Leon Uris’s bestselling epic Exodus — and its hit movie adaptation starring Paul Newman — influenced generations of Americans, from the suburbs to the State Department.
When I was 12 or 13, I found a copy of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus in my synagogue’s library. I stood amid the shelves, surreptitiously reading a sex scene (did the book just fall open right to it, the way every copy of Judy Blume’s Forever did at Chapter 12?) in which the passionate, long-legged, redheaded Jordana Ben Canaan makes love to her cerebral military strategist boyfriend, David Ben Ami, in the ruins of a Crusader castle on Mount Tabor in 1947 Palestine. As they canoodle, they recite King Solomon’s Song of Songs to each other. Uris uses ellipses ecstatically. (“And he kissed her breast … ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies …’ And he kissed her lips … ‘And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly’ …”) I was scandalized.
I took the book home and devoured it, much the way David devoured Jordana.
Exodus not only titillated me but also filled me with youthful pride. It’s difficult to overstate what a phenomenon the novel — a sweeping story about the founding of the modern state of Israel — was, even in the early ’80s, when it was already more than two decades old. It was over 600 pages long, structured in “five books” (you know, like the Hebrew Bible), touching on the exile of Jews from the Holy Land, the terrors of life in the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Mostly, though, it focused on a handful of Jewish characters, plus one foxy blond Presbyterian American nurse, in 1947 and 1948.
If you walked into a Jewish living room when I was a kid (or today, if you have a grandparent of a certain age), you’d spot it on a shelf. The hardcover edition dominated bestseller lists for months; it was translated into over 50 languages. When the paperback came out in September 1959, it had the largest advance purchase order — a million and a half copies — of any novel in publishing history. It presaged a glut of massive, sweeping national epics by the likes of James Michener, John Jakes, and James Clavell. And in 1960, it became a blockbuster movie starring Paul Newman as hottie Jewish freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25212018/GettyImages_1466801071.jpg)
Leo Fuchs/Getty Images
From the start, Exodus hugely influenced the world’s perception of Israel. “It’s been said that the only other book that had as great an impact on American foreign policy was Pearl Buck’s novel about China,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. “The book wasn’t just a driver of Jewish identity. People in the notoriously antisemitic state department read it at every level.”
In Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story, Israeli college professor and historian M.M. Silver notes that the book was a gift to Israel’s tourist industry. “More tourists fly into Tel Aviv with Exodus than with the Bible,” said the director of the Israeli government’s tourist office in 1959. David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, reportedly proclaimed, “I don’t usually read novels. But I read that one. As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.” Production images from the Otto Preminger film, featuring a shirtless Paul Newman wearing a Star of David necklace, only increased the story’s allure.
The book seemed to fit right in with the vision of Israel my parents provided for me. I grew up listening to Israeli folk records and hearing about the kibbutz movement, in which no one owned property and everyone tilled the land together and worked to make the desert bloom. I was taken to the Sinai desert, where my family camped with Bedouins and looked at the stars; I saw the mountain in the Galilee that would later feature in my bat mitzvah haftarah, where the prophet Deborah led the Israelites into battle against the Canaanites. Israel seemed like the happy almost-ending to the story of Jewish history. There’s a joke that the meaning of every Jewish holiday is “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” Jaffa oranges and creamy feta seemed like our delicious due for surviving the Holocaust.
When my parents were growing up, Jewish American identity was in transition. The Holocaust was a shattering collective experience, not only because of the deaths of 6 million Jews but also because it reminded American Jews that they were only guests in their own country. They knew about the draconian immigration quotas in America and elsewhere. No one wanted refugee Jews. Then, suddenly, the newly established state of Israel provided what seemed like a true haven.
The postwar period was also when American Jews were starting to join the middle class in greater numbers, leaving tight urban enclaves and beginning a big collective move to the suburbs. It was a weird time. As Silver writes, “By the end of the 1950s, suburban Jews developed a new, vicarious form of affiliation; because Jewishness seemed inauthentic in suburban space, they sought membership in a far-off land whose moral credibility was rooted in a sacred Jewish past.”
