Many American students face a strange punishment for missing school: losing more class time.
Educators nationwide regularly turn to suspension as a response to attendance problems, according to a Hechinger Report review of data from a dozen states that track this information.
Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, school districts in those states cited attendance-related violations as a reason for student suspensions more than half a million times. In all, they made up almost 1 in 10 discipline records.
Those totals are “crazy high,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
His research has shown that school attendance is an early indicator of whether a student is on track to graduate. Punishing students by forcing them to miss class can harm their chances of getting a diploma on time.
“To me, whether you’re truant, absent or late, that our remedy is to tell you to miss more school is just poorly thought out at best,” Balfanz said. “We just know from years and years of research that it’s really important for kids to be in school every day.”
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Hechinger’s analysis is the largest national look to date at suspensions for attendance violations, gathered as part of its Suspended …for what? project.
A previous Hechinger analysis of 150 Arizona school districts, in partnership with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, found nearly 47,000 suspensions for attendance issues across five years, also accounting for 10 percent of all such punishments.
Both Hechinger reports found that the suspensions for missing class disproportionately affected students from certain minority groups.
Educators say suspensions can be a useful tool to teach students a lesson when they have persistent attendance problems or to help keep schools safe. But many experts criticize these punishments as an ineffective way to solve the problem.
“One can understand the theory behind that, but there’s no real evidence to show that it actually then spurs a student to change,” said Joshua Childs, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “What that doesn’t recognize is that a lot of attendance issues are beyond an individual student’s control.”
Students may miss part or all of the school day for any number of reasons, including mental health concerns, transportation problems or family responsibilities. A suspension addresses none of these issues and can instead further alienate a student from school.
Related: Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions:
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
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At least 11 states ban suspensions for attendance-related violations, and another six limit out-of-school suspensions for attendance violations. Following the 2022 Hechinger/AZCIR report, an Arizona lawmaker twice proposed bills that would have done the latter. Both measures stalled after initially drawing bipartisan support, and the legislator has decided not to seek reelection.
Some districts have acted on their own. In the 2022-23 school year, Georgia’s Gwinnett County Public Schools banned suspensions for attendance-related reasons. In the five years before that, the 194,000-student district assigned more than 27,000 such suspensions.
Statewide, educators issued more than 190,000 suspensions for attendance violations in that time, which accounted for more than 13 percent of all suspensions records.
The ban came with problems, though, Gwinnett spokesperson Bernard Watson said, including “an increase in the number of students arriving late to class, skipping class, and hanging out in restrooms and locker rooms.”
After hearing concerns about safety from school leaders, the district changed course. School leaders could once again suspend students for missing class, but only after they had first tried other options, such as detention, parent outreach or check-ins with support staff.
“Decisions related to discipline are not made in a vacuum,” Watson said in an email, adding that the district considers data, as well as seeking feedback from staff, parents and students. “These efforts help keep students and staff safe and productive in schools.”
Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class
Lori Miller, executive director of the Georgia-based Truancy Intervention Project, said her organization regularly works with kids who are punished for missing class, even if they managed to get to school for part of the day. In these cases, she says, the suspension rarely makes sense to the students.
“Well, you’re telling me I should go to school, but I showed up, even though I’m late, and your response was to pull me out,” she said. “It’s very confusing to kids. We have to be very careful with the messages we’re sending.”
Miller added that the problem is worse at schools that are under-resourced, which disproportionately serve Black and Latino students. There, teachers and staff are stretched thin dealing with a wide array of student issues including mental health challenges and food insecurity. In those cases, she said, suspension can be the easiest, quickest way to address a problem — even if it’s not the best.
In almost all states with available data, Black students were more likely to be suspended for attendance-related violations than their white peers. The same was true in our previous investigation in Arizona. Experts called the findings concerning and said further investigation was merited.
The Hechinger Report and AZCIR also found many school leaders who were committed to eliminating suspensions for attendance-related reasons. These educators focused on developing connections with students and addressing the root causes of what was keeping kids out of class, strategies Balfanz said are key to improving attendance problems.
In Arizona’s Tolleson Elementary School District, for instance, every student is paired with an adult who checks in with them regularly. Clubs and extracurriculars also help students find a place where they feel they belong. An onsite health clinic helps address medical concerns early to get kids back to school as fast as possible.
Schools should be focused on “What does it take to get the kids to be there every day?” Balfanz said. “Not just, ‘We take the ones who come and we punish the ones who don’t.’”
This story about school suspension data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.