We should pay parents for fixing school attendance problems
Conditional cash transfers are evidence-based social policy with a record of success.
Too many children are missing school in the United States. Since extended pandemic school closures disrupted education across the country, chronic absenteeism is surging.
By last year, the estimated 8 million students who were chronically absent pre-pandemic had doubled to an estimated 16 million, or about 33 percent. In D.C., according to a recent report, an astonishing 48 percent of kids reached that 10 percent mark — up from 29 percent three years earlier. Obviously, covid’s diminished impact on everyday life hasn’t reversed the patterns developed at the disease’s peak.
The Washington Post published an editorial last week recognizing the problem and proposing a variety of interventions, including home visits, improving school facilities, and making classes more relevant and fun. While all of these ideas would help, the scale of the problem requires a simple, powerful measure that will have an immediate impact — paying parents to guarantee their children are attending school. In other words, parents would receive cash payments when their children regularly attend school. Cash payments would be conditioned on school attendance — a conditional cash transfer.
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have existed for decades in Latin America and other parts of the Global South. The goal is simple: to help alleviate cash poverty while simultaneously promoting desirable social outcomes, such as school attendance or uptake of childhood vaccines. Children in families experiencing poverty are significantly more likely to have chronic attendance problems than other children.
They are evidence-based social policies that have proven to increase school attendance in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia — created in 2003 by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — is arguably the most famous. Children whose families participate in the Bolsa Familia program must maintain 85% school attendance rates for their parents to receive cash payments. One 2019 study found that children enrolled in Bolsa Familia between 6 and 15 years of age were 22% more likely to meet the program’s attendance conditionality.
Mexico’s Progresa program (subsequently rebranded as Oportunidades and Prospera), which unfortunately no longer exists due to austerity measures, was found to have increased school enrollment of 14-year-old boys by 14% and a 2007 Cornell University study reported it increased secondary school attendance by 20% for girls and 10% for boys in participant households.
More recently, a post-pandemic labeled cash transfer (LCT) program implemented in Kenya increased secondary school enrollment by about 8%, as flagged by World Bank Senior Education Adviser Harry A. Patrinos. While unconditional (i.e. no strings attached), parents “were informed that it was intended to help cover the costs of re-enrollment for a specific adolescent girl nearing completion of secondary school.”
The COVID-19 cash transfer was a logistically straightforward and scalable intervention intended to help adolescent girls return to school after prolonged school closures due to the pandemic. It had no formal conditions but did have limited direct messaging and thus can be interpreted as a labeled cash transfer. There were significant positive effects on enrollment for the targeted girls when schools fully reopened. The intervention appears to have even brought some girls not enrolled earlier in the year back into school. Therefore, the transfer helped stave off dropout during a highly uncertain period and at a vulnerable point in their secondary schooling, with possible beneficial implications for future well-being. The effectiveness of the intervention suggests an important role for additional resources for secondary schooling after the initial period of the pandemic when the vast majority of households had suffered income losses.
Given school systems in rich countries generally have sophisticated attendance tracking software and systems, it would probably make more sense to pursue a conditional program in the U.S., but the Kenya program nonetheless “suggests an important role for additional resources for secondary schooling after the initial period of the pandemic when the vast majority of households had suffered income losses.”
To be clear, any CCT program implemented in a U.S. city or school district should be viewed as a welfare addition, not a subtraction. Ohio State University Professor Vladimir Kogan correctly points out that there can be “huge blowback” when punitive approaches, such as Michigan’s problematic policy, to school attendance and welfare benefits are imposed on families. This means that CCT programs intended to improve school attendance should be framed as a carrot, not a stick, and messaging — as well as compassionate family outreach efforts implemented alongside the CCT — should emphasize that the goal is child welfare and success.
In order to avoid complicated issues related to means-testing, any CCT program should apply to an entire school district or city experiencing an attendance crisis — say, a district with average attendance below 85% during the 2022-23 academic year. Applying the policy to an entire district would also prevent instances of attempting to create attendance problems in order to qualify for CCT payments upon their resolution. Yes, a small number of affluent parents would qualify, but districts with the worst attendance crises right now are almost entirely comprised of poor and working-class families, many of which benefited tremendously from the expanded child tax credit (ECTC). For families participating in a new CCT program, the payments could potentially have a similar anti-poverty effect to the canceled ECTC program.
Of course, CCT programs wouldn’t be without some complications: how to address shared custody situations? What should be done to make sure children aren’t penalized for sick days in a country where getting a doctor’s note is extremely expensive? How would payments be made to the unbanked? Would grace periods and warnings be provided to parents at risk of losing payments? And, perhaps most importantly, where could funding quickly be found in order implement CCT programs starting in the fall? One advantage of CCT programs is that there would likely be bipartisan appeal — some Democrats might appreciate the simple cash transfer payments and some Republicans might appreciate accountability related to the conditionality.
It’s worth noting that New York City tried to implement a CCT program based on academic achievement during the Bloomberg mayoralty and the results weren’t particularly great. But improving school achievement is a little bit harder than fixing attendance. And there are legitimate reasons, such as reducing exposure to gun violence and the importance of age-appropriate socialization, to invest time and resources into addressing chronic absenteeism even if the learning loss piece is a tougher nut to crack.
Challenges aside, the chronic absenteeism problem isn’t getting better fast enough and we need to think more laterally about how to address the problem across the country. Alongside making schools as welcoming and appealing as possible for children and families, combining well-executed home visits and conditional cash payments could be a powerful post-pandemic strategy to bring children back into classrooms where they belong.