Exodus, the novel, arrived when Jews were searching for a new self-image. Uris was committed to a vision of muscular, heroic Jews, not ghetto weaklings or “golden riders of the psychoanalytic couch” (Silver’s term for Jewish American intellectual novelists like Philip Roth, who Uris loathed — and the feeling was evidently mutual). As Prell put it, “Exodus was a work of popular fiction that established a deep sense of Jewish identity, [instead of one] that had been far more complicated, fragmented, filled with shame. This book made the case that that’s not who you are as a Jew.”
As I got older, though, my youthful love of the book started to feel like an embarrassing crush on an teen idol. When I thought about Exodus at all, I recalled it as wildly sexist and reductive. More importantly, I wanted to forge my own sense of Jewish American selfhood that didn’t rely on endless stories of Israeli heroism and Holocaust horror, the twin narratives that seemed to direct so much of Jewish education and identity formation. Later, the Israeli government moved increasingly rightward and Jewish settlements expanded incrementally in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, and I turned away from Israel as a source of Jewish identity entirely.
I instead focused my attention on Jewish art, Jewish folklore and mythology, Jewish food, home-based rituals like lighting Shabbat candles and building a sukkah and hosting Passover seders. I chose to ponder Jewish values and history through culture, through learning about Jewish leadership in American labor and feminist movements. When I had kids, I addressed Israel the way many Gen X and older millennial parents have: by avoiding it. By sighing when the subject came up, saying “It’s complicated,” and passing the latkes.
I no longer have the luxury of noping out. I need to address my ambivalence and confront the gaps in my education if I’m to talk responsibly about Israel and Palestine, including the current siege of Gaza, with my own kids, who’ve grown up in silence. (I choose the word advisedly: Breaking the Silence is an Israeli NGO established by Israel Defense Forces veterans to talk about their experiences in the Occupied Territories since 2000.) My failure to discuss Israel with my children, even if I don’t have answers, is my fault. The first time I publicly wrestled with the subject of talking to kids about Israel when you’re dismayed by Israel, I got an email from a reader who wrote, “Jews like you are how my family ended up in the ovens.” Now I think if you’re not being accused of being a self-hating Jew by some folks and a Zionist stooge by others, you’re doing something wrong.
As part of my self-education, I decided to reread Exodus and watch the movie, which I’d never seen. (Spoiler alert: This is one of those rare cases in which the movie is better than the book. Which is damning with faint praise.)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25212103/MMDEXOD_EC002.jpg)
Courtesy Everett Collection
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25212130/MMDEXOD_EC003.jpg)
Courtesy Everett Collection
Exodus is a novel, but the foreword begins, “Most of the events in Exodus are a matter of history and public record.” The rest of the book’s 608 (!) pages are filled with a litany of historical names and real places. There’s no afterword offering clarification; I had to keep looking up what was factual and what Uris had invented. The Jewish characters are wholly noble, though their politics differ, with some swearing by diplomacy and others by violent freedom-fighting. The Arabs — both Christian and Muslim — are evil cartoons. Uris luxuriates in phrases like “so illiterate and so backward,” “blood orgy,” “slithering along the ground with knives between their teeth,” “nearly insane with rage,” and “the dregs of humanity.” He makes sweeping generalizations like “There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere, cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.”
The book proffers only two good Arabs. One is Kammal, the village leader who says, “The Jews are the only salvation for the Arab people. The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world.” (When Kammal’s weak-willed son Taha takes over as mukhtar, he spends his time obsessing over having forbidden sex with Jordana and preparing to betray her brother Ari.) The other good Arab is Mussa, the Druze who saves Ari’s life when he’s shot by British soldiers after breaking his uncle out of jail. Mussa is essentially faceless, but has a “carriage of dignity” and a village that’s “sparkling white and clean in comparison to the filth and decay of most Arab villages.” How nice.
