At least 40 percent of CA districts and charter schools have rates of chronic absence in grades K-8 that are high or very high based on new performance measures that are now part of the California School Dashboard.
The dashboard measures, which actually underestimate the extent of the problem because they do not highlight high schools, show that fulfilling the basic responsibility of getting children to school remains difficult in many places. The data is on the dashboard for the first time this year because the state did not release absenteeism numbers until 2017 and the system requires at least two years of data to determine whether schools are showing improvement.
