Michigan study finds home visits help—yet fail

A new analysis of roughly 2,700 Michigan schools shows that schools making the biggest gains in attendance had students showing up about seven more days per year than similar students in the lowest-improving schools. Researchers say frequent home visits often

On average, the difference between showing up and falling behind can look small on paper: about seven more days of class per year. In Michigan, researchers treated those days as something urgent, because missing 18 school days a year is the threshold for chronic absenteeism.

Their analysis looked at roughly 2. 700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025. dividing them into quarters based on how much they improved students’ attendance rates. Students in the top quarter attended for about seven more days per year than similar students in the bottom quarter. The gains weren’t brief, either. Schools that made the most progress tended to improve attendance across all three years of the study.

Still, improvement doesn’t automatically mean “fixed.” Some of the most effective schools in the state had absenteeism rates above 40 or 50 percent, according to Jeremy Singer, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan–Flint and lead author of the study.

What stood out to the researchers was where the progress was happening. Schools making the most headway tended to educate many children in poverty. often in the state’s poorest cities such as Detroit. Flint and Saginaw. or in economically depressed rural areas where farms are rapidly going out of business. The study also reflects a national reality: absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities. where evictions. addiction. transportation problems. health issues and family responsibilities disrupt school attendance.

High-poverty schools, Singer said, often already know the problem well. They run numerous programs and staff efforts aimed at reducing absences. So the researchers pushed further, trying to find what strategies those improving schools had in common.

To do that, they combined their analysis with a Michigan school survey in which principals described how they were tackling chronic absenteeism.

The strongest signal pointed toward a practice that sounds simple but takes serious effort: frequent home visits. The value of frequent home visits rose to the top in the study. and it also corroborates other research in Connecticut. where an intensive home visiting program to boost attendance showed strong results.

But even here, the story refuses to become a neat lesson.

Some Michigan schools conducting weekly home visits saw no improvement in attendance—or even worsening absenteeism. Singer was blunt about what that means: “They’re certainly no silver bullet.”

If home visits don’t automatically work. the key question becomes why they work in some places and fail in others. Singer said researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits effective, because the approach is expensive and time-intensive. Potential factors include who conducts the visits. what time of day they occur. whether they are scheduled or surprise visits. and what conversations take place.

The study also points to a broader discomfort in education research: the gap between what people want from “best practices” and what the evidence can actually prove. Schools are trying dozens of other interventions. but researchers didn’t detect a strong connection between most of those efforts and improved attendance.

That list includes early warning systems, letters home, automated text messages and phone calls. Schools that had support from district personnel—such as truancy officers or liaisons—did not do better than schools without those staffers.

There were smaller hints of what may help. Personalized and frequent text messages were modestly more common among schools with improving attendance. And schools making more progress were slightly more likely to report actively helping families address outside barriers such as housing and transportation.

Even with these patterns, the researchers say they can’t claim cause-and-effect. The correlation between interventions and schools that were effective in boosting attendance is a clue about what works. but it doesn’t show whether the interventions actually drove the improvements. The improvements could also be coming from other efforts not captured in the survey—like hiring especially skilled teachers or building stronger relationships with students that make school feel worth attending.

For parents, students and educators watching the chronic absenteeism crisis, the results land like both relief and caution. There are schools that clearly move the needle. But figuring out exactly which strategies make attendance improve—and how to replicate that success—turns out to be far more complicated than a simple checklist.

The findings also leave a final, hard-earned message: best-practice recommendations often overstate what researchers actually know. Schools can make a meaningful difference in attendance. identifying genuinely successful schools is difficult. isolating why they succeed is even harder. and simple solutions rarely hold up under scrutiny.

Michigan schools chronic absenteeism school attendance home visits student poverty truancy officers education research Jeremy Singer University of Michigan-Flint Detroit Flint Saginaw