Exodus’s Jews just want to live in peace. The only time they do something bad, it’s “a strange and inexplicable sequence of events” — a mysterious accident! In a short passage based on the real-life 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which Zionist paramilitary groups attacked a village of mostly women and children, Uris says, “a panic broke out among Maccabee troops and they opened up a wild and unnecessary firing.” Strange! Inexplicable! His problem with the massacre isn’t the dead innocents; it’s that it “fixed a stigma on the young nation that it would take decades to erase.”
The 1948 narrative I and so many others grew up with, the one depicted in Exodus, maintains that Arab leaders, both in Palestine and in the wider world, told residents to flee while Jews begged them to stay. We now know this isn’t true. Left-leaning Israeli media have reported on the Israeli government’s ever-increasing efforts to suppress scholarship on 1948-era Palestine and its history, including the fact that Zionists attacked Arab residents and seized their land. Palestinians are more than justified in calling their own Exodus the Nakba — the Catastrophe.
The argument that Uris and the modern Jewish right share, that non-Jewish Palestinians chose to leave, isn’t correct. The insistence that Israel is inherently virtuous because, after the Nakba, it did what America refused to do and accepted Jewish refugees (this time, the ones expelled from or threatened with murder in the Arab countries in which they were residing in 1948) isn’t relevant. Absorbing all those refugees meant less land — or the impossibility of return — for the Palestinians. Jews deserve a homeland, but so do Palestinians. As I sighed to my kids: It’s complicated. But I also need them to know that there are Jews working for the rights of Palestinians. Organizations like T’ruah, the New Israel Fund, and B’Tselem have long focused on peace and human rights throughout Israel and the Jewish world.
When I sat down to watch Exodus, the movie, with my home-from-college kid (who quickly fled, noting, “This is boring”), I was surprised to find it more nuanced than the book. Director Otto Preminger explicitly rejected Uris’s rabid anti-Arab prejudice. “I don’t believe that there are any real villains,” he later said. Preminger hired Uris, who had written a successful screenplay, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to adapt his novel into a movie but quickly wound up firing him. Preminger claimed he tried to work with Uris’s script but gave up a third of the way through; Uris claimed he never wrote a word and was fired for his beliefs. Uris said, “Otto was a terrorist — he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein.” Preminger replaced him with the then-blacklisted non-Jewish screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; it was Trumbo’s first script credit since his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
“I think my picture is closer to the truth, and to the historic facts, than is the book,” said Preminger. In a strangely prescient snippet of dialogue not in the book, Ari objects to his uncle Akiva’s attacks on unsanctioned targets: “I think these bombings and these killings hurt us with the United Nations,” he says. “A year ago, we had the respect of the whole world. Now, when they read about us, it’s nothing but terror and violence.”
Preminger’s claim that his film “avoids propaganda” is debatable, though. It still features a rousing speech from a Jerusalem balcony, in which Ari’s father Barak, a diplomatic Jewish leader played by Lee J. Cobb, tells a vast cheering crowd that the United Nations has voted to partition the land into two states and urges, “To the Arab population of Jewish Palestine, we make the following appeal: The Grand Mufti has asked you either to annihilate the Jewish population or to abandon your homes and your lands and to seek the weary path of exile. We implore you, remain in your homes and in your shops! And we shall work together as equals in the free state of Israel!” In reality, not so much.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25211954/GettyImages_1077131528.jpg)
Archive Photos/Getty Images
My kid is right: The movie isn’t great. It is three and a half hours long. (Comedian Mort Sahl supposedly stood up three hours into a screening and yelled, “Otto! Let my people go!”) Paul Newman is wooden. Preminger’s wife Hope Bryce told the director’s biographer that Newman and Preminger got off on the wrong foot when the actor arrived with five pages of notes and suggestions about his character and Preminger immediately informed him he wasn’t changing a word of Trumbo’s script. When filming began and Newman asked what Ari should be thinking in a certain scene while eavesdropping on two other characters, Preminger barked, “Oh for God’s sake, just stand there.”
