Rethinking Attendance

Everyone is obsessed with attendance right now. Conversations about school improvement increasingly start and end with the same question: How do we fix attendance? The answers tend to follow a familiar script—make students come to school, make parents ensure they come, and hold schools accountable when they don’t. Attendance is tracked, monitored, and used as a primary indicator of school quality. And to be clear, attendance does matter. If students aren’t present, learning can’t happen.

The problem is not that we care about attendance. The problem is that we have begun treating attendance as the outcome of school rather than what it actually is: a means to an outcome. When attendance becomes the goal instead of a condition that supports learning, we start making decisions that undermine enrollment, belonging, and long-term engagement—especially for students who are already on the margins.

At the same time schools are being pressured to improve attendance, we are also facing widespread concern about declining enrollment. These two realities are colliding in troubling ways. Students are being disenrolled for “poor attendance,” sending an implicit message that if you cannot come consistently, you do not belong here. But we cannot be alarmed by low enrollment while simultaneously pushing out the very students who make attendance statistics uncomfortable. If we want students enrolled—particularly students who have been disengaged, pushed out, or failed by traditional systems—we have to accept the attendance realities they bring with them.

For some young people, any attendance rate above zero represents progress. A student attending 25% of the time may appear, on paper, to be part of a failing school. But that number only makes sense when compared to the alternative. If that school did not exist, where would that student be enrolled? And how often would they attend there? In many cases, the answer is not “a better school with higher attendance,” but no school at all. For students who have already disengaged entirely, partial attendance can be the first step toward re-entry, not evidence of failure.

Low attendance is not a verdict on a student or a school; it is a signal. It tells us something about whether school feels relevant, safe, accessible, or worth the effort required to navigate complex realities like trauma, health issues, transportation challenges, work obligations, or caregiving responsibilities. When we treat attendance as the ultimate outcome, we stop listening to that signal and start responding with punishment—disenrollment, exclusion, or closure—rather than curiosity and design.

If we are serious about improving outcomes for students, we need to be clearer about what outcomes actually matter. Are students learning when they are present? Are they building academic confidence, skills, and a sense of agency? Are they progressing toward credentials, graduation, or meaningful next steps? Are we seeing growth over time, especially among students who were previously attending zero percent of the time? These are the outcomes that tell us whether a school is doing its job.

Attendance will always matter, but it should not be the sole or primary measure of success. When students do show up, we should celebrate it. When they learn, we should celebrate it. When they return after an absence, we should celebrate it. People come back to places where they feel seen, valued, and successful. Belonging and learning are what drive attendance over time—not threats, metrics, or exclusion.

If we want higher attendance, we should focus less on forcing compliance and more on making schools places people want to be. And when we evaluate schools, especially those serving students with the greatest barriers to engagement, we must look beyond raw attendance rates. A school that students attend some of the time may be accomplishing far more than a system that closes its doors to them entirely.

Attendance matters—but it is not the point. Learning is the point. Belonging is the point. And keeping doors open for students who might otherwise disappear from education altogether is one of the most meaningful outcomes a school can achieve.