What is it about Dana Farber that makes it such a powerful adversary against cancer? It's hundreds of Dana Farber researchers and clinicians making new discoveries inspired by the work of previous Dana Farber discoverers. At Dana Farber Cancer Institute, nothing is as effective against cancer as a relentless succession of breakthroughs. Learn more about their momentum. Go to Danafarber. Org/stories.

From the New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold. This is The Daily. Today, long after schools have fully reopened, my colleague, Sara Rewaash describes a more permanent shift in the way kids and their parents think about being in class after the pandemic, which is that school feels optional, and kids are still missing a lot of it. It's Tuesday, April second.

Sarah, you're an education reporter, and you've been looking at what's happened in schools since the pandemic, when kids missed many hours of class and fell way behind on their learning targets. It's been three years since most kids went back to school, so one might expect things to be almost back to normal, but you found something surprising. Tell us about that.

Yeah, things are really not back to normal, even though it has been quite a while since most or all kids have come back to the classroom. For example, we know that kids are still academically behind since the pandemic. On average, US students have made up about a third of their pandemic learning losses in math and about a quarter their losses in reading. So overall, academically, students are not back to where they would have been without the pandemic.

Got it.

Then we're also just seeing still a lot of behavioral challenges in the classroom. Kids having a lot of trouble regulating their emotions and their ability to sit in the classroom and respond in an orderly way and be in a really structured environment. As an education reporter, I had been following all of these trends and wondering, why isn't it back to normal?

How did you answer that question? Why aren't kids back to normal?

I came across this data and this report that really crystallized things for me. It was about absenteeism, the share of students who are missing a lot of days of school. Before the pandemic, about 15% of US students were chronically absent from school. After the pandemic, 28% of students were chronically absent from school. So that's almost double Wow. And last school year, the last school year for which these national estimates are available, it was 26%. So it had barely improved, and still, one in four students were chronically absent from school.

Sarah, what does chronically absent actually mean?

The way that it's typically defined is being absent for at least 10% of the school year, and that typically works out to about 18 days out of the year. The reason why all of this matters is because students not being in school and not being in school regularly relates directly back to the things I mentioned at the beginning about academic catch up from the pandemic and academic performance, as well as their ability to regulate their behavior, get into a routine, deal with some of the mental health aspects of the pandemic. This issue is a window into what's going on in schools today. One of the most surprising things we saw in the data is that this is really happening across demographic groups. Wow. In poor communities which had higher absenteeism rates before the pandemic, it has increased from about 19% before the pandemic to around 32% last school year. But in rich communities, it's also increased from about 10% to 19%. This is also happening similarly across demographics in terms of how long school districts stayed remote during the pandemic, which was a surprise to me. You see generally similar increases in chronic absenteeism on average in districts that were remote the longest and districts that were opening relatively quickly during the pandemic.

Wow, that is striking. If it's happening across demographic groups, is it equally happening across age groups or are there differences that you're seeing?

The way that one source described it to me is that chronic absenteeism is like a Nike swoosh.

Explain that. What do you mean? A Nike swoosh?

Yes. In the early grades, you see higher rates of absenteeism, like in kindergarten and first grade. Then you see this long tail at the end in upper grades in high school where absenteeism has also historically been high. You have the least absenteeism in the middle, in elementary, in middle school, and then high rates on either end.

Let's dig into that a little more. Do we know why some students still aren't going back to school. What's causing this absenteeism?

There's no one factor that's driving the absences. It's more like there are a number of factors that pile up on top of one another. But probably the most universally shared reason that you'll hear is just illness. Schools have always been germ factories. But with COVID, there is ostensibly one other virus in the mix, as well as just a feeling of a changed culture around going to school and to work sick. I think some hesitance and caution from families about sending their child to school sick.

I can totally relate to that. Having three kids of my own, there is certainly this self-consciousness that if somebody cuffs or sniffles, you feel this sense of responsibility of not exposing the world to your germs.

Yeah. I think some would argue that's been a positive cultural change for everyone's health since the pandemic. But it's also something that schools are now trying to fight against in terms of having some new messaging to remind people that school is obligatory, it is mandatory, and they're trying to re-encourage families to send their kids to school unless they're actively throwing up or they have an active fever. It's a new recalculation and recalibration.

Okay, sickness is one of the things that is keeping kids home more. What else is going on?

