180,000 Students Still Missing Too Much School

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2023-24, Tennessee's chronic absenteeism rate fell 1.3 percentage points, the largest single-year improvement since the pandemic began. Attendance directors across the state had reason to think momentum was building.

Then the 2024-25 numbers came in: 0.6 points. Half the prior year's gain. The rate sits at 18.3%, down from the 20.3% peak in 2021-22 but still 5.2 percentage points above the pre-pandemic baseline of 13.1% that the Tennessee Comptroller documented for 2018-19. That translates to 180,343 students missing more than 10% of school days, roughly 29,000 more than were chronically absent in 2020-21, which was itself an elevated COVID year.

Tennessee is not alone in this deceleration. Nationally, the annual drop in chronic absenteeism fell from 2.6 percentage points to just over one between 2022-23 and 2024-25. But the state's trajectory carries particular weight because Tennessee ranks third nationally in post-COVID math recovery, proof that its schools can close pandemic gaps when the system pushes. Attendance has not responded with the same urgency.

The easy gains are gone

The year-over-year pattern tells a clear story of diminishing returns. In 2021-22, chronic absenteeism spiked 4.8 points from the prior year. The following year it barely moved, falling 0.1 points. Then came the 1.3-point drop in 2023-24, followed by last year's 0.6-point improvement.

At the current pace of 0.6 points per year, Tennessee would not return to its 2020-21 level of 15.5% until roughly 2030. That 15.5% figure was itself a COVID-era rate. Reaching the Comptroller's pre-pandemic baseline of 13.1% would take until approximately 2034 at this trajectory.

The pattern mirrors what RAND researchers describe as "sticky" absenteeism in more than half of urban districts nationally: the students who returned to regular attendance after 2022 were likely those with the fewest barriers. The families still absent tend to face transportation problems, housing instability, or health care gaps that a phone call home cannot resolve.

Where the recovery stalled, and where it didn't

The statewide average obscures a split between grade levels. K-8 schools have recovered 51.2% of their COVID-era spike, pulling down from 18.1% to 15.9%. High schools have recovered just 44.0%, and the pace there has nearly flatlined: the rate fell 1.2 points in 2023-24 but only 0.2 points last year, landing at 23.6%. Nearly one in four high schoolers is chronically absent.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the state's largest district with 105,186 students, is moving in the wrong direction entirely. Its chronic absenteeism rate has risen every year in the data: 19.0% in 2020-21, 25.5%, 28.9%, 29.5%, and now 30.2% in 2024-25. That four-year climb of 11.2 percentage points means nearly one in three Memphis students is chronically absent, and the district's 31,785 chronically absent students alone account for 17.6% of the statewide total.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools^↗ has poured resources at the problem -- 78 attendance liaisons, a summer door-knocking campaign that enrolled over 1,000 unregistered students, daily calls home when a student is marked absent. The rate kept climbing. The barriers families cited most often were not apathy but logistics: immunization paperwork and bus routes.

Davidson County^↗ offers a counterpoint. Its rate fell from 28.9% in 2020-21 to 23.3% in 2024-25, a 5.6-point recovery. Davidson made its fastest progress in 2023-24, dropping 3.7 points in a single year. The contrast with Memphis is instructive. Davidson started the period in worse shape, at 28.9% versus Memphis's 19.0%. Four years later, Davidson has pulled down to 23.3% while Memphis has climbed to 30.2%. The two districts' trajectories crossed and then diverged, leaving Davidson 6.9 percentage points lower.

The equity gap has not budged

Every major subgroup has improved since the 2022 peak, but the distance between groups looks nearly identical to where it was before the spike.

Black students face a chronic absenteeism rate of 26.5%. White students are at 15.5%, up from 12.0% in 2020-21. The Black-White gap stands at 11.0 percentage points, compared to 11.9 before the spike. The pandemic did not create this disparity; it widened it temporarily and then it returned to approximately the same size.

Students from economically disadvantaged families carry the heaviest burden at 29.9%, a rate 11.6 points above the statewide average and the slowest-recovering major subgroup. Only 35.9% of the COVID-era spike for economically disadvantaged students has been recovered, compared to 41.7% for all students. Special education students show a similar pattern: 22.5%, with 38.9% of their spike recovered.

Hispanic students stand out as the sole group to fully return to their 2020-21 rate, moving from 18.0% to a peak of 20.2% and back to 18.0%. English learners, a group that overlaps heavily with Hispanic students, actually improved beyond their 2020-21 starting point, falling from 18.8% to 16.3%.

A funding formula with a blind spot

Tennessee's TISA formula, which replaced the BEP in 2023-24, calculates base funding using Average Daily Membership across nine reporting periods. A student who is enrolled but absent still counts toward ADM, though the formula implicitly penalizes districts with high absenteeism because those students are less likely to be enrolled at all and absent students generate no instructional contact hours. The disconnect means a district like Memphis can have 31,785 chronically absent students funded at their full ADM weight even as the instructional programs those students need go undelivered.

The Achievement School District sits at the extreme end of this pattern -- 53.7% chronic absenteeism, more than half its remaining students missing class regularly. The ASD is closing after a decade, its story an illustration of what happens when attendance erosion compounds beyond the point of intervention.

The deceleration is not mysterious

AEI's national analysis argues that early pandemic-era gains came from students who were marginally absent returning when schools normalized. The families still missing tend to face interrelated barriers -- unstable housing, unreliable transportation, chronic health conditions, caregiving responsibilities -- that do not yield to a phone call home or a truancy notice.

Tennessee's three-tier truancy intervention system, which escalates from universal supports to juvenile court referral after seven unexcused absences, was in place before the pandemic. The system was designed for outlier cases. At 18.3%, nearly one in five students triggers it.

Memphis is closing five schools this year with up to 10 more by 2028, displacing 1,200 students whose attendance patterns will be disrupted again. Nashville has demonstrated that large urban districts can bend the curve. The gap between those two trajectories will determine whether Tennessee's 180,000 chronically absent students become 160,000 or 200,000.