60% of DC high schoolers are chronically absent

DC's schools and safety net continue to fail kids as juvenile crime rises

DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) finally posted last school year’s (2022-2023) attendance report. This report shows in awful detail that DC schools are nowhere close to recovering to pre-pandemic attendance levels. 60% of high school kids are chronically absent and in 8 high schools (mostly in DC’s poorest neighborhoods) 75%-85% of students are chronically absent. While absenteeism and truancy decreased slightly from last school year, they remain incredibly high and reflect serious unaddressed problems. Missing school is often a warning sign that something is going wrong in a child’s life and is strongly correlated with juvenile arrests. It’s deeply concerning that nothing in the Mayor’s “Public Emergency on Juvenile Crime” order addressed the school absenteeism problem despite them being aware of this problem for years.

Preventing crime by keeping kids in school

The OSSE report heavily focuses on the positive development that both chronic absenteeism (missing at least 10% of school days) and truancy (at least 10 unexcused absences) decreased slightly from last school year. While any improvement is welcome, their trend graphs help show that this problem remains much worse than pre-pandemic:

While a 43% chronic absenteeism rate is bad, the situation is even worse in DC’s high schools. The only silver lining here is that chronic absences in DC high schools decreased from 70% in school year 2021-2022 to 60% in school year 2022-2023:

Montgomery County, Maryland has also posted their 2022-2023 absenteeism data which allows for a partial comparison (while acknowledging the many differences between the two jurisdictions). At every age DC students are significantly more likely to be chronically absent:

21%-31% of DC high schoolers are missing 30% or more of the school year (red in the table below). These high school students in the “Profound Chronic Absence” category represent about 5,572 kids.

Looking solely at DC’s high schools there is a clear division between public schools serving low income neighborhoods (with high truancy rates) and schools with wealthy parents (with low truancy rates):

DC’s attendance data is often regarded as incomplete. Some excused absences may be coded as unexcused and there are often disagreements over “late” vs. “absent.” However none of these data quality problems are new or explain away the massive increase in absenteeism over the past several years. The fact that this data is only available at the end of November for a school year that ended in June shows that DC schools’ attendance data is incredibly disorganized and/or intentionally withheld from the public. DC schools also withhold any kind of attendance data about the current school year from parents. This serves the political purpose of keeping this embarrassing topic out of the news but it also prevents any kind of accountability to drive improvement at the school or District level.

In 2021 the DC Auditor testified about the lack of real-time data to get ahead of student problems:

“For example, even though we do not have needed course, credit, and grade information, we can build a limited, initial early warning system right now that would return critical attendance, behavior, and achievement data to educators. We could create high school feedback reports, the most in demand state level reporting by LEAs across the country. These reports show levels of incoming achievement, attendance, and behavior for each high school as well as include key metrics on access and outcomes within each high school. We could do this tomorrow while we are also investing in a long-term pathway to better data and systems.”

By all accounts OSSE has not set up a District-wide “early warning system” and has instead claimed that schools are doing this kind of proactive tracking and intervention on their own. But with over 60% of high schoolers chronically absent it is clear that the current approach isn’t working. In previous school years only 29%-39% of truant kids were referred to Court Social Services (despite requirements for schools to do so) so OSSE should know that schools have been unable to proactively do even the bare minimum to address truancy. While some people treat Mayoral Control of DC schools as the victorious end-state of reform; in practice how the schools are run is more important than who is in charge.

This depressing absenteeism data should also cause the Mayor’s “Every Day Counts!” task force to re-assess their glowing assessment of EveryDay Labs. This vendor’s data showed no net improvement in attendance in school year 2022-2023 but the Mayor’s task force chose to focus on the 48% of students who improved while ignoring the 52% whose attendance got worse. Despite this failure, the Bowser administration extended their partnership with EveryDay Labs for this school year:

So far EveryDay Labs has received $443K from the DC government for their intervention:

At the same time that the EveryDay Labs intervention isn’t working, only 8% of chronically absent kids were served by the “Show Up Stand Up” truancy reduction program and the Mayor cut the Truancy Reduction program’s funding by 57% for this fiscal year (which mostly overlaps with the 2023-2024 school year). All of this depressing data paints a picture of DC schools where absenteeism is still unacceptably high and there’s no viable plan to bring it back down to pre-pandemic levels (which were already incredibly high). Which in turn should be deeply concerning to everyone who is worried about DC’s juvenile crime problem.

