Credit: Alison Yin for EdSource Today

Credit: Alison Yin for EdSource Today

California will begin its first statewide collection of data on students who are chronically absent, a key indicator of academic trouble, the California Department of Education said Thursday.

The need for a statewide pool of absenteeism information long has been disputed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who in 2022 vetoed two omnipresence-collection bills and wrote, "Keeping children in school and learning is a priority, only collecting more information is not the primary solution."

The modify is the effect of the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Barack Obama in December, which requires states to collect and report data on chronic absenteeism.

Keric Ashley, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, said in an interview that the state will brainstorm collecting the information from districts in tardily spring 2017, based on omnipresence for the 2016-17 school year, and will use its current definition of chronic absenteeism as a student who is absent more than 10 percent of the days in a school year.

Districts will upload their information into the state student data organisation known as the California Longitudinal Educatee Achievement Information System. Housing the data in that organisation volition let the state and the districts to disaggregate the findings by factors that include gender, eligibility for free and reduced priced meals and ethnicity, Ashley said. The statewide data will exist publicly bachelor.

Districts will report two figures at the end of the schoolhouse year for each educatee: the number of days in the school yr and the number of days the pupil attended. If a pupil attends a school for only a few months, chronic absenteeism would be calculated by the number of days a educatee could have attended the school divided by the number of days the student did nourish.

"What it doesn't do is wait at data in real time," Ashley said. "This isn't something to exist used as an early alarm system." Instead, the information will give school districts a look at how well they are keeping runway of students who are missing more than x percent of school.

Advocates have urged districts to develop faster ways to identify students who are missing a lot of schoolhouse, for excused reasons, unexcused reasons or disciplinary suspensions, and then interventions can be put in place. In a letter to interim U.S. Secretarial assistant of Education John King, the nonprofit arrangement Attendance Works urged that districts exist asked to analyze their information "on a weekly or bi-weekly footing, if not in real-fourth dimension" to quickly identify students who have missed 10 pct or more of school.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, who has said that focusing on elementary school attendance is a "smart, toll-effective" arroyo to improving students' lives and keeping them out of the justice organisation she oversees, has fabricated no secret of her frustration with information drove. For years, she has lobbied for a statewide data collection system for chronic absenteeism. California has been one of a handful of states that does non collect that data.

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