Metric alignment: measuring absenteeism/attendance for NYC schools

Phase 0 deliverable of the absenteeism deep dive — kx-jin, 2026-06-09. Under review with the Chalkbeat NY team; sources cited inline.

1. Question

Chalkbeat NY wants to use per-school attendance data to explain post-pandemic absenteeism: overall trends, how much schools vary, and which schools over/under-perform socioeconomically similar peers. Before building anything we need to align on which metric(s) to measure, verify the candidate sources agree with each other, and fix the analysis window.

2. Candidate metrics

Why chronic absenteeism leads

1. It's the official measure, everywhere. NYC DOE adopted NYSED's definition in 2020-21 and applied it retroactively to the whole published series: a student is chronically absent if attendance ≤90% of enrolled days, counted only if enrolled ≥10 days and present ≥1 day (source NOTES sheet of the InfoHub file; same definition in NYC Open Data dataset sgsi-66kk). The Mayor's Management Report, NYSED report cards, IBO, the State Comptroller, and Chalkbeat's own coverage all report this measure.
2. It's the sensitive instrument. Citywide, chronic absenteeism moved 26.5% → 40.3% → 33.3% (2018-19 → 2021-22 → 2024-25) while ADA moved only 91.5% → 88.1% → 89.8%. ADA averages away exactly the concentration that matters: a school where most students miss a little looks like a school where some students miss a lot.
3. It's already ingested and validated. 7 years × ~1,520 schools × 16 subgroups in the warehouse, with denominators; base-case validation vs the source file is exact (10,639 cells, 0 mismatches — docs/qa_reports/chronic_absenteeism_rate__validation.md).

Why ADA still matters as a companion

It's the MMR's other indicator, it's in the same source file (not yet ingested — Phase 1), and divergence between the two is itself diagnostic (rising ADA + flat chronic absenteeism ⇒ improvement concentrated among students who were already mostly attending).

3. Do the sources agree?

Citywide, % chronically absent (All Students, All Grades):

* mean over ~1,520 school-level rates, computed from our warehouse (data/stories/deepdive-data.json). † 2019-20 truncated at 3/13/20; 2020-21 includes remote attendance.

• InfoHub = MMR exactly for FY23–FY25; one small discrepancy in FY22 (40.3 vs 40.7). Cause not established; MMR p.301 notes its own FY22 revision (40.6→40.7). Both round to Chalkbeat's reported "41%". Not material for school-level work; flagged for the validation backlog.
• Citywide vs school-mean differ by ~3pp by construction (student-weighted vs school-weighted). Both are correct; published work mixes them silently. We will always label which one we're showing.
• School Quality Snapshot disagrees at school level: only 66.5% of sampled school-years match within ±1.5pp; signed gaps −12 to +7.7pp including at large N (docs/qa_reports/chronic_absenteeism_rate__snapshot.md). Working hypothesis (not established): the Snapshot uses NYC's accountability cohort (Oct-31 audited register) rather than the all-enrolled InfoHub population. Implication: the InfoHub file is our ground truth; the Snapshot is a labeled secondary reference. Resolving the gap definitively is Phase 2 work (Educator Guide denominator; the 2024+ Snapshot's renamed varnames).
• NYSED publishes the same definition independently (per-school, through 2024-25 incl. charters; Access-format Report Card Database, tables ACC EM/HS Chronic Absenteeism) — NYC adopted NYSED's definition, so values should reconcile up to enrollment-window details (NYSED reports grades 1–8 and 9–12 separately; min-N 30, dropped to 20 in 2024-25; suppression marker s). This is the one truly independent (different-publisher) check; BEDS↔DBN is deterministic for district/D75 schools and needs a crosswalk only for charters.
• NYC Open Data mirrors of the same DOE series (sgsi-66kk; school-level gqq2-hgxd ends 2020-21) — same publisher, useful as a format check only.

