Attending school every day increases a student’s chances of success in school and in life. Find out how to identify the causes of chronic absenteeism and how to combat its negative effects.
MentoringResearch confirms that quality mentoring relationships have powerful positive effects on young people in a variety of personal, academic, and professional situations. Learn about how to incorporate mentoring at your school.
Tools & Resources
Bringing Attendance Home Toolkit
Created with the help of practitioners who have worked successfully with families to improve attendance, this toolkit is filled with ideas, activities and materials that you can use to spark conversations with parents about how good attendance can help them fulfill their dreams and aspirations for their children’s futures. The toolkit contains:
- Research showing a positive relationship between parent involvement and attendance as well as the results of new studies examining parents’ attitudes about school absences and their implications for messaging and action.
- Key Principles for engaging parents on attendance.
- Materials to share with parents about the importance of good attendance
- Interactive Exercises to spark awareness, conversation and action with groups of parents about the consequences of poor attendance on their children’s futures.
To help teachers build a culture of attendance and maintain it throughout the school year, this teacher toolkit, Teaching Attendance: Everyday Strategies to Help Teachers Improve Attendance and Raise Achievement can help drive up attendance in your classroom and throughout your school community!
The Students at the Center Framework
The Students at the Center Framework includes four research-backed tenets, or principles, for powerful teaching and learning, meant to ensure that all students develop the sort of high-level knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college, careers, and civic life. Drawn from the mind/brain sciences, learning theory, and research on youth development, these tenets are overlapping and complementary. In combination, and when guided by a coherent and rigorous set of educational goals, they provide a strong foundation for the pursuit of deeper learning.
Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching
The Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching build on and push beyond the best existing teaching competencies and standards to capture what educators need in order to create and thrive in personalized, learner-centered systems. The competencies are organized into four domains.
National Success Mentors
This report commissioned by the New York State Education Department explores strategies to help boys and young men of color—and all students—realize their full potential. The report, New York State Education Department National Success Mentors Guidance Document: Emerging Practices for Schools and Communities, provides an overview of the outcome trends among boys of color in K-12 school environments, and a research review of the most prevalent strategies currently being implemented in schools and communities across the country.
Early Warning Systems
The report, Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice by Eric Toshalis and Michael J. Nakkula synthesizes research on achievement motivation, school engagement, and student voice, concluding that the more educators use student-centered approaches to reinforce student agency, the more motivation and engagement are likely to rise. The Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice Toolkit is a professional development series that has been designed to help put into practices the ideas from the report. The activities are designed to facilitate the development of a mindset that encourages a critical analysis of what participants believe, what they do, and what might need to be changed to fully realize the potential of student-centered teaching.
Students at the Center Research
The research papers presented renew attention to the importance of engaging each student in acquiring the skills, knowledge, and expertise needed for success in college and a career. The research is far reaching and encompasses the following topics:
- Assessment
- Competency Education
- Curriculum & Instruction
- Equity and Diverse Learners
- Learning Theory
- Rethinking Readiness
- School Improvement
- Understanding ESSA
Chronic Absenteeism
Preventing Missed Opportunity: Taking Collective Action to Confront Absence builds on the first national chronic absence data set from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) from the 2013-14 school year.
America’s education system is based on the assumption that barring illness or an extraordinary event, students are in class every weekday. So strong is this assumption that it is not even measured. Indeed, it is the rare state education department, school district or principal that can tell you how many students have missed 10 percent or more of the school year or in the previous year missed a month or more school − two common definitions of chronic absence. Below is a list of resources, references, data, and reports geared towards combating chronic absenteeism.
Did you know at-risk youths with a mentor are:
- 55% more likely to be enrolled in college
- 78% more likely to volunteer regularly in their communities
Click here to discover the many benefits and opportunities to becoming a mentor.