Oregon's Senate Interim Education Committee is reviewing a proposal to repeal and replace the state's compulsory attendance laws. The plan would shift the focus from legal obligation to engagement. Whether this proposal passes, the research on what actually reduces chronic absenteeism points in the same direction.
Chronic absenteeism has persisted in Michigan and several other states with strong enforcement laws long enough to raise a diagnostic question. If compulsory attendance law has been enforced for years, why has absenteeism kept rising? Michigan is one of the more instructive cases. The state has sustained some of the worst chronic absenteeism rates in the country. Post-pandemic levels in the most affected buildings left a majority of enrolled students classified as chronically absent. A multi-year study of thousands of Michigan schools traced what set the improving buildings apart from those that were not. The results were clear about what showed the weakest connection to better attendance: early warning systems, automated parent messages, truancy officers, and district liaisons all showed minimal correlation with improvement. Frequent home visits, conducted weekly or daily by school staff, showed the strongest.
Detroit Public Community School District, among the Michigan systems with the most severe absenteeism history, shifted its strategy after the pandemic. It moved toward the approaches the research identifies as more effective: attendance agents working with families directly, wraparound services that remove non-academic barriers, and financial incentives designed to sustain student engagement. The district has since outpaced the rest of Michigan in reducing chronic absenteeism.
This pattern carries a lesson for any district that has not yet run the experiment. Attendance requirements, when used as the primary tool, are a weak fix once absenteeism has become a structural problem. When a large share of a school's enrollment is chronically absent, the legal framework is producing documentation more than deterrence. What the evidence ties to actual improvement is direct human contact: a school representative who shows up, regularly, at the home of a student who has stopped showing up at school.
Oregon's proposal would write that shift into state law. Several Michigan districts have already made it in practice, and their results support the direction.
The objection your board will raise
Removing the attendance requirement signals to families that absences carry no consequences.
This concern reflects a sound theory of deterrence. What it misses is that the deterrent is already failing in the districts where chronic absenteeism is worst. The students who most need help are not deterred by legal notices. Their absences reflect conditions that enforcement tools are not built to address. Housing problems, caregiving duties, transportation gaps, and untreated health issues do not get resolved because a district sends a truancy letter. They are more likely to resolve when someone from the school makes direct contact, finds out what the specific barrier is, and starts working on it.
Enforcement is not the wrong tool because it is punitive. It is the wrong primary tool because it is not designed to address the conditions that drive chronic absenteeism where the problem is worst.
Five questions before your next attendance policy review
Oregon's proposal is still in committee, and what works in Michigan may not map directly to your district. What does transfer is the practice of examining whether your attendance resources are going toward the mechanisms with the stronger track record. These five questions are a starting point.
What is your current ratio of enforcement contacts to direct relationship contacts for chronically absent students? Enforcement contacts include automated notices, truancy referrals, and court interventions. Relationship contacts include attendance agents, scheduled home visits, and social worker outreach. A heavy skew toward enforcement means your resources are in the category the research identifies as the weaker lever.
Do you track attendance changes in the weeks after enforcement contacts, compared to your baseline? Without that data, you are spending on an intervention you have not measured.
What share of your chronically absent students have a documented non-school barrier driving their absences? For those students, have enforcement protocols been replaced with barrier-resolution steps that route to the right support?
Does your district treat chronic absenteeism as a compliance failure or as a diagnostic signal? Those framings are not the same: one allocates resources toward enforcement, the other toward case management. The research suggests the allocation matters.
If your state restructured its attendance law on Oregon's model, which parts of your current approach would survive intact, and which would need to be rebuilt? Mapping that gap before a legislative change forces the question is less disruptive than doing it after.