Houston Students Aren’t Staying in the Classroom Post-Pandemic

This article was originally published in Houston Landing.

From purchasing alarm clocks, donating Uber gift cards, showing up on families’ doorsteps and even attempting to help parents plan their vacations, Clear Creek ISD employees are exhausting their options to get students to show up to school.

In the roughly 40,000-student district southeast of Houston, 17 percent of students were considered “chronically absent” during the 2022-23 school year – meaning they missed at least 18 school days. That’s up nearly double from five years ago.

The issue is not unique to Clear Creek ISD. Mirroring a nationwide, persistent trend, rates of chronically absent Houston-area students exploded after the pandemic. It’s a phenomenon that leaves many wondering why kids aren’t coming to school like they used to – and what it will take to fix that.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Houston’s other largest districts did not make administrators available for an interview for this story.

School leaders and education experts say high absenteeism has devastating ripple effects on students’ academic performance, school district funding and society’s overall perceived importance of the classroom. Yet there is no clear solution, causing schools to scramble to improve attendance habits.

“There did become the feeling of, ‘Is schooling optional?’” said Holly Hughes, Clear Creek ISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We know that the habits start in pre-K, in our earliest years, with parents understanding the value and the intention. It’s a lot to get our students to school in the morning.”

When schools returned in-person after the pandemic sent classes online, most large Houston districts saw their chronic absenteeism rates double. Those rates decreased in the 2022-23 school year — the most recently available state data — but still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

‘Do we even need the school?’

The pandemic shattered the routine of going to school each morning, and once students returned, the lingering option of remote learning was largely seen as an acceptable alternative for when students don’t show up in person.

“People became comfortable staying home and not going to school, where they could dial in or not dial in,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “There wasn’t anybody there to enforce that.”

That’s created an issue larger than anyone knows how to fix, let alone any one district, says Joshua Childs, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. To him, it signals to him a shift in the culture of American schooling.

“At this moment, we are wrestling, as a country, as a state, in terms of what we value when it comes to educating the kids under the age of 18,” Childs said. “Like, what’s the value of education, and what’s the purpose of the school itself? And do we even need the school?”

School leaders and education experts agree that a student’s attendance has major impacts on their academic achievement. The Texas Education Agency warns that chronically absent students are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests, and they’re less likely to attend or complete college.

In a late June State Board of Education meeting, TEA commissioner Mike Morath hypothesized that increased absences could be a reason why student math scores are declinin g across Texas.

“Our broad hypothesis of this is that Covid caused much higher absenteeism from instruction, and as a result, much more mathematics gaps,” Morath said. “The linear nature of mathematics as a discipline is such that if a student misses little chunks of that discipline along the way, that may or may not cause them immediate problems, but it will certainly, at some point in time, prevent them from achieving higher levels of mathematics.”

But the problem lies in getting students and families to understand these stakes.

“One of the things that the pandemic … maybe raised more questions around, is, ‘What’s actually the purpose of schooling? If I can do it through my phone. I can learn through TikTok. I can learn through using technology in different ways, and arriving in a building every single day may not be what’s best for my kids or myself,’” Childs said. “It has big impacts, as far as academic outcomes, employment, post-secondary opportunities, social, mental, physical health outcomes. All of that is impacted based on a child’s attendance.”

Across-the-board issue

Chronic absenteeism affects students across different demographics – campus-level data shows that in some Houston districts, schools in both affluent and underserved communities post similarly high rates of absenteeism.

Students in underserved areas may miss school because they lack necessities like transportation, or because they have a job to support their families. Meanwhile, students from more affluent families may miss class to take regular vacations or visit colleges. Across the board, it’s easier to keep kids at home because parents are increasingly able to work remotely.

With no simple root cause, there’s no crystal-clear solution to keeping kids in the classroom.

Hughes, the Clear Creek administrator, said she found it isn’t as simple as providing more “wraparound” resources such as clothing and transportation. They’ve had to urge families to schedule doctor appointments and college visits on staff professional development days, supply suggested dates for vacations, and try to communicate the overall importance of the in-person school routine.

“It’s important to start those traditions, those expectations and those structures in the home early,” Hughes said. “Going to school on a daily basis and committing to that follow through every day, it takes a lot on a family unit. … I think it became hard for parents.”

A pricey problem

Brown said declining attendance is a circular issue – the more kids miss school, the less money districts have to rectify low attendance.

The Texas government funds schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning total attendance counts for the year are divided by the number of instructional days to produce the number of students a district is funded for.

Proponents of attendance-based funding say it provides incentive for improving attendance, while critics have long argued it more heavily penalizes schools with students dealing with socioeconomic factors that drive absenteeism.

Many school districts across Texas have outlined multimillion-dollar budget deficits this year, and several Houston-area school boards have pointed to declining attendance rates as a factor contributing to their financial woes.

“Schools are working really hard to try to get the kids in but it takes the parents and the kids, as well, to get them into school,” Brown said. “Schools can’t do much on attendance, other than encourage and try to build an environment where kids want to be there.”

This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.