The raw data looks inarguably bad: The share of American children missing at least 10 percent of school days nearly doubled over the course of the pandemic, leaving perhaps more than six million more students “chronically absent” than had been in the 2018-19 school year. Almost everything about school performance and the well-being of children and adolescents now seems to orbit the duration of remote learning in one school year, which lives on years later as the gravitational center of our retrospective universe. The most recent available national numbers show that 26 percent of American students missed at least 10 percent of school in 2022-23. In Britain, chronic absenteeism jumped from 11.7 percent of children before the pandemic to 23.5 percent in 2022-23. In Belgium, the problem has grown by 90 percent, and in New Zealand, more than 45 percent of children missed at least 10 percent of school days.

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Persons: “ Organizations: Covid, National Agency for Education Locations: Sweden, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand, Japan