The pandemic's impact on Michigan students, teachers and families continues, with data showing how the pandemic has created more barriers to student attendance and created challenges leading to learning loss.

The Office of Foundation Liaison (OFL) and CMF hosted a virtual event last week focusing on learning loss amid the pandemic and leveraging federal funding with several education experts. 

During the conversation with our CMF community, the Education Trust-Midwest shared the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on students in Michigan specifically when it comes to digital access: 

•    Digital access is 20% lower in Michigan’s poorest districts compared to its wealthiest districts.

•    Nearly 1 in 4 children, in districts with the highest rates of students of color, lack digital access at home which is 10 percentage points lower than the statewide rate.

The Education Trust-Midwest also cited a recent McKinsey report that analyzed the learning loss disparities associated with COVID-19. According to the report, America’s students could lose five to nine months of learning by June 2021. 

The pandemic has impacted school attendance as well.  

A report by Attendance Works, analyzes attendance policies throughout the country during the pandemic. The report found that Michigan has yet to reinstate daily attendance and only requires districts to make sure an adult interacts with the student twice a week if learning is remote.  

There is also little consensus about what should count as attendance in distance learning.

“The alarming attendance challenge created by COVID-19 means that districts, schools and their partners will need to take a strategic, transformative and long-term approach to engaging students and families. It involves moving beyond individual student case management to taking actions at scale that broadly offer support or pathways to engagement to groups of students,” Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works said. 

Another report by Attendance Works found that chronic absence was already a challenge in Michigan before the pandemic. The report focused on data from the 2017-2018 school year and found that 22.3% of Michigan’s students were chronically absent.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school. According to research, it is a leading indicator and contributor to educational inequities and is directly linked to students being less likely to read by third grade and more likely to drop out of high school.

Chronic Absenteeism in Michigan:

•    About half of Michigan’s chronically absent students are concentrated in about a fourth of schools in Michigan that have extreme levels of chronic absence.

•    Levels of chronic absence were found to be highest in schools where most students live in poverty.

As Attendance Works shares when chronic absence affects large numbers of students, it is typically a sign of systemic failures like unreliable transportation, poor health and housing displacement, or practices that push students out of school settings including biased disciplinary policies and a lack of teachers who reflect cultures, ethnicities and languages of the student population.

“The key to addressing chronic absence is noticing poor attendance as soon as it becomes a problem and then partnering with students and families to find out and determine what are the barriers that needs to be addressed,” Chang said. 

As schools in Michigan engage in more in-person learning, Chang shared that to meaningfully engage students and families, actions should be tailored to recognize the strengths and specific challenges of high priority student groups who experience significant levels of chronic absence.   

Last week, Attendance Works released their Pathways to Engagement: A Toolkit for Covid-19 Recovery Through Attendance, a resource that will offer tools to support engagement and attendance. 

“We are advocating starting now to engage in activities that nurture belonging to school for current and prospective students in the spring, building bridges to school in the summer and creating a welcoming, restorative community at school in the fall,” Chang said. 

Attendance Works recommends adopting the following policies to address chronic absence and learning loss: 

•    Promote tracking daily attendance for all students.

•    Continue to monitor and publish data on how many students are missing 10% of school for any reason across all educational settings.

•    Invest in technology to ensure the availability of meaningful and actionable attendance and participation metrics.

•    Leverage data to inform action and resource allocation.

•    Build capacity to collect, analyze and use data on attendance and absenteeism.

•    Refrain from using chronic absence as an accountability measure for school improvement.

•    Ensure adequate and equitable funding.

Want more?

Read Attendance Works full report on chronic absence. 

Learn more about how the pandemic has impacted attendance. 

Join us on April 21 for a conversation with Michigan's state superintendent Dr. Michael Rice and Megan Schrauben, the executive director of MiSTEM Network during CMF’s event Exploring MI Education Priorities & Opportunities.

Watch the full virtual event: Leveraging Federal Funding to Address Student Learning Loss.