Key findings
- The viral teacher videos point at real trends, but the worst year was 2022. National chronic absenteeism peaked at 28.3% in 2021-22 and fell to 22.6% in 2024-25 (AEI, 44 states plus DC). That is still well above the 15.4% pre-pandemic rate.
- Progress is slowing: the 2024-25 drop was just 0.9 points, and kindergarten chronic absence in 2025 was 48% higher than in 2019.
- Behavior is teachers’ top stressor. In RAND’s 2026 survey, 52% named managing student behavior, more than named low pay. In Pew’s 2023 survey, 58% of teachers dealt with behavior problems every day.
- Fewer teachers say they will quit: 18% planned to leave at the end of 2025-26, down from 22% two years earlier. Frequent job stress fell from 62% to 55%, still far above the 34% of comparable workers.
- Schools still blame the pandemic, a little less each year: 76% of public schools said in May 2025 that it still hurts students’ behavioral development, down from 80% in 2024 (NCES).
- Free data: teacher_student_trends.csv, 19 rows with a source link on each, CC BY 4.0.
Short answer: the teachers in the viral videos are describing real, measurable problems, but the numbers peaked around 2022 and have been easing slowly since. About 1 in 5 US students (22.6%) was chronically absent in 2024-25, down from 28.3% at the peak and up from 15.4% before the pandemic. A majority of teachers name student behavior as a top stressor, and more than half still report frequent job stress. Fewer say they plan to quit than two years ago.
This page puts the main national data series side by side: chronic absenteeism from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), teacher surveys from RAND and Pew Research Center, and principal surveys from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Every number has its source and year next to it. The full series is in a free CSV at the end.
Is chronic absenteeism still rising?
No. It has fallen three years in a row, but the decline is slowing and the rate is still about 7 points above 2019. A student is usually counted as chronically absent after missing 10% of the school year, about 18 days, for any reason, excused or not, as K-12 Dive summarizes the AEI method.
AEI’s latest estimate, reported by Chalkbeat in June 2026, puts 2024-25 at 22.6% across 44 states plus DC. The year before it was 23.5%, so the one-year improvement was 0.9 points. For perspective, in 2016 the US Education Department called a 15% rate (2013-14 data) a “hidden educational crisis.” Today’s rate is half again as high as the number that triggered that warning.
| School year | Chronically absent | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | 15.0% | ED Civil Rights Data Collection, via Chalkbeat | Different data source; context only |
| 2018-19 | 15.4% | AEI, via K-12 Dive | Pre-pandemic baseline |
| 2021-22 | 28.3% | AEI, via Chalkbeat | Peak |
| 2022-23 | 25.4% | AEI, via The 74 | |
| 2023-24 | 23.5% | AEI, via Chalkbeat | |
| 2024-25 | 22.6% | AEI, via Chalkbeat | 44 states plus DC |
Table 1. National chronic absenteeism rate by school year. AEI rates are multi-state estimates, not an official federal figure.
Source: AEI estimates as reported by K-12 Dive, The 74 and Chalkbeat (2025–2026). Bars scaled to 30%. Pre-pandemic year in yellow, peak in red.
Worked example. In a school of 500 students, the 2019 rate means about 77 chronically absent children (500 × 0.154). The 2024-25 rate means about 113 (500 × 0.226). That is 36 more students who each missed roughly 18 days or more, or at least 648 additional lost student-days a year in one building.
Where absences are worst: states, cities and the youngest students
The national average hides a wide spread, and the steepest increase is in kindergarten. AEI found kindergarten chronic absence in 2025 was 48% higher than in 2019, with a similar pattern in grades 1 through 3 (Chalkbeat, June 2026). This matches the thumbnail of the Casey Simpson video that started the latest wave of teacher posts, which shows a kindergartner with 100 absences.
| Place or group | Chronic absence | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska (highest state in AEI set) | 41% (46% in 2022) | 2024-25 |
| Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee | 18% or lower | 2024-25 |
| Detroit Public Schools Community District | nearly 61% | 2024-25 |
| Kindergarten, national | 48% higher than 2019 | 2025 |
Table 2. Highest and lowest chronic absenteeism in AEI's 2026 analysis, as reported by Chalkbeat.
AEI, EdTrust and Attendance Works set a “50% Challenge” for districts to halve their 2022 chronic absence rates by 2027. Fewer than half of students attend districts that are on track. AEI’s Nat Malkus summed up the attitude problem this way, as quoted by Chalkbeat: “Everyone agrees it’s a problem, and they seem to agree that it’s somebody else’s problem.”
Why students say they miss school
Illness is still the most common reason, but a large minority of absences are optional. In student survey data reported by Chalkbeat, 32% cited a family vacation or event and 16% said they “just didn’t want to go.” Chalkbeat did not name the survey behind those figures, so treat them as indicative.