Kids missing school is only sometimes caused by a problem within the school. Very often absenteeism is just an indicator of some other problem in the child’s life like family strife, physical or mental health issues or logistical problems like clothing, housing, hygiene or transportation. But most of those issues can also be risk factors for a kid engaging in criminal behavior:

DC ought to be using attendance data alongside other indicators as an “Early Warning System” (the Auditor’s phrase) to target supports and enforcement to vulnerable kids and their families. These risk factors are never an excuse for kids to break the law but they are things we can address (alongside enforcement) to make it less likely that kids commit crimes. Instead we’ve seen that many kids get neither support from DC’s safety net or meaningful enforcement action when they skip school.

This failure to proactively help DC’s most vulnerable families also extends to critical programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Councilmember Christina Henderson outlined how DC’s bureaucracy is failing to process SNAP and Medicaid applications:

• In fiscal year 2022 DC’s rate of “timely” processing of SNAP applications was by far the worst in America at only 43%. For comparison DC was at 92% in FY 2021 and Maryland and Virginia were both at 89% in FY 2022. This means that incredibly poor families in DC were left waiting without the funds they qualify for to buy food.

  • The income limits for SNAP are quite low. For example a 2 person household can only earn up to $39K in gross income and retain SNAP eligibility. So these are families where even small benefits like SNAP can make a big difference.

  • DC is incredibly slow at processing SNAP applications despite spending “more than $622 million on the DC Access System (DCAS) that was supposed to streamline the enrollment process not just for SNAP, but ever other public benefit program including Medicaid.”

• “43% of pending Medicaid renewal applications (more than 6,900 apps), were pending review for more than 60 days. 27% of renewal applications (more than 4,300), were pending review for more than 90 days”

  • This means that very poor families (often with kids) are being delayed in getting physical or mental health care due to broken bureaucratic processes

If the Bowser administration was serious about doing everything possible to address the “root causes of juvenile crime” then reducing absenteeism and strengthening safety net programs would be a priority. Instead the “Public Emergency on Juvenile Crime” order is only focused on measures for how the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) can handle kids after an arrest. The Mayor also made significant cuts to programs serving vulnerable DC kids in this year’s budget:

• $3.9M cut from child mental health

• $1.9M cut from the Child and Family Services Agency (the Mayor had originally proposed a $3.1M cut)

• $3.8M cut from Department of Parks and Recreations programs (mostly for kids)

• $2.3M from the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (the Mayor had originally proposed a $1.7M cut)

• $2.9M cut (-57%) from the Truancy Reduction program

Money isn’t everything but these are material cuts in a period of elevated inflation so the impact is significant. The Mayor was making these cuts at the same time she was cutting MPD’s patrol budget by $27M. All of these key programs in the fight against crime absorbed serious cuts because the Mayor’s first budget priority was to not raise taxes. Almost immediately after the District’s revenue projections came out (which informed what the FY 2024 budget would have available since DC has to have a balanced budget) the Mayor released a statement saying “it would be fiscally irresponsible to try to tax our way to sustainable, long-term growth” and “we must budget within our means.” Her “red line” or highest priority was not “no cuts to public safety” but instead “no tax increases.” In practice this also meant ensuring that a planned tax cut on real estate transactions went into effect; driving the need for even deeper budget cuts to pay for it. It’s perfectly legitimate for the Mayor to be the champion of business interests and wealthy neighborhoods that prioritize lower taxes over a robust safety net. But it’s very hard to tackle the root causes of juvenile crime without a robust safety net.

There’s been no clear strategy from the administration how multiple DC agencies will suddenly begin to provide much better services to DC’s youth with fewer resources in a time of crisis. When combined with serious problems at Court Social Services (run by our federal court) DC’s juvenile crime-prevention “ecosystem” seems to be woefully incapable of dealing with the current challenge. Hopefully this disturbing absenteeism data will spur the Bowser administration and the Council to take action. High schools with 75% or higher chronic absenteeism is the youth data equivalent of air raid sirens going off. It shouldn’t be possible for the administration and media to continue to ignore this problem but only time will tell.