No change in North Dakota student absenteeism rate
North Dakota’s chronic absenteeism rate remained stubbornly stuck at 20 percent in 2025. Chronic absenteeism — when students miss 10 percent or more of the school year — isn’t a new problem, but the fact that the elevated rates of students chronically absent during COVID haven’t declined much is concerning.
While absenteeism has fallen from its peak in 2022, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels, suggesting the problem has moved from a temporary disruption to a more persistent challenge.
North Dakota Chronic Absenteeism Rates
North Dakota is hardly alone in facing elevated levels of chronic absenteeism, but neither is it among the states that have returned closes to pre-pandemic norms. At the district level, results are mixed. Belcourt and Dunseith continue to report nearly half of their students as chronically absent. At the same time, some districts demonstrate that improvement is possible. New Town Public School District, for example, reduced chronic absenteeism to just 8 percent in 2025, its lowest level since at least 2018. In 2021, the district was at a high of 22 percent.
Attendance issues not only affect student well-being and achievement but can have long-term detrimental effects if not addressed, weakening the return on the substantial investment North Dakota taxpayers make in public education each year.
Why haven’t absenteeism rates returned to normal? Nat Malkus, with the American Enterprise Institute, has closely tracked this, and shares this analysis:
Overall, these grade-level patterns have clear implications for what is driving persistent absenteeism after the pandemic. Absenteeism is still up for all students, not mainly, or even disproportionately, cohorts that were in school during the pandemic. This strongly suggests that the pandemic has changed how American families and schools approach school attendance and that this change is affecting the post-pandemic generation of students who did not experience remote learning, school closures, or any of the other disruptions of 2020 and 2021.
Eighteen states (North Dakota not yet one of them) have committed to cutting their chronic absenteeism rates in half by 2027, accepting the challenge to do so from a group of education advocates including Attendance Works, EdTrust, and Nat Malkus.
Even if states make progress toward this goal, there may be limits to what policy can do to fix this problem, points out Michael McShane with EdChoice.
Culture eats policy for breakfast, as the saying goes, and this could be a large-scale demonstration of that fact. As a school choice guy, I hope we can provide a stronger incentive for parents to get their children to school by giving parents more say in where their children go to school. Giving parents an opportunity to align themselves with likeminded educators could also encourage attendance. But these trends might be bigger than any policy can solve. If that is true, we might need to take an altogether different approach to solve the problem of chronic absenteeism.
Improving attendance should be viewed as an accountability priority. Schools are expected to raise student achievement, but they cannot do so if students are routinely absent. Schools should be held accountable for achievement, but student attendance must be part of that accountability metric.
Restoring a culture that treats regular attendance as an expectation requires shared responsibility among families, educators, school leaders, and policymakers. Looking at what certain districts, like New Town, have implemented and what changed could help.
Chronic Absenteeism by State, Select School Years, 2019-2025