But as Ari Ben Canaan, Newman is at his most ravishing. Who cares about wooden acting when a human looks like that? Seeing this huge movie star (half-Jewish, as both Adam Sandler and my mother note) wearing a Star of David on his wet, bare, heaving chest — in his first scene, he’s just swum to shore in a heroic and strenuous reconnaissance mission, obviously — at a time when Jews were mostly depicted onscreen in sword-and-sandal epics and generally played by the goyish and unpleasant Charlton Heston is surreal. Newman embodies exactly what Uris wanted from his Ari: an icy blue-eyed action hero, not a cringing shtetl weakling.
Sal Mineo — who also has a shirtless scene — gives an excellent performance as an angry young Holocaust survivor and Nazi rape victim. (Again, this is not in the book. Only Jewish women get raped in the book.) Mineo is naturalistic and emotional, and his chemistry with every other actor is magnetic. The movie’s action scenes are thrilling; there are flashes of humor the book lacks; the fact that the film was shot on location lends immediacy and verisimilitude. But it’s still cheesy, and it reminds me of how far away modern-day Israel is from the naïve, glorious promise of my childhood. I wonder how many other Jews my age and older have considered the ways in which Exodus warped our perception of the country and made us slow to demand better of it.
I’d argue that it’s worthwhile for everyone to revisit books and movies they loved as kids. You too may be shocked to learn how you missed or even internalized some pretty problematic ideas. Real life is knotty and multistranded, and reductive storytelling harms us all. “Uris was a vivid and suspenseful writer,” said Prell — who, by the way, also read Exodus when she was 12 — “and a simple enough writer to tell a simple story about one of the most complicated places on earth.”
The movie changes the book’s ending, making it bleaker. Ari stands over an open grave containing two corpses wrapped in linen. A double funeral, for an Arab and a Jew. Ari says, in Trumbo’s words, “I look at these two people and I want to howl like a dog. I want to shout ‘Murder!’ so that the whole world will hear it and never forget. It’s right that these two people should lie side by side in this grave, because they will share it in peace. But the dead always share the earth in peace. And that’s not enough. … I swear, on the bodies of these two people, that the day will come when Arab and Jew will share a peaceful life in this land that they have always shared in death.” But in the final shot of the film, a line of jeeps come, and the men and women with rifles hop in, and we know there will be more killing.
What it means to be “chronically absent” — and why it matters.
When schools reopened their doors after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, eager to “return to normal,” millions of students didn’t show up. Teachers prepared their classrooms to welcome children back to in-person learning, but millions of desks were unfilled. With an eye toward pandemic recovery, the government allocated billions of dollars to help students regain what they lost at the height of the pandemic, but many of them weren’t there to receive the aid.
Many of them were absent — and still are.
Some of the latest absenteeism data reveals the staggering impact the pandemic has had on student attendance.
Before the pandemic, during the 2015–16 school year, an estimated 7.3 million students were deemed “chronically absent,” meaning they had missed at least three weeks of school in an academic year. (According to the US Department of Education, there were 50.33 million K-12 students that year.) After the pandemic, the number of absent students has almost doubled.
Chronic absenteeism increased in every state where data was made public, and in Washington, DC, between the last pre-pandemic school year, 2018–19, and the 2021–22 school year, according to data from Future Ed, an education think tank. Locations with the highest increases saw their rates more than double. In California, for example, the pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate stood at 12.1 percent in 2018–19 and jumped to 30 percent in the 2021–22 school year. New Mexico experienced one of the largest increases, with the rate jumping from 18 percent before the pandemic to 40 percent after the pandemic.
There is so far some evidence, based on new state data from the 2022–23 school year, that attendance rates are rebounding, albeit slightly. Though chronic absenteeism rates remain notably higher than pre-pandemic levels, nearly two dozen states have reported decreases. Of the 31 states and Washington, DC, that have made data public, 21 reported moderate decreases of 5 percentage points or fewer. Michigan saw the greatest drop in chronic absenteeism, with a nearly 8 percentage-point decrease. But its 2022–23 rate, 30.8 percent, remains far above its pre-pandemic rate of 20 percent.
