Engaged or Absent: What Economic Shocks Reveal About the Wrong Interventions and the Right Ones

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

Despite widespread investment in attendance-targeted interventions, chronic absenteeism has doubled in U.S. public schools since 2018 and remains elevated. We argue the field has been treating a symptom rather than the underlying condition. Using the What Works Clearinghouse as an analytical dataset, we examine whether interventions designed for attendance outperform engagement-oriented programs that reduce absenteeism as a secondary effect. We then test whether this pattern holds under real-world conditions by studying how economic shocks — events that suddenly disrupt family stability and student engagement — differentially affect districts depending on which type of program they had in place. Our findings point toward a reorientation of both research and policy away from attendance monitoring and toward engagement as the more promising lever for keeping students in school.

The Annual Data Challenge Expo 

Section on Statistical Computing