I think mental health and anxiety is another big issue, something that I heard in a lot of interviews parents and counselors. We know that students and children experienced increases in depression and anxiety during the pandemic, lots of disruption to their school and home lives. What I'm hearing from parents as well as counselors is just a lot of increases in anxiety and the way that students relate to school because they were removed from school and were able to have distance and a barrier during critical periods of development. Reengaging with that has been pretty hard on a lot of kids.

Hello.

Hey, Dana.

It's me again.

There's this one parent I spoke with in Atlanta. Her name is Dana Shefsky. She's a mom of two teenagers, and she went through this with her son, who's now 13.

My son, he's very bright.

Before the pandemic, she described him as really social.

Extremely social, very well-liked, extremely athletic and in that way, love to do sports.

There were no major flags or issues regarding his attendance. Then, like everyone else, in the spring of 2020, he was sent home. He learns online. By fall of that year, he gets back to school relatively quickly, but things were not normal. They had to wear masks, and at some point, things start to take a turn.

He started to withdraw a bit from social activities. The fear of removing his mask in front of the other kids overtook his ability to go to football out of fear and anxiety. That's when we realized that something was very wrong.

Eventually, he is set to start middle school.

He said, I'll be fine when school starts in the fall. I just need the summer to do a reset.

He's telling himself he's going to go and it's going to go okay.

He said he was fine and he was ready. Then the first day of school came and he was not fine.

He doesn't go.

He refused to go to school the first few days, and he kept telling himself that he'll do it tomorrow. I think he was really convinced of that. Each time tomorrow would come and he would get up and get ready. He would get in the car and we would get to the parking lot of the school, and he just couldn't do it.

It took a few days into the school year until he would actually go to school. When he did, it went okay.

He saw all his friends from fifth grade. They were all happy to see him. He felt great. He came home and was just so relieved that that chapter was over, as were we. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of further challenges.

But then it started to get worse.

He started to miss school, probably a day or two, a week. He felt like he wasn't really ready for the increased demands and pressures of middle school, both socially and academically. And his response to that was to just avoid it at any cost possible.

And by later that fall.

We went from missing school one or two days a week the first month to by October of that school year, he was refusing entirely.

He had pretty much stopped going altogether.

It almost seems like Dana's son is stuck in this vicious cycle where fear and anxiety beget more fear and anxiety.

Yeah. A crucial thing is that her and her husband were able to work from home, which is one aspect of this, that some parents do have the ability to work remotely now, which she would say is a factor in allowing some of this to happen. Completely refusing school is perhaps an extreme example, but it is representative of some of the push and pull that kids are experiencing right now, where feeling anxious can make you want to avoid school, but then the more you don't go to school and you're out of your routines, it can make you feel more anxious about going. It can be a vicious cycle. For Dana and her family and her son, it took some real professional intervention to help him get out of it.

Okay.

So anxiety about school and different feelings about sickness are a couple of drivers of this absenteeism that we're seeing.

What else?

Yeah, there are a number of other reasons. For this, it can depend on family situation. I think it's helpful to break it out into two different categories, higher income families and lower income families. For higher income communities and higher income families, I'm hearing a lot more that families are going on vacation. They're not so beholden to the spring break calendar. It's like, no problem. Let's add on a few days at the end. Maybe we'll go off peak travel season. I heard from a number of people that just aren't blanking about that anymore. You learn online during COVID, we can just make it up online. We'll just figure it out. There's not that sense of obligatory attendance as there might have been before.

Basically, the pandemic normalized this that kids don't always need to show up. Maybe some parents are even taking advantage of that.

Yeah. I think it's playing out in different ways depending on your family circumstance. If you're a higher income family, maybe you're taking advantage of a deal to go to Hawaii for two weeks, and it's not the peak travel season. But if you're a lower income family, you have different reasons. It's the same underlying philosophy, but the different motivating factors. Some of the many reasons that lower income communities had higher rates of student absences before the pandemic still exist. Your student may have a job, and that job and the money that it brings in for your family is more valuable than the daily attendance, as well as needing childcare and babysitter's for younger siblings. Maybe you were up all night with a family situation and you're tired and you go for sleep, you're not going to school that day. Transportation barriers. There's any number of reasons, but it's also just this feeling that it doesn't feel mandatory anymore more that any one of those barriers is just a little more likely to keep you home than before.

It's quite a contrast, isn't it? It's almost like a perfect satirical snapshot of our very unequal society, right? I mean, disadvantaged kids missing school because they're working and more privileged kids missing school because of vacation.