Experts point to deeper issues, some that have long troubled students and schools and others that are only now apparent in the aftermath of school shutdowns.
“When you see these high levels of chronic absence, it’s a reflection that the positive conditions of learning that are essential for motivating kids to show up to school have been eroded,” said Hedy Chang, the founder and executive director of Attendance Works, an organization that tracks attendance data and helps states address chronic absenteeism. “It’s a sign that kids aren’t feeling physically and emotionally healthy and safe. Belonging, connection, and support — in addition to the academic challenge and engagement and investments in student and adult well-being — are all so crucial to positive conditions for learning.”
Despite increased attention to the topic, chronic absenteeism is not exactly new — until recently, it was considered a “hidden educational crisis.”
“This has been an ongoing issue and it didn’t just all of a sudden appear because the pandemic arose. Folks have been trying to address this issue for years,” said Joshua Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies absenteeism interventions in communities and states. “It’s historically mainly impacted students from disadvantaged communities and underserved populations.”
What’s new about chronic absenteeism is that it now affects students from a variety of demographic backgrounds, from those in the suburbs and rural areas to those in cities.
“Before the pandemic [there were] high levels of chronic absence for students with high needs: special education, who have [individual education plans], English learners, or free and reduced lunch students,” said Kari Sullivan Custer, an education consultant for attendance and engagement at the Connecticut State Department of Education. Though Connecticut has been lauded for its initiatives to track and address chronic absences, the pandemic still presented a significant roadblock. “The [state’s] opportunity districts had higher chronic absence rates prior to the pandemic, but once the pandemic hit, we started to see chronic absence rates escalate everywhere.”
The root causes of chronic absenteeism are vast. Poverty, illness, and a lack of child care and social services remain contributors to poor attendance, and some communities continue to struggle with transportation challenges; the pandemic has brought on a youth mental health crisis that has caused students to miss school; parents have reframed how they think about illness, ready to keep their children home at the slightest signs of sickness.
The evidence has long been clear that absences contribute to lower achievement and worsen long-term economic outcomes for individual students and the country. Poor attendance influences whether a child can read proficiently by the end of third grade. By sixth grade, chronic absenteeism signals that a student might drop out of high school.
“What we’re seeing is a large-scale failure for a substantial number of our students to reengage,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford economist and the Barnett Family Professor of Education. “And it’s a very serious problem because we’re in the middle of a very important effort to try to address the educational harm that has unfairly fallen on this generation of students.”
There is hope. Chronic absenteeism can be addressed with preventative measures at the school level and with targeted approaches that meet students and families where they are. The pandemic has laid bare the reality that schools need to engage students and families with lessons and facilities that make children want to be there.
“When we looked at the fall [2020] data and we realized that kids were not coming back to school and that they were falling behind in their learning, we knew we had to do something,” said Sullivan Custer. “Families were isolated. Families in our urban areas and other places were doubled up and there were a lot of people in a house, getting sick or, unfortunately, passing away from Covid. People were scared. And we wanted to reengage families with the school and to find out what’s happening with them. … [So we] put boots on the ground to go out and reach out to these families to say, ‘Hey, how are you? How can we help?’”
What exactly is chronic absenteeism, and why does it matter?
A student is considered chronically absent when they miss 10 percent or more of the school year for any reason. The average school year for most schools across the country is 180 days long, which means that a chronically absent student typically misses at least 18 days of school or at least two days per month. Those absences can be for any reason.
Policymakers and researchers began using chronic absenteeism — rather than truancy, or unexcused absences — as a measure about 15 years ago. In a 2008 report, researchers found that students who miss nearly a month of school, or 10 percent of school days, are worse off academically. They also learned that absences in the early grades add up and have a negative effect on learning later on. Students who are chronically absent in kindergarten showed “lower achievement” in math, reading, and general knowledge in first grade, the researchers found.
