John Braun commentary: Kids can’t learn when they’re not in school
Friday, October 17, 2025
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, especially in our state, it’s how children benefit from attending school — socially, emotionally and academically.
Knowing that, you might expect Washington’s lawmakers and education community to put more priority on an important problem: one out of every four Washington K-12 students misses at least 18 days of school in a year. These students are considered “chronically absent.”
Some absences obviously are due for health reasons or family activities. Those are not the issue. The concern here is for the students whose chronic absenteeism puts them at risk of failing to graduate from high school.
Yet in each of the past two legislative sessions, Olympia’s majority Democrats have chosen not to pass bills aimed specifically at supporting these students
This is frustrating, and not because I introduced those bills. Every Washington lawmaker knows our state constitution makes providing for K-12 education our paramount duty. Promoting school attendance should be part of that as much as funding school buses.
Besides, Democrats have a history of using our constitution’s priority on education as an excuse to add to the tax burden on Washington residents without also adding to the educational achievement of our kids.
When they wanted to expand taxpayer-funded health care, Democrats tied it to education by arguing kids can’t learn when they’re sick. Then it became “kids can’t learn when they’re hungry” when calling for all-day meal programs at schools. Homelessness was next on the list, more than a decade ago. These have cost billions of tax dollars.
While those arguments have merit, here’s a better one: Kids can’t learn when they aren’t in school.
My proposed solution, which has received strong bipartisan sponsorship, is focused on identifying and locating students who are chronically absent and working to reengage them in academic learning.
It would do this primarily through a combination of training for educators and school staff and grants to organizations that can get the necessary supports to students and their families.
In 2024 my bill received unanimous support from the full Senate but died after reaching the House operating-budget committee. I brought it back for 2025, only to have it die before it reached the floor of the Senate chamber.
It’s a mystery why Democrats have gone backwards on this. Is there a downside to having more students attend class, especially when we all know from the pandemic how much children can lose by not being in a classroom?
Also, just as the effects of the pandemic-driven classroom closures show in Washington’s student-assessment scores, so does the increase in chronic absenteeism.
During the pre-pandemic 2018-19 school year, 85% of K-12 students statewide missed fewer than 18 days in a school year — which is considered regular attendance. That is one out of almost seven students. Back then, 60% of students tested at grade level in English and up to 49% did the same in mathematics.
The share of students with regular attendance fell to 73% for the 2023-24 school year, which is the latest data we have. That equates to one out of four students. Not surprisingly, test scores were down too: only 50% were at grade level in English and just below 40% hit that mark in math.
Put another way, a 12% increase in chronic absenteeism corresponds with a 10% decline in students at grade level in English and an 8% decline in math.
This matters because more than half of our state’s school districts saw more than a 12% increase in chronically absent students for the 2023-24 school year compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2018-19.
Pre-pandemic, there were approximately 165,000 chronically absent kids. That number has grown to 275,000. While 18 absences may not sound like much, that’s 10% of a school year. For comparison, think about what giving up 10% of your pay would force you to miss.
Common sense says there is no single reason that one in four students misses at least 18 days of class, when it used to be one out of almost seven. Also, a district’s chronic-absenteeism numbers don’t seem to be connected to its enrollment numbers, property values, or whether it’s urban, suburban or rural.
Because the causes are likely to vary from one district, school or even one family to the next, SB 5007 — which will be available for consideration again in 2026 — doesn’t propose a one-size-fits-all solution to the chronic-absenteeism problem.
Instead, my approach would give a fair amount of latitude to those receiving grants to learn which strategies work best for identifying at-risk students and connecting them to help.
The correlation between test scores and chronic absenteeism means the path to improving those scores in our state should include promoting regular attendance.
Even those who downplay test scores, like Washington’s superintendent of public instruction, should appreciate that employers prefer to have their workers show up regularly and on time. In that sense, encouraging regular school attendance is simply part of preparing students for the real world.
Senate Republicans in our state are committed to improving the lives of Washington’s children. We want better outcomes for students, and those aren’t going to happen if more children keep missing class – so let’s take action. That’s how our state does better.
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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.