Yeah, and actually really speaks to some of the other things about absenteeism, where if you're a higher-income student, you're less likely to be academically affected because you're off getting an enriching experience when you're out of school, whereas lower-income students, it's more harmful for them to miss school because the things that they're missing for are not necessarily academic replacements.

It sounds like there were a few things that were set in motion by the pandemic that exacerbated problems that were already there. Then because of the way the world settled into this new reality and developed new habits and attitudes towards sickness and remote work, you have this perfect storm that results in kids chronically missing more school.

Yeah. I think on an individual level for any particular student or family, it might not seem so significant for the one day that you're sick or the one day you go on vacation, but it does start to add up. Then when you look at a school level or a system level and the large number of students and families this is impacting, that's where you start to see that this is having a huge impact on education.

We'll be right back. Sarah, what is the implication of so many kids missing school?

Yeah. One reason I think this is a helpful metric is because absenteeism helps explain why so many students across the country have not caught up from their pandemic learning losses. It's both a cause and a symptom. If you're behind academically, you don't really want to go to school. If you don't go to school, you fall further behind academically. Then with mental health, if you have a lot of anxiety, you may not want to go to school, but then not going can fuel your anxiety even more. It's all really interrelated. Looking at this gives us a clear picture of the challenges facing schools right now. Part of why this is so relevant is because absenteeism has impacts beyond the students who are absent themselves. So not only is it bad for their academics, there's research that shows that when classmates are absent, it can negatively harm the academics of even the students who do show up because the teacher has to adjust their curriculum and slow down a bit to make sure that everyone's on the same page. Then there's other research that shows that absenteeism is culturally contagious. On a given day, if at least 10% of your classmates are absent, you are then more likely to be absent the following day.

We've talked a lot about the negative impacts of missing school and this doom loop, if you will. School, in many ways, is about more than just the academics, right? What are kids missing out on apart from this crucial time of learning?

Yeah. I mean, school is where you get prepared for social life and work life in society. And so beyond the academics, there's a lot that goes into school. For very young students who were very young during the pandemic, there's the element of learning to stand in line for the bathroom, learning how to hold a pencil, learning to share. These are all things that kids are learning in school. And for older For older students, there's learning to engage with the world in a way that you're going to have to do as an adult in the workforce. One thing that really stuck out to me is I talked to a school counselor who told me the kids at her high school got so used to just googling solutions during the pandemic that they have a lot of anxiety around taking a test they don't know the answers to or having a difficult conversation with a teacher. Those social skills, those practicing of awkward encounters or just acknowledging when you don't know something and having to have a conversation with someone else that you then use in the workforce in your adult life. School is where we practice all of these things.

When experts project out into the long-term effects of all this, what are they worried about?

I mean, as a nation, we're concerned with whether students are catching up from the pandemic. We saw historic losses during the pandemic, particularly in math. The federal government has poured billions of dollars into helping schools catch up. But if students are not there, they cannot benefit from interventions in order to catch up. That has impacts on our economic future as a country, as well as for the students themselves in the system. When you're in In those early grades, establishing those daily habits of attendance is crucial for your success later on. In older grades, you're running out of time. Being chronically absent to a serious degree can be a predictor of drop out or disengagement from high school.

So all age groups basically suffer, and the stakes are high. I guess the next question is, how do we fix this? Are there any solutions that you know of that are actually working?

Yeah. So there's lots of research out that you have to tackle absenteeism from multiple angles. Some of the things we've seen that have worked, there are campaigns to text message with parents or send postcards to their home, letting them know how many absences actually have been accumulated so far that school year. That has seen some positive effects. There's been some research that tutoring can have a positive effect on absenteeism, perhaps because it helps people engage academically and interrupts that cycle we were talking about. Then there's home visiting, which has seen some really promising results where school districts are sending representatives out to connect with families in their homes and find out, Why are you not going to school? What can we do to help you? Hi, it's Sarah at the New York Times. How are you? I actually spoke to a mom in Michigan who received one of these visits. Tell me about you. What is your name? Where do you live? Tell me a little bit about your family. Her name's Regina Murf.

It's myself, and I have four children. I have two that are grown and moved out.

She has two school-age kids.

My 6-year-old and 12-year-old that are with me. They're both boys. They're attending Ipsey Community School. School.

And during the pandemic, she was working at a nursing home, so she had a lot of virus exposure.

I lost my younger sister. That put me in a different mindset.

And she lost her sister to COVID-19.

And I feel like that that's when things fell apart in a sense.

And she was just struggling.

With my six-year-old, in the morning, I try to make sure I have everything together because you're If you're missing a shoe or if you're missing simple items, it's a domino effect, I would say.

