The Unexpected Attendance Strategy: What Virginia's Arts Education Research May Be Telling Us
- Jeremy Earnhart
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
Students completing sustained arts coursework were 32.3% to 50.8% less likely to be chronically absent than their peers.
Leadership Insight
In March 2024, the Virginia Department of Education presented one of the most significant arts education findings of the past decade to the Virginia Board of Education.
Students completing four years of fine arts coursework were 32% to 50% less likely to be chronically absent than their peers.
Virginia Department of Education Meeting
Fine Arts & Chronic Absenteeism Report
March 28, 2024
Using multiple years of student-level data from the Virginia Department of Education, Quadrant Research examined outcomes for students who completed four years of arts education during high school. These findings were significant enough to be presented to the Virginia Board of Education and subsequently highlighted by the Virginia Department of Education through its #AttendanceMattersVA campaign.
"Seniors enrolled in four years of fine arts courses each year since 2020 demonstrate a
32% to 50% lower absenteeism rate than those who did not take a fine arts course
during high school. These findings hold when comparing data across fine arts disciplines and for key variables such as race/ethnicity, enrollment in Free and Reduced-Price Meal programs, and English Learners"
Source: Virginia Department of Education Facebook, #AttendanceMattersVA Campaign — March 28, 2024
Outside Virginia—and outside the arts education community—the finding received surprisingly little national attention.
It should have.
The study does not establish causation. Like most educational research, it identifies a meaningful relationship rather than proving one variable caused the other.
Nevertheless, the finding aligns with something educators have understood for generations:
Students are more likely to attend places where they feel connected.
Every day a student misses school is a day of instruction that can never be recovered.
Schools can reteach a lesson. Teachers can provide tutorials. Counselors can offer additional support.
But no school can recreate yesterday's classroom.
That simple reality has made chronic absenteeism one of the defining educational challenges facing American education. Across the country, states and school districts are investing significant time, funding, and personnel into improving student attendance because they understand a fundamental truth:
Students cannot benefit from learning opportunities if they are not present to receive them.
What helps students keep showing up?
One answer may have been hiding in plain sight.
Belonging Is an Attendance Strategy
Students are more likely to attend places where they feel connected.
Arts programs create those conditions by design. Whether through band, orchestra, choir, theatre, dance, or visual arts, students become part of a community in which their presence matters and their absence is noticed.
That sense of belonging may be one of the most overlooked attendance strategies available to schools.
Educational Systems Are Multiplication Machines
Educational leadership is fundamentally different from classroom instruction because educational systems multiply everything.
In The Cost of Not Playing, I explored how relatively small differences in music participation could create significant staffing and financial implications when expanded across thousands of schools. Attendance follows the same mathematics.
Five students become five hundred.
One percentage point becomes thousands of students.
One additional day becomes millions of instructional hours.
One additional attendance day may seem insignificant. One percentage point may appear modest. One hundred students hardly seems transformational.
But educational systems multiply everything. When small improvements are repeated across hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students, they become millions of instructional hours, stronger graduation pipelines, and greater returns on the public investment already being made in education.
Small improvements, consistently applied across large educational systems, become transformational.
The Attendance Dividend
The illustration below is intended to demonstrate scale rather than predict a precise outcome. Using the chronic absenteeism differences reported in Virginia together with the Commonwealth's published attendance improvements, it estimates the instructional time potentially associated with sustained arts participation.
Now imagine 100 high school students.
Applying Virginia's findings suggests a cohort of 100 students could generate approximately 200 to 300 additional attendance days each year under similar attendance patterns.
Those are more than numbers on an attendance report.
They represent:
More students in classrooms.
More instructional time.
More opportunities to learn.
More students on a path toward graduation.
A seemingly modest reduction in chronic absenteeism becomes millions of additional instructional hours when multiplied across an entire educational system.
Attendance creates opportunity.
Opportunity creates possibility.
Attendance is one of the few educational outcomes that compounds.
Every additional day in school increases the opportunity for every other educational investment to matter.
Improving the Return on Public Investment
Every instructional day requires teachers, transportation, facilities, counselors, instructional materials, technology, food service, and countless other resources.
Those investments occur whether every student attends or not.
When students are absent, schools generally do not spend dramatically less money that day. Instead, communities receive less educational return from an investment that has already been made.
Improving attendance increases the return on that investment.
That perspective changes the conversation.
Attendance is not simply an accountability metric.
Attendance is an educational efficiency strategy.
Looking Beyond Attendance
Attendance is not the destination.
It is the beginning.
Students who attend consistently are more likely to earn credits. Students who earn credits are more likely to graduate. Graduates are more likely to pursue higher education, technical training, military service, or stable employment.
Communities benefit from a more educated workforce, stronger civic participation, greater lifetime earnings, and increased economic opportunity.
No single educational program can claim responsibility for those outcomes. Nor should it.
But if sustained participation in music and the arts helps more students come to school consistently, it strengthens one of the earliest measurable links in that entire chain. Their impact extends well beyond the rehearsal hall—to classrooms, graduation stages, workforces, and communities.
And perhaps, over time, they help expand educational and economic opportunity while contributing to efforts to reduce intergenerational poverty.
That possibility deserves further study.
Perhaps We've Been Asking the Wrong Question
For decades, conversations about arts education have focused on creativity, academic achievement, and social-emotional learning. Those outcomes remain important.
But perhaps another question deserves equal attention.
Can sustained participation in music and the arts help schools mitigate chronic absenteeism?
Virginia's research suggests the answer may be yes.
If future research continues to support these findings, arts education should be viewed not simply as an enrichment opportunity, but as one component of a comprehensive strategy for strengthening school connectedness, improving attendance, and expanding opportunities for student success. But perhaps Virginia's most important contribution extends beyond attendance.
The data were never the problem.
We have more educational data than at any point in history.
The challenge is no longer collecting more information. The challenge is asking better questions of the information we already possess.
Virginia's attendance findings may represent not the conclusion of a research project, but the beginning of a broader research agenda.
Virginia asked one.
If attendance can be studied this way, what other educational outcomes are already waiting to be discovered within state longitudinal data?
Perhaps that is the most important lesson of all.
References
Primary Sources
Virginia Board of Education. Presentation on the Virginia Arts Education Data Project (March 2024).
Virginia Board of Education. Agenda Memorandum – Virginia Arts Education Data Project.
Virginia Department of Education. #AttendanceMattersVA: Chronic Absenteeism and the Arts in Virginia Public Schools.
Virginia Department of Education. Attendance Matters statewide attendance reports.
Supporting Research
Quadrant Research. Virginia Career Arts Education and Student Outcomes.
Arts Education Partnership. Arts Education Data and Reporting Initiatives (2024).
Explore the Research
Virginia Department of Education – #AttendanceMattersVA
Quadrant Research – Virginia Career Arts Education Study
Virginia Board of Education Presentation
Virginia Attendance Matters Dashboard
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