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And what can we say about what is actually driving that phenomenon? If the best estimates of the effect of school closings suggest it explains only about one-fifth of the variation in absenteeism, what about the other four-fifths? Prepandemic patterns of absenteeism seem to be playing a role, as do rates of poverty and local educational attainment. Researchers tend to cite a bundle of other factors as well, including logistical disruptions, both on the family side and the school side, and mental health issues, including increased rates of anxiety and what’s been called “emotionally based school avoidance.” Some also suggest old-fashioned increases in truancy, though high school graduation rates have not fallen but have improved overall in the past few years, or families growing more comfortable taking their children out of school for trips or days off.
But when my colleague Sarah Mervosh, recounting her reporting on chronic absenteeism on The Daily, was asked what was driving the spike, she answered, “probably the most universally shared reason that you’ll hear is just illness.” And although C.D.C. survey data isn’t perfect, what it shows is quite striking: The number of children who reported missing at least 15 days of school the previous year because of illness nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022. Nationally, there have been two to three times as many hospitalizations for respiratory viruses among children in the past two years as in the year before the pandemic, according to C.D.C. data, though those increases may also reflect increased patterns of testing alongside increased rates of illness. In New York City, the share of teachers who missed at least 11 days of school grew almost 50 percent between 2019 and 2023, too, and, in some places, teachers who have exhausted their allotment of paid sick leave are routinely taking unpaid leave now.
But sickness doesn’t happen in a clinical vacuum, and the past few years may have marked a post-pandemic culture shift in how we relate to illness — that in the aftermath of the pandemic, there has been a subtler and more widespread change in mores around infections and exposure, with daily school attendance seeming less urgent and obligatory than it did before the pandemic, and the need to keep sick children home to prevent them from spreading bugs to others perhaps more urgent. In other words, it may be the case that across the country, American children and their parents have simultaneously grown less conscientious about schooling and more conscientious about health. If the size of that effect is about two percentage points of daily attendance, is that necessarily an overcorrection? If so, how large an overcorrection? And it is probably notable, in this context, that at least in New York City, the largest increases in absenteeism have been among the youngest students, who are much less likely to be making decisions about attendance themselves.
Many of the researchers looking most closely at the surge in absenteeism worry that it represents a new normal. But on that point the story looks somewhat T.B.D. to me. Nearly every state experienced declines in rates of absenteeism in 2022-23, though the changes were typically small, leaving rates still well above prepandemic levels. And although the data we have for 2023-24 is still quite patchy, it suggests the possibility of accelerating improvement. In Massachusetts, for instance, rates of absenteeism have this year dropped down closer to 2020-21 levels. While that means they are still above prepandemic patterns, the improvement suggests that at least in New England — both more wealthy and more well-run than average — a return to the old normal may not be all that far-off.
In the meantime, it does tell us a few things about all the ways we are continuing to misperceive and misunderstand our collective experience of the pandemic and its legacy. First, much of what Americans are now retrospectively processing as frustrations and failings peculiar to this country were actually near universal features of the Covid experience. Second, much of the turmoil we now want to chalk up to pandemic policy, perhaps to pin the blame for it on some accountable authority or modifiable ideology, was instead either the direct result of the disease itself or a human response so common that it is hard to find a place in the world that managed to sidestep it. And sometimes we seem to be pinning problems on Covid policies that hardly seem related to the pandemic at all: Last month, commentators considering a worrying rise in drowning deaths among American children tried to connect them to lockdowns and interruptions to swim instruction. But between 2019 and 2022, the largest absolute increases in the rate of drowning deaths have been among children under the age of 4, most of whom had not yet been born during the closings phase of the pandemic, and those over age 85, whose swimming skills were most likely not affected by pool closings in the summer of 2020. That’s not to say it isn’t bad that more people are drowning, only that we don’t solve the problem — or help ourselves see it clearly — by intoning “school closings” over and over whenever we come across a distressing fact about our post-pandemic lives. Most of these stories, it turns out, are complicated.
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