Parents know. Sometimes the morning's going to be rough when you're trying to get your kids to school.

And then he ends up missing the bus. I'll say, Oh, just forget it. We'll try again tomorrow.

And it was just harder to get her kids to school in the morning early enough to make the bus.

And then the fear of sickness, sending my kids out there. Will they get sick? I don't want anything to happen to them. It's a lot of fears. It was a lot of fears there.

And so her kids started to miss a good amount of school.

And then someone came to my house, and they just told me that they were worried about the attendance and how they- And eventually, she got a visit. I How does it make you feel to have someone come out and ask you about that? I mean, a part of you is embarrassed, but it was refreshing to know that I had those options to be able to reach out to them.

The way that she described it to me, she was a little embarrassed, but she also felt a little bit less alone. She was going through a hard time in her life. And so this home visit helped reestablish the relationship with school, helped make her more aware of how many absences her kids had accumulated, helped her maybe make more of an effort in the mornings when it is hard to get them to school because she knows there's going to be other times when they'll have to miss because they really are sick.

It's this direct intervention, a personal intervention that maybe has the hope of rebuilding the connection, the broken connection often between parents, kids, and schools that we've seen since the pandemic.

Yeah. I don't think it's the only way, but it speaks to something that's really critical. Schools have always been the center of American life and the center of neighborhoods. They're supposed to be places of community, places of relationships, friendships. Reestablishing that connection is really important to helping students and families feel like there's reason to go to school. I think by all indications, things are slowly getting better, but we're not back to pre-pandemic levels. This school year is going to be critical. When we see the data from this school year, what is it going to show? I mean, in interviews, I'm talking to educators who are telling me, at least in their school, it's continuing to some degree this school year. I think there's some evidence that while things are getting better very slowly as time goes on, something has changed fundamentally. When you think back to all of those different reasons that families are giving and why kids are missing school, they're pretty diverse. There's a bunch of different reasons, but the core theme that underlies them is this shift and this mindset that school is now optional. That mindset took root during the pandemic, and that was the lived experience for many families.

It was optional to attend school in person. When schools shut down, that broke the daily norm, and it suffered a lot of families' trust in the education system that is supposed to be a reliable place. Then when schools reopened, there were still options. There were relaxed policies around grading and attendance. It all culminates in this cultural shift of school feeling optional. I think that's something that you see in society more broadly. If you look at remote work, for example, the rate of remote work for those who can work remotely has remained about the same since late 2022. That It seems to be here to stay. That's a long-term cultural shift brought about by the pandemic. This question is, is that going to happen with schools? We saw that the pandemic exacerbated and revealed all of the beauties and flaws of our education system. Students lost a lot of ground not being in-person, so you can see on the one hand what the value that schools bring. But then on the other hand, it revealed all of the flaws of our imperfect public education system and the flaws of a system that's pretty strained in terms of its resources and its ability to serve all students.

Then their increasing needs, they have more academic needs, they have more mental health and behavioral needs. You're seeing that all culminate in this moment.

So in some ways, the pandemic crippled our school system. And by doing so, it actually showed the essential role schools play in society.

Yeah. I think also the essential role that relationships and connection to one another play in society. And today, years out from the pandemic, I hear from teachers who are so exhausted and feel so underappreciated. They're facing so many challenges in their classroom. I hear from parents who feel failed in some ways by the school system, and their kids are not getting what they need. We're at this moment where we're at a crossroads. Will schools stay optional, or will we come together again? Can this trust be rebuilt? Will schools be the pillars in our community going forward?

Sarah, thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Donald Trump has posted a $175 million bond that will prevent authorities in New York from seizing his assets, including his best-known properties, while he appeals a civil court judgment against him. Trump owes New York more than $450 million after a judge found he and his sons knowingly inflated the value of their properties. He was originally asked to pay a bond in that amount, an amount he was having trouble securing, and only got the bond once it was later lowered to $175 million. If Trump loses his appeal, he will still owe the full $450 million. And Israeli airstrikes destroyed part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Syria, killing at least seven Iranian officers overseeing covert operations in the Middle East. Three generals in the external military and intelligence service of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and four other officers died in the attack, making it one of the deadliest in a years-long shadow war between Israel and Iran. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennisgetter, Luc Van der Plug, Summer Thomaat, and Diana Wendt. It was edited by M. J. Davis Lynn and Paige Cawet, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brandberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYLE. That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benhold. See you tomorrow.