Achievement (More) Absent Post-Pandemic?

It’s back to school season in Atlanta! And this typically coincides with release of overall Georgia Milestones exam results at the state, system, and school levels.[1] How did we do this year, and how does the post-pandemic recovery look for our students?

As in past posts on this subject,[2] we will focus on 3rd grade reading scores– as these mark students’ crucial transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” And it seems that we still have a lot of work to do. The percentage of 3rd graders statewide who scored proficient or higher dipped slightly year-over-year from 38.6% in 2023 to 38.4% in 2024, and both years were considerably short of the high-water mark of 41.7% set pre-pandemic in 2019. Still, 3rd graders in 2024 fared considerably better than they did in 2022, when only 36.4% scored proficient or higher. And as much as we would prefer to regard the COVID pandemic as firmly in our collective rear-view mirror, we must also keep in mind that the 3rd graders who took the Milestones examinations this spring would have entered kindergarten in the fall of 2020.

Digging a bit deeper, we can observe meaningful variation among school systems in terms of post-pandemic recovery. Figure 1 compares 2019 and 2024 performance on the 3rd grade ELA exam for the fifteen school systems serving the eleven-county ARC region.[3]

As the chart above shows, third-graders in three school systems (Buford City, Fulton County, and Marietta City) actually performed better in 2024 than in 2019. In fact, third-graders in Atlanta Public Schools and in Cobb County came within a percentage point of getting back to pre-pandemic levels. That’s good news. But seven systems remain five points or more below their 2019 performances. Among these, Forsyth and Decatur City remain high-performing despite drops since 2019. But with the declines from 2019 to 2024, Henry and Rockdale County systems clocked just over a quarter of students at grade level. In Clayton County, only about one in five students scored proficient or better.

One factor likely complicating recovery of pandemic-era learning loss is a spike in school absenteeism.[4] Figure 2 below shows the rise in chronic absenteeism[5] between school year 2019 (i.e. the 2018-2019 school year) and school year 2023[6] for the same fifteen school systems.

This graph shows that chronic absenteeism is up significantly for all school systems serving our 11-county region. However, the increase is smallest for Buford City, the school system that saw the best improvement in 3rd grade reading scores between 2019 and 2024. And two of the three systems with the largest increases in absenteeism (Henry County and Douglas County) are also in the top three in terms of decline in scores.

Since there is also wide variation among schools within some of these systems, it more instructive to examine this relationship at the school level. Figure 3 presents the relationship between chronic absenteeism and 3rd grade ELA scores for elementary schools serving our 11-county region.[7]

As this scatter plot above shows, there is a strong inverse relationship between the percentage of students who are chronically absent and the percentage of students who score proficient or better on the 3rd grade ELA exam (r=-.76). The slope of the trend line is -1.4, which means that each additional percentage point of absenteeism yields a predicted drop of 1.4 percentage points in terms of ELA proficiency. It makes sense that it should be worse than 1:1, as chronically absent students impact other students. Teachers have to slow down or repeat lessons in order to catch those students up, and students who are lost and frustrated are more likely to exhibit behavioral issues. The trendline predicts that 68.6% of students would be proficient or better at a school where no students were chronically absent. But you’ll also notice that this prediction line hits 0% proficient (which is obviously the floor of what is possible) when about 47.6% of students at a school are chronically absent. Therefore, the actual relationship is probably not straight-up linear[8]– it is a bit steeper at lower absenteeism levels, then flattens out at higher levels.

What accounts for this rise in absenteeism? We don’t have the data that would tell us about individual student decisions, but one major correlate is economic need (r=.86).[9] Though this is speculative, it is not hard to imagine mechanisms for this to play out. For example, students with high economic need would have lower access to treatment for depression set off by the pandemic, which in turn would lead to lower school attendance (and then lower scores).

The upshot is that the investments in schools we are making to ameliorate pandemic-related learning loss are good, but that those investments will pay off only if we find ways to bring students into school (to benefit).

Endnotes

[1] Note that there is a delay in the release of math scores this year. The Department of Education has implemented new Mathematics content standards which are being assessed for the first time with this year’s exams.

[2] Links to 2022 and 2023 Milestones blog posts (https://33n.atlantaregional.com/data-diversions/milestones-2023-the-recovery-is-still-underway) and (https://33n.atlantaregional.com/data-diversions/milestones-2022-of-learning-lost)

[3] In addition to the eleven county systems, four cities in our region have independent systems: Atlanta, Buford, Decatur, and Marietta.

[4] This rise in chronic absenteeism is a nationwide trend, and not something unique to Atlanta. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html

[5] Per GOSA, “Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing 10 percent or more of enrolled days.” See https://gosa.georgia.gov/attendance-explained .

[6] The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) typically releases data on absenteeism rates in December following a school year, so we must use data from the prior year as a proxy. That, in turn, means that we must take any results with a “grain of salt”. It is possible, for example, that a school system undertook an intervention directed at improving school attendance that is not (yet) observable to us.

[7] A further caution is in order when using data across school years as attendance zones may change year-over-year. For example, three high-performing APS schools (Mary Lin ES, Morningside ES, and Springdale Park ES) saw reconfigured attendance zones for SY 2024 with the opening of a new fourth school, Virginia-Highland ES, in the former Inman MS facility. The results are insensitive to the inclusion or removal of these three schools.

[8] Yet an R² of .58 suggests using a line to fit these data is not unreasonable.

[9] We use the percentage of students “directly certified” for income-based programs as a measure of economic need. See this discussion (link follows) from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement for an explanation of how direct certification is measured and why it is a preferable measure to the more traditional focus on students receiving free or reduced-price school lunches: https://gosa.georgia.gov/changes-freereduced-priced-lunch-measure-student-poverty

[10] Despite the high collinearity between economic need and absenteeism, both remain statistically significant when placed together in a model predicting 3rd grade reading scores.