“What we were trying to hit upon was a measure that predicted academic challenge,” said Chang, who helped research and popularize the concept. “But it’s also a common sense metric that people can use to notice early on when they can take action and prevent a child from becoming chronically absent for the entire school year.”
Chronic absenteeism and truancy are not interchangeable. Truancy only measures unexcused absences while chronic absenteeism measures unexcused and excused absences.
It may seem obvious that missing days of school might lead to worse academic outcomes for students, but schools didn’t draw causal conclusions about absenteeism until they were pushed to collect the data and analyze it. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which President Obama signed into law in 2015, states were required to publicly report on five measures of student success. By 2017, almost all states decided to collect and report on chronic absenteeism as a way to measure student success or school quality and continue to do so today.
According to Chang, used to collect attendance on paper and simply used the “average daily attendance” measure — how many students show up on a given day — or a tally of unexcused absences. These methods overlook chronic absences. With classes as large as 30 students, it might be easy for a teacher to miss attendance patterns earlier in the school year.
“People don’t realize how easily absences can add up. … When we think about a kid who misses school often, we might think about the kid who missed a week or two,” said Chang. “What we’re not always thinking about is the kid [who misses] one day here and another day here. And by the end of the year, you’ve added up to so much time lost in the classroom that you’re actually academically at risk.”
Paying closer attention to chronic absenteeism is not meant to be a scarlet letter for students but simply a way for educators to take note of the kind of outreach students and families might need.
Chronic absenteeism worsens existing problems and can lead to poor academic and long-term economic outcomes for students at all grade levels. Students who are chronically absent in early grades can set off a domino effect of negative consequences: Chronically absent preschoolers are more likely to have difficulty reading on grade level by the second grade.
And if they still can’t read on grade level by fourth grade, they are more likely to drop out of high school, which decreases their earning potential later on in life. For older students, each week of absences per semester in ninth grade is connected to a more than 20 percentage-point decline in the probability of graduating from high school, University of Chicago researchers observed about Chicago students. By comparison, “college-ready students,” those who are likely to enroll and persist in college, have average attendance rates of 98 percent, meaning they miss less than a week over the course of an entire school year.
Constant absences create chaotic classroom environments, with teachers needing to help students make up missed work or missing students disrupting the balance of classrooms that might be necessary for certain lessons. Chronic absenteeism increases educational inequality since it has risen more among disadvantaged students, particularly those with disabilities and those from lower-income households.
There are other less explored areas when it comes to the impact of absences. “We need to talk more about what this means for the trajectory of students beyond their time in K-12,” said Childs. “What might their post-secondary education look like or how will this affect their ability to get and keep a job?”
What the latest chronic absenteeism numbers tell us about attendance
The latest data point to a rise in chronic absenteeism that won’t rebound without concerted efforts to get students back into classrooms each day.
Dee collected data from 40 states and Washington, DC, which collectively serve more than 92 percent of all K-12 public school students in the country. He examined changes between the last school year before the start of the pandemic, 2018–19, and the last year for which comprehensive data is available, 2021–22, and found that chronic absenteeism increased in every state between 4 to 23 percentage points.
The overall chronic absenteeism rate was 14.8 percent in 2018–19 and jumped to 28.3 percent in 2021–22, as students returned to in-person learning.
Between those school years, the number of students who were chronically absent grew by 13.5 percentage points, with an additional 6.5 million students considered chronically absent, according to Dee’s research.
New Mexico experienced the highest increase, a 22.5 percentage-point jump, from about 18 percent to 40 percent between those two school years. Alaska, which had the highest chronic absenteeism rate at about 48.5 percent in 2021–22, experienced a similar rate of increase. Washington, DC, had the second highest rate of chronic absenteeism at 48 percent.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25212902/chronic_absenteeism_increased_chart.png)
Dee also found that this increase in absenteeism occurred outