Students in Illinois are still missing more school than they were before the pandemic and, for elementary school students, the number of days absent is impacting their learning even more than it did before COVID-19, according to a study released Tuesday.
Senior researcher Mariana Barragán Torres said she and her colleagues thought the opposite would be true — that online lessons, refined and normalized during the pandemic, would make in-person attendance in school less tied to how well students learn.
But Torres’ Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, or iWERC, found that in-person learning has become even more important. In fact, test scores decline each additional day students are absent from school, especially in math. iWerc is a private-public institution that provides data analysis for the state’s policy and education leaders.
Torres said the findings are especially important in this moment when many schools are reporting that students are staying home, scared by increased federal immigration enforcement.
“Now we have evidence of the consequences of not attending school,” she said. “We’re not saying they should just go out and attend school regardless. We’re saying there should be policies to create an environment of safety, so that students themselves and their families feel safe attending school.”
Before the pandemic, Black and Latino students, as well as children from low-income families, had higher absenteeism rates than other groups. That got worse during the pandemic, “highlighting a double disadvantage for these groups of students,” according to the study. Torres noted that researchers looked at school-level data over time, so they saw the effects of increased absenteeism on individual students.
Elementary students particularly struggle in math when they are absent. The study found that every additional day a third-grader was absent in 2023, their average score on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness standardized exam decreased by -.31 points. In 2019, test scores went down by -.24 points. The discrepancy continued through eighth grade.
Math scores for elementary school students in Illinois have not rebounded as much as English Language Arts scores. The study shows that continued increased absenteeism might be the reason.
For high school students, the story is a little different. Absenteeism skyrocketed by an average of more than five days in ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th grades. Test scores were negatively affected, but they weren’t worse than before the pandemic.
In Chicago Public Schools, almost half of high school students missed more than 20 days of school in 2024, and they scored an average of less than 500 on either the math or English Language Arts portions of the SAT. However, as WBEZ and Chalkbeat reported this spring, the graduation rate continues to increase, leading to questions about the connection between what students know and whether they get a diploma.