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From our news partners at The Seattle Times: Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools.
The finding was hard to believe, but year after year and in state after state, the numbers kept bearing it out: Sixth-graders who missed 20 days of class had, at best, a 20 percent chance of graduating from high school on time.
This was a bombshell for researcher Bob Balfanz, who'd spent most of his career trying to understand the factors driving 1 million American students to drop out each year. He'd paced school hallways and sat through hundreds of hours of classroom instruction.
But in 2007, after tracking 13,000 middle-schoolers for eight years in Philadelphia, Balfanz finally isolated a red flag common to all who, years later, failed to graduate on time: A history of poor attendance.
"You'd think, ‘Hey it's only sixth grade, you can recover and grow out of this,' " he said.
Yet Balfanz, based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found that missing as few as 10 days a year has a cumulative impact, weakening the foundation upon which all other school achievement builds.
More surprising still, school-attendance averages, while widely reported, are highly misleading. A district may accurately note rates of 90 percent, but still have hundreds of students missing weeks of instruction because that number is an aggregate — concealing the fact that different students are absent on different days.
"That's when the sheer magnitude hit us," said Balfanz, who released the findings of a major study on this effect Wednesday in New York City.
Other researchers have found a similar relationship between poor attendance and low performance among rural kids, preschoolers and middle-class youth alike.
"Wherever we've looked, we've seen a clear relationship between missing a month of school and negative educational outcomes later," Balfanz said. "That has been proven for all kids."
Conversely, it turns out that targeting attendance can make a significant dent in such thorny areas as the achievement gap and high-school dropout rates — without having to overhaul an entire curriculum.
This finding inspired Balfanz to create the anti-dropout program Diplomas Now, which sends dozens of recent college graduates into middle schools with a laser focus on attendance and tutoring. At Denny International and Aki Kurose in Seattle, both of which have long struggled with student discipline and lackluster scores, it is making a dramatic difference.
