Long Past the Pandemic, Kids Skip School in New York

The city’s rate of chronic absenteeism shot up from 25% of students before Covid to 34.8% last year

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"it was New York City that bore the brunt of his overzealous lockdown edicts. In deference to teachers’ unions, he and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio kept New York City schools closed longer than in other parts of the state. Schoolchildren are still suffering the consequences, and many may never recover.

According to a new study from the Manhattan Institute, more kids in New York City public schools are attending class less often. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more school days in a given academic year, climbed from 25% before the pandemic to 34.8% last year, which is well above the national average."

"a recent decision by New York state to accommodate this trend by minimizing the importance of school attendance. Under a new plan adopted by the state, chronic absenteeism has been eliminated “as a measure of school quality, which means that this will not be one of the measures by which the state evaluates the performance of school districts.”"

"Absenteeism leads to learning losses, which aren’t spread evenly across demographic groups. Children who were already behind pre-Covid have fallen further behind, and those same kids are the ones mostly likely to be regularly missing school."

"Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and Bradley Strauss tally the economic costs of pandemic learning losses. “Based on the available research on the lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5-6% of lifetime earnings,” the authors write. “Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century.” To put that figure in context, they note that it dwarfs “the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or the recessionary losses in 2008.”"