4. Recommendation

1. Headline metric: chronic absenteeism rate (NYSED definition), school-level, from the InfoHub End-of-Year file — already ingested as chronic_absenteeism_rate (LOWER_BETTER).
2. Companion: ADA (% Attendance from the same file) — ingest in Phase 1; report alongside, never as the headline.
3. Grade-level chronic absenteeism (PK–12 rows exist in the file, currently unloaded) — ingest in Phase 1. Citywide the pattern is U-shaped (K 37.8%, grade 5 26.8%, grade 12 43.7% in 2024-25), so school-level grade mix matters for fair comparisons.
4. Subgroups: keep all published cuts, including the complements recovered in PR #9 (Not Poverty / Not ELL / Not STH / Other / non-binary) so within-school gaps (e.g. STH 48.7% vs Not-STH 30.7% citywide) are computable.
5. Universe: all NYC public schools, for every analysis year. The InfoHub file covers districts 1–32 + 75 only — it is NYC DOE reporting on schools it operates from its own ATS system, so charters (~281 schools, ~148k students, >15% of public-school enrollment in 2024-25), D79, and home/hospital are out of scope for that publisher, not missing. Charter chronic absenteeism is published per school by NYSED (Report Card Database, data.nysed.gov): scouting confirmed school-level tables for 2017-18, 2018-19, 2020-21, and 2021-22 through 2024-25 — SRC2025 (released 2026-04-30) already carries 2024-25, so the earlier assumption of a one-year NYSED lag is moot. The only NYSED hole is 2019-20 (never published — COVID), which our window excludes anyway. Decision: ingest NYSED and run an all-schools universe across the full window; every chart/table still states its universe and per-school publisher. Settled by scouting: D79 programs do not appear in NYSED data → D79 stays excluded, stated in methodology. Known coverage wart: Success Academy stopped reporting attendance to NYSED in 2023-24 (DATA_REP_FLAG=N, values suppressed in 2023-24 and 2024-25) — network scope to be quantified on ingest and disclosed wherever charters are shown.

4b. Grade coverage by source

Implications: like-for-like cross-publisher comparison = our grades-1–8/9–12 aggregates vs NYSED's bands (possible only because the per-grade DOE rows are ingested); PK/K carry the highest absenteeism (48.2%/37.8% citywide 2024-25), so DOE school-wide mechanically exceeds a grades-1–12 basis at elementary schools — the documented basis caveat on charter headline values; NYSED also lacks gender and temporary-housing subgroups, so within-school STH gaps remain DOE-only.

5. Analysis window & comparability

• Pre-pandemic baseline: 2018-19 (earliest year in the series).
• Exclude from trend fits: 2019-20 (year ends 3/13/20) and 2020-21 (remote attendance counted) — consistent with docs/design/reference-scaffold/config/comparability.yaml.
• Trend window: 2021-22 → 2024-25 (4 clean post-pandemic years), with 2018-19 as the recovery yardstick. This matches the Detroit PEER study's window and Chalkbeat's framing.

6. Known caveats to carry through all phases

• Students attending multiple schools in a year count at each school (school-level rows don't sum to citywide).
• FERPA suppression: rows with ≤5 students or ≤900 total days; chronic-absence value additionally suppressed if ≤5 students contribute ≥20 days.
• D75 short-term-stay schools enter the file in 2022-23 (small series break).
• PK rows only for K-12 schools that offer PK (no NYCEEC/PreK centers).
• 148 school-years exist in the source but not the warehouse (stale school directory; re-ingest requested alongside PR #9).
• NYSED (charter) data is not perfectly apples-to-apples with the DOE file: same core definition (DOE adopted NYSED's), but NYSED accountability reporting uses grades 1–8 / 9–12 splits (DOE file includes PK/K), and the State Comptroller describes NYSED's measure as excluding out-of-school-suspension and extended-medical absences (not yet verified at the rule-book level). Reconcile and document before mixing publishers in one chart; the overlap on district schools (both publishers report them) is itself the validation instrument.
• Crosswalk: NYC charters carry district-84 DBNs in city directories; whether the schools table covers all ~281 charters is to be confirmed when wiring the NYSED ingest (same BEDS↔DBN work the independent check needs).

7. Open decisions (checkpoint with Chalkbeat)

1. Approve chronic absenteeism as headline + ADA companion + grade-level cut.
2. Approve the analysis window (2018-19 baseline; trends on 2021-22→2024-25; 2019-20/2020-21 excluded).
3. Confirm the all-schools universe (district via DOE + charter via NYSED, every analysis year incl. 2024-25; D79 not published anywhere → excluded with a methodology note); universe and per-school publisher labeled on every output.
4. Flag any additional cuts they want first-class (e.g. borough/district rollups, STH focus).