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It鈥檚 2026. Satellites connect to devices in our pockets, artificial intelligence algorithms can drive cars and scan X-rays, and Homer鈥檚 3,000-year-old poem is the basis for the summer鈥檚 hottest movie.

But there鈥檚 always a but. And right now, in a time when public school absences remain stubbornly high since Covid closures five years ago, it seems amazing not that educators can鈥檛 fix this problem, because it is complicated and occurs for many reasons, but that they can鈥檛 even agree on how to count whether a student is absent or not.

That鈥檚 not an exaggeration. While the number of chronically absent students nearly doubled after schools returned to in-person schooling in 2022, there is no universal consensus on how to determine the extent of this problem.

In fact, when Iowa put together comprehensive legislation in 2024 to address the state鈥檚 attendance problem, it became clear that different counting methods made it impossible to compare attendance statewide. Starting with the 2025-26 school year, the state mandated that all districts use the same method to count attendance.聽

For the most part, school attendance policies fall into three buckets:

• If you are present for any part of the school day, you are counted as attending.
• If you are present for at least half of the day, you are counted as attending.
• Your attendance is tracked at the period or even the minute level.

While Iowa has chosen the minute-level attendance as its state standard, there is no universal agreement or any research about which method is the best. Sixteen states leave that decision to local discretion. In fact, two experts, Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the CEO and president of Attendance Works, and Justine Oliva, the director of Policy & Research for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, stay away from endorsing any one method. But both call for standardizing how attendance is counted within each state.

鈥淭he lack of a common definition of a day of attendance continues to make it difficult to interpret and compare data within and across states,鈥� reads a 2025 report from Attendance Works.

Attendance throughout history

While the first school law in the country is the, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it is not known when schools first started taking attendance. But there鈥檚 a good record of the initial attendance complaint. Near the end of Horace Mann鈥檚 in 1838, Mann wrote about the state鈥檚 inability to collect even basic 鈥渋nformation respecting the number of scholars attending the public schools, and the regularity of that attendance.鈥�

By 1918, all states had laws mandating school attendance, but truancy did not become a federal focus until 2001鈥檚 bill made it mandatory for all states to report truancy data to the federal government. Fourteen years later, the pushed attendance further into the spotlight, when many states recognized chronic absenteeism鈥檚 importance in student outcomes. Unlike truancy, this indicator reflects both excused and unexcused absences. As part of ESSA, 36 states and the District of Columbia included chronic absenteeism as one of the markers of educational progress in their states.

The first thing to understand about attendance is how schools use their data. In six states, is used to determine state funding; the rest of the states use enrollment counts assessed once or twice a year to decide how much money districts receive. But even within a school there can be different uses for attendance. For instance, at Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy in Norwalk, Connecticut, principal Damon Lewis said the middle school reports its homeroom attendance to the district and state, but uses its period-by-period attendance to keep a closer eye on each student.

Before the pandemic, about were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year or about 18 days. When schools reopened after Covid shutdowns, student behavior had changed, with nearly twice as many learners chronically absent, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Research proves the link between attendance and achievement, Malkus said; for every day a student is absent, the average achievement for that student decreases. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just kids who are chronically absent,鈥� he said, the effect of attendance on achievement 鈥渋s pretty much linear. Every day matters.鈥�

A new report from NWEA last month backed up those findings, showing that chronic absenteeism played a major role in students failing to reach pre-pandemic academic levels. 鈥淚mproving attendance should be part of the academic recovery strategy in most districts rather than seen as a distinct issue,鈥� the report concluded.

While chronic absenteeism is a big issue for many state education leaders, Malkus warned that it can be an arbitrary distinction. 鈥淥ne of the shocking things [about attendance] is that 7% of kids miss over 20% of the school year,鈥� he said, adding that these absences can affect an entire school鈥檚 achievement.

Best ways to count

While there is no research that measures one method of counting attendance versus another, it鈥檚 also difficult to know even how most schools measure attendance. In an Attendance Works 2026 , only eight states require districts to use a per-minute attendance calculation, while 24 states require attendance for a half day or more to count a student as present. But there are some signs that a growing number of schools are opting to get granular and track student attendance per minute. Arkansas and Oklahoma moved to period-based attendance in the 2025-26 school year, and both Ohio and Iowa will make that move in this year.

Jesse Roy, the senior director of education value for PowerSchool, said his customers are trending toward wanting more information. 鈥淲e see states going from daily to half-daily to per-minute. More data is kind of what you鈥檙e after.鈥� PowerSchool is a student information software company used in 90 of the country鈥檚 largest 100 school districts.

Oliva of Rhode Island mentioned that counting attendance so closely could have some pitfalls. 鈥淢ore granular methods (like per hour) may better capture instructional time if the data are accurate but may be more difficult to implement consistently at the local level,鈥� she said.

When Rhode Island tried to pass a comprehensive attendance bill in 2024, it was using 鈥渁t least half the day鈥� method of counting a student present, she said, adding that this method is the more widely used benchmark in education. Even though that bill never became law, the state did implement several components of the proposal and has had success improving its attendance rates. Rhode Island鈥檚 chronic absenteeism rate posted the fifth largest decline in the country from 2021-22 to 2023-24, according to a from the state鈥檚 Public Expenditure Council.

Iowa鈥檚 push to improve attendance originally focused on how schools must take specific steps to notify parents as students鈥� absences piled up, as well as a major publicity push to inform the public about the importance of good attendance. But the next year, the state鈥檚 legislators passed some smaller changes that specified not only how schools must count attendance, but also what could count as an excused absence.

鈥淭hey are sweating the details on this, and that is what state leadership looks like,鈥� Malkus said.

Des Moines has been tracking per-minute attendance for years, well before Iowa鈥檚 new requirement. 鈥淭he per-minute calculation really matters,鈥� said Jennifer Stalder, who oversees the case managers who track attendance in district schools. 鈥淚t allows us to home in on what鈥檚 happening and have more meaningful conversations with parents.鈥�

Even though Central Falls, Iowa, had not yet gone to per-minute attendance last school year, Jennifer Van Fleet, the district鈥檚 executive director of student services, said she imagined the extra information might help each school discern which student has an aversion to math or highlight a student who is late everyday. 鈥淲e can match the support and intervention to be specific,鈥� she added.

Ohio is another state that uses the per-minute method as part of its statewide goal to reduce chronic absenteeism in half by the end of the 2028-29 school year. The state has shifted to trying to predict and prevent students from becoming chronically absent, instead of only intervening after they have missed 10% of school. Part of this effort is not only collecting more information about student attendance, but sharing that data quickly and accurately.

The state鈥檚 , shows weekly updates statewide, including the number and percentage of students in each district who are both chronically absent and at-risk of becoming chronically absent.

Even though PowerSchool鈥檚 Roy wondered if data overload could reach a point of diminishing returns for school officials, he did express wonder at how specific schools can be now when tracking student attendance. 鈥淔ifteen years ago,鈥� when he worked in a school district, 鈥淚 would have to walk around with binders and do two hours of work per student鈥� to find out all this information, he said.

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