Tackling absenteeism with behavioral nudges
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, schools are grappling with a quiet crisis: students simply not showing up. In the three years after the pandemic, 40% of students were absent at least once—more than double the 17% pre-pandemic. Even more troubling, the share of students absent in all three years rose from 2.4% to nearly 8%, according to the Brookings Institution.
Todd Rogers, the Weatherhead Professor of Public Policy, has been at the forefront of efforts to reduce absenteeism. Drawing on behavioral science, he designs interventions—or “nudges”—that encourage families to improve attendance without mandates or penalties.
In one widely cited study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, Rogers and UC Berkeley’s Avi Feller partnered with the School District of Philadelphia to test repeated, mail-based messages to parents. Families received multiple rounds of personalized updates about how many days their child had missed and, in some versions, how that compared with classmates. The results were striking: the most effective versions reduced chronic absenteeism by more than 10%—at a fraction of the cost of typical programs like mentorship or social work support. Replications in Chicago Public Schools and other districts confirmed the approach as robust, scalable, and cost-effective.
At the request of partner districts, Rogers and Feller cofounded EveryDay Labs in 2016 to bring these interventions to schools nationwide. Rogers continues to advise the 40-person organization for a few hours each week as part of his outside activities. Today, EveryDay Labs works with more than 1,500 schools, has run a dozen randomized controlled trials replicating and extending the initial findings, and has reduced absenteeism by over two million school days.
Rogers’ research has also shaped state policy. In California, he and collaborators—including Jessica Lasky-Fink (UC Berkeley, now at HKS People Lab), Carly Robinson (Stanford University), and national attendance expert Hedy Chang MPP 1989—redesigned the truancy letters sent to millions of parents each year that are mandated by state law. The standard notices were long, written at a 10th-grade level, and legalistic in tone—often leaving parents feeling threatened. The team tested shorter letters, written at a 5th-grade reading level, framed as collaborative rather than punitive.
In a trial with over 130,000 families, the redesigned letters reduced absences 40% more than standard ones in the following month. Published in Educational Researcher in 2021, the study showed that small, virtually cost-free changes to existing communications could meaningfully improve attendance. Since then, states including Louisiana and California have adopted the letters as their standard, with other states actively considering adoption.
Together, this work demonstrates how rigorous behavioral science can translate into practical, large-scale solutions. From cost-effective nudges that empower parents to policy changes reshaping state practices, Rogers’ scholarship is helping schools keep students in class—and learning.
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Championing attendance
HEDY CHANG MPP 1989 is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit initiative Attendance Works, which has focused on attendance policy and practice in school districts across the United States since 2010. It provides concrete policy recommendations and resources to school districts and educators. She, Rogers, and Emma Starr, a former research fellow at HKS, wrote this about the California truancy research as a blog post on the Attendance Works website in 2019: “Applying insights from behavioral science, such as the simplification of language and supplying the right information in an empowering way, can have a meaningful impact on students and families.”
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Improving education by LEAPS and bounds
BY MOST METRICS, learning in schools around the world has stagnated. Roughly 70% of 10-year-olds in the global South cannot read a simple text. Almost half are girls, and many are from impoverished families. HKS scholars are committed to addressing this problem.
Asim Ijaz Khwaja, the Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at HKS and faculty director of the Center for International Development (CID), leads a portfolio of studies in Pakistan that are transforming educational outcomes. The Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) portfolio is a collaboration among HKS, the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (which Khwaja cofounded), and other universities.
LEAPS has demonstrated that designing educational interventions that solve frictions in the entire learning ecosystem can sustainably and cost-effectively improve learning at scale. Khwaja and co-principal investigators have studied the effects of information to parents, cash grants to schools, performance pay for teachers, and personalized learning in public schools. In each case, they have demonstrated that market structure matters, and that carefully crafting solutions to real-world, contextualized problems delivers positive results, even to those not directly impacted.
Through longitudinal panel data collection, LEAPS also speaks to the long-term effects of improved foundational learning. Around the world, access to high-quality education can be an important contributor to a country’s growth and development. Education can lead to better employment and is a path out of poverty for many families. School attendance also may curb child labor, improve health literacy, break gender barriers, and delay early marriage and childbirth. LEAPS has shown that improving students’ foundational learning leads to 23% higher schooling completion, 32% higher college attendance, and 12% higher wages.
LEAPS findings have informed education reform efforts across South Asia, and inspired interventions in India, Kenya, and Uganda, including vouchers, information campaigns, and educational investments. LEAPS is part of the Global Education and Research: Unleashing Potential initiative within Harvard’s Center for International Development.
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Tackling literacy in South Africa
Literacy rates are tied to education attainment and ultimately with people’s economic prospects and well-being. In South Africa, roughly 81% of fourth grade students “cannot read for meaning in any language,” according to a 2024 Reading Panel report.
Through a project he initially conceived of while a student at HKS, Athol Williams MC/MPA 2013—along with his wife Taryn—worked to boost literacy in his home country of South Africa, providing hundreds of thousands of books to children in poor communities over the course of a decade. About this initiative, called Read to Rise, Williams has said, “Literacy is one of the big challenges in South Africa. We’ve got four out of five children who can’t read with comprehension. … We keep saying our program is far more about the rise than about the read.”
(Read more about Williams in the Spring 2024 HKS Magazine.)
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Banner image: Aerial view of a parking lot full of school buses in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Abstract Aerial Art/Getty Images; faculty portraits by Martha Stewart. LEAPS photo courtesy of CID.