rewrite mandated school-to-family communications. For example, consider the “Notices of Truancy” states require schools send to families when a student is late or absent a certain number of times. Todd conducted research on rewriting these notices with a team of collaborators that included Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. Working with a large urban district, they rewrote the notices to be clearer and more direct, more supportive, and less punitive, and then conducted an experiment involving more than 130,000 families.
To illustrate what treating families as partners looks like, consider the first two sentences of the original notice used statewide in California before the study, followed by the first two sentences in the improved notice that we wrote.
Original:
Good attendance is required for academic excellence. California Education Code section 48260 provides that a pupil (child) subject to compulsory full-time education or to compulsory continuation education who is absent from school without a valid excuse three full days in one school year or tardy or absent for more than a 30-minute period during the school day without a valid excuse on three occasions in one school year, or any combination thereof, shall be classified as a truant and shall be reported to the attendance supervisor or to the superintendent of the school district.
Improved:
We need your help. Todd’s absences from school are concerning, and your partnership is crucial.
The difference is dramatic. In the district studied, the improved notices were 40 percent more effective at reducing absences over the following month (Lasky-Fink et al., 2021). Yet truancy notifications are just the tip of the iceberg. Districts should make all their communications to families easier to read and more centered on families as partners (Rogers & Lasky-Fink, 2023).
A Common Goal
The Dual Capacity-Building Framework can help schools transform their approach to family engagement, fostering communities where educators and families work as partners toward the common goal of student success. This collaborative approach reduces absenteeism, while building stronger, more resilient communities, schools, and classrooms.
Authors’ note: The writing of some sentences in early drafts of this essay was assisted by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ Is family engagement in your school or district laser-focused on student success?
How do you know?
➛ What tone do the truancy notices sent to families in your community convey? Could the language be revised to be easier to read, more supportive, and less punitive?