Parents tend to see the problem as someone else’s. In University of Southern California survey data cited in the same report, 28% of parents said absenteeism was a problem at their own child’s school, while 60% said it was a problem at other schools. That gap matters, because the best-tested fix (below) works by correcting exactly this blind spot.
If you are a parent wondering whether a few missed days add up, our days until summer counter shows how many school days are left this year. Missing 18 of roughly 180 crosses the chronic line.
What teachers report about classroom behavior
Behavior problems are a daily event for most teachers, and the youngest grades see the most physical aggression. Pew Research Center surveyed more than 2,500 public K-12 teachers in fall 2023 and published the results as Challenges in the Classroom in April 2024.
Source: Pew Research Center, "What's It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?", April 4, 2024. Bars scaled to 100%.
The grade-level split runs in opposite directions. Physical violence is mostly an elementary problem: 55% of elementary teachers had experienced it, against 23% in high school. Disengagement and phones are mostly a high school problem: 58% of high school teachers called low interest in learning a major problem, and 72% said the same about cellphone distraction, compared with 6% of elementary teachers. Whether phones are actually shrinking students’ focus is a separate question, covered in our review of student attention span research.
What principals report: the NCES School Pulse Panel
School leaders’ reports line up with teachers’, and the pandemic explanation is slowly fading. NCES runs the School Pulse Panel, a recurring survey of public school leaders. Its May 2024 round covered 1,714 schools.
| Indicator (share of public schools) | May 2024 | May 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Pandemic still hurts students’ behavioral development | 80% | 76% |
| Confiscated a weapon during the school year | 45% | 42% |
| Lack of focus or inattention had a severe negative impact on learning | 26% | n/a |
| Student disrespect toward staff weekly or more often | 36% | n/a |
| Need more mental-health support (students or staff) | 76% | 70% |
Table 3. NCES School Pulse Panel. Sources: NCES press release, July 18, 2024; NCES SPP results, May 2025. n/a: not in the May 2025 summary we checked.
One shift is telling. Between 2022 and 2024, the share of schools saying they needed more classroom-management training rose from 50% to 61%, the only support need in that list that grew significantly. Schools are asking for practical behavior skills, not only counselors. Our classroom tools for teachers collect some of the low-cost ones, such as a seating chart maker for separating predictable conflict pairs.
Are teachers really quitting?
Fewer are planning to. About 1 in 5 still say they may leave, and their stress remains well above other workers’. RAND’s 2026 State of the American Teacher survey (829 teachers, spring 2026, compared with nearly 500 similar working adults) found 18% planned to leave their job at the end of 2025-26, according to Education Week. That is 5 points below 2022-23.
Source: RAND State of the American Teacher surveys, via Education Week (July 2025, June 2026). The 2022-23 value is our arithmetic from "5 points below 2022-23." Bars scaled to 30%.
| Measure | Earlier | Latest | Comparable workers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frequent job-related stress | 62% (2025) | 55% (2026) | 34% (2026) |
| Burnout | 60% (2024) | 53% (2025) | n/a |
| Earned less than last year after inflation | n/a | 61% (2026) | 57% (2026) |
| Average base salary | n/a | $75,599 (2026) | just over $105,000 |
Table 4. RAND teacher well-being indicators. Sources: Education Week (July 2025; June 2026) and eSchool News, June 26, 2026.
Intent is not attrition. RAND’s Ashley Woo told Education Week in 2025: “Not everyone who says that they’re likely to leave is actually going to leave.” We could not find a published national attrition rate for 2024-25, so the honest summary is that intent to quit has dropped, stress has dropped a little, and both stay higher than for similar professionals.
Why behavior now outranks pay as a stressor
In 2026, managing student behavior was named by 52% of teachers as a top source of stress, the most common answer. Education Week reports that behavior was 20 percentage points more likely than low pay to make a teacher’s top three. RAND’s Elizabeth Steiner described it as a consistently high source of stress for five years.
The pay picture is not good either, which makes the ranking more striking. Teachers average about 50 hours a week working in school, those with second jobs add about 13 hours more, and they spend an average of $665 of their own money on classroom supplies. Women reported frequent stress more often than men (59% vs 44%).
Burnout cuts both ways for students. A teacher who spends daily time on disruptions has less time for feedback and planning. Simple routines that make transitions predictable help here: a visible classroom timer for work blocks, a noise meter for group work, and a random name picker so calling on students feels fair rather than targeted.
