In the years since COVID, chronic absenteeism has remained a serious concern across the United States, negatively impacting student learning and achievement. Given the breadth of absenteeism, it is beneficial to identify cost-effective means of improving attendance for a large number of students. Musaddiq and colleagues sought to address this through personalized monthly email and text messages sent to parents through the messaging platforms used by four public school districts in the metro-Atlanta area of Georgia. Messages were designed to inform parents about the number of absences their children had and how that number compared to their peers’.
Results showed that for students whose caregivers were sent the messages (n=>28,300), the probability of chronic absenteeism was reduced by 2 percentage points, although not all caregivers received the message; students whose caregivers received the text messages saw greater reductions in end-of-year absences and the probability of chronic absenteeism (a decrease of 4 percentage points) than non-experimental district students (n=>347,300).
The study also pointed to useful practical findings related to reaching parents. The researchers noted that many parents were not reachable through existing district messaging platforms, that emails were more often received than text messages, and that the parents of students who were most in need of improving attendance were the most difficult to reach. These findings highlight that “light-touch, low-cost, and scalable” parental outreach efforts through existing platforms can have a positive impact on chronic absenteeism, but also point to ways to further enhance programmatic impact, for instance working with districts and schools to identify additional correct means of contacting parents, for instance.
Source: Musaddiq, T., Prettyman, A., & Smith, J. (2024). Using existing school messaging platforms to inform parents about their child’s attendance. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 17(4), 770–805. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2023.2264841