One of the biggest challenges schools across the United States face at the start of 2025 is the persistently high levels of student chronic absenteeism. Having skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest data shows it remains almost double pre-pandemic levels, with approximately one in four students missing more than ten percent of school days each year. Frustratingly, for everyone involved, including school leaders, teachers, families and students themselves, schools have only seen marginal decreases in the years since the pandemic.

Education leaders at all levels—from state chiefs to district superintendents to school principals—are searching for solutions. Many are talking to families about the importance of sending their children to school every day through awareness campaigns, by providing awards for good attendance, or by sending letters home to parents with warnings about potential consequences for children missing more school. But rarely do they talk with families about how engaged their children are at school.

Yet, decades of evidence point to the importance of families in student motivation, engagement, and outcomes. One significant review of evidence showed that the way parents and caregivers interact with their students at home was two times more predictive of students’ interest and learning in school than socioeconomic status.

Boosting student engagement is an area ripe for family-school partnership. Not only do families play an especially important role alongside teachers and schools in supporting engagement, student engagement can change relatively quickly when students’ contexts change. But to work with schools to support student engagement, families have to know how engaged their children are. Our research shows that parents, which for the purposes of this report includes any adult caring for a child, are woefully unaware of how engaging their students’ learning experiences are at school. This is not the fault of parents, who track their children’s engagement in their learning at school based on the indicators schools typically provide, including attendance, grades, and biannual parent-teacher discussions.

Read the full article about student engagement by Rebecca Winthrop, Youssef Shoukry, and David Nitkin at The Brookings Institution.