What actually helps: the evidence, ranked
The interventions with the strongest evidence are cheap and specific. Broad slogans have the weakest. The table separates randomized trials from surveys of opinion.
| Problem | Likely cause | What has evidence | Strength of evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chronic absence | Parents underestimate their child’s total absences | Mail parents the child’s actual absence count | Randomized trial, 28,080 students; WWC rated it as meeting standards without reservations |
| Students behind after absences | Gaps compound across units | High-dosage tutoring | 90% of schools offering it rated it at least moderately effective (NCES, May 2024). Opinion data, not an effect size |
| Disruption, low-level misbehavior | Unclear routines, unstructured transitions | Classroom-management training; short structured movement breaks | Schools’ demand for training rose 50% to 61% (NCES). Movement breaks: reviews find improved on-task behavior, low-to-medium quality studies |
| Phone distraction | Constant notifications | School or district phone policy, enforced consistently | 82% of teachers’ schools had a policy in 2023, but 60% of high school teachers found it hard to enforce (Pew) |
| New teachers leaving | Isolation, overload in first years | Induction and mentoring programs | Review of 15 studies: mostly positive on retention; one large randomized trial found no retention effect (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011) |
Table 5. Symptom, cause and evidence-backed response. Sources listed at the end of the page.
The attendance letter study deserves a closer look. Todd Rogers and Avi Feller tested mailers to the families of 28,080 high-risk K-12 students in Philadelphia in 2014-15. The best version cut chronic absenteeism by more than 10% and total absences by 6%, at about $6 per additional day of attendance (What Works Clearinghouse review). It worked by correcting parents’ belief that their child missed fewer days than they really did, the same blind spot the 28% vs 60% parent survey shows.
For movement breaks, see our list of brain breaks for the classroom, which notes the research behind short, active resets.
What parents can do this year
Parents control the two levers with the best evidence: attendance and the home-school conversation. These steps follow the research above, in order of effort.
- Count your child’s absences now. Ask the school office or check the portal. Parents in the Philadelphia trial typically underestimated the number. Compare it with the 10% line (about 18 days in a 180-day year).
- Schedule trips outside school days. Family vacations and events were cited by 32% of students who missed school.
- Treat “didn’t want to go” as information. If your child avoids school, ask what happens there. Anxiety, bullying or a hard class often sit behind refusals.
- Ask the teacher two specific questions at the next conference: what does my child do when they are off task, and what routine works for them in class? Our list of parent-teacher conference questions has more.
- Back the phone policy at home. If school bans phones in class, a phone that stays in a bag during homework time supports the same habit. Our homework motivation guide has focus routines that work without a fight.
- Watch homework load as a stress signal. The national picture is in our homework statistics; if evenings regularly run far past those norms, raise it with the school. Our study of 32 district homework policies shows what many districts put in writing about limits.
Methodology and limitations
We compiled published figures; we did not survey anyone. Each number was checked against the source named next to it on October 15, 2026.
- Absenteeism series. AEI’s rates are estimates built from state data (44 or 45 states plus DC, depending on the year), not an official federal count. The 2013-14 value comes from a different federal collection and is shown for context only. The 2022-23 value is as reported by The 74.
- Teacher surveys. RAND’s samples are nationally representative but modest (829 teachers in 2026). Year-to-year differences of a few points may be within the margin of error. The 2022-23 intent-to-leave value is derived by us from Education Week’s “5 points below” wording.
- Self-reports. Pew and RAND measure what teachers say; NCES measures what school leaders say. None directly observes student behavior, and there is no long pre-2020 national behavior series to compare against.
- Intent vs action. “Plan to leave” measures intent, not attrition.
- What we left out. Figures we could not confirm in a source we opened are not on this page (see Sources).
Cite this page
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit to The Homework Site and a link to this page. Please also cite the original organizations.
Download the data as CSV (19 rows; columns: series, period, value, unit, note, source, source_url).
Sources
- Chalkbeat, “Chronic absenteeism crisis not just due to pandemic, study finds,” June 30, 2026 (AEI data, USC parent survey): chalkbeat.org
- K-12 Dive, “Progress to reduce chronic absenteeism slows nationwide” (AEI, definition): k12dive.com
- The 74, report on AEI chronic absenteeism data (2023 rate of 25.4%): the74million.org
- Education Week, RAND 2026 State of the American Teacher coverage, June 2026: edweek.org
- Education Week, RAND 2025 coverage, July 2025: edweek.org
- eSchool News, RAND 2026 stress and salary figures, June 26, 2026: eschoolnews.com
- Pew Research Center, “What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?” April 4, 2024: pewresearch.org
- NCES, School Pulse Panel press release, July 18, 2024: nces.ed.gov ; May 2025 results: nces.ed.gov
- Rogers, T. & Feller, A. (2018). Reducing student absences at scale by targeting parents’ misbeliefs. Nature Human Behaviour 2, 335–342. WWC review: ies.ed.gov
- Ingersoll, R. & Strong, M. (2011). The impact of induction and mentoring programs for beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research 81(2). repository.upenn.edu
- Daly-Smith, A. et al. (2018). Systematic review of acute physically active learning and classroom movement breaks. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 4(1): doaj.org
Checked October 15, 2026. Spot an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
Frequently asked questions
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Watch: video explainers
The viral video that put a kindergartner's absences and tardies in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers. Watch it next to the national absenteeism numbers on this page.
Teachers describe the classroom side of the story in their own words. The RAND and Pew numbers here show how common those experiences are nationally.
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