Speaker

Attendance Works is an action research project, moving vertically from local environments to national policy-making. Working in over two-dozen school districts, 32 states and in collaboration with 70 national organizations, Attendance Works uses continuous quality improvement to evaluate gaps in knowledge and capacity building. Constant assessment of interventions leads to updated and new tools and approaches in reducing chronic absence. Hedy Chang was named by the White House as a Champion of Change for her commitment to furthering African American Education, hand-picked by the Vice President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to examine whether missing too much school in the early grades was one of the reasons so few low-income children were reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade. The answer was yes, chronically absent students—those who miss 10 percent or nearly a month of school—do worse academically. Subsequently coining the term “chronic absence” to differentiate it from truancy and to account for all absences, including excused and unexcused. Once defined, Attendance Works focused local communities, school districts, teachers, and policy-makers on collecting and analyzing data on chronic absence. The next step was urging the use of this information to forge partnerships with families, civic organizations and public agencies to unpack and address common barriers to getting to school, such as lack of access to health care, a safe path to school or bullying, and nurturing a community wide culture of daily attendance in schools. Hedy Nai-Lin Chang directs Attendance Works. She is deeply committed, a known scholar on chronic Absence in the Early Grades and called upon nationally and internationally to speak to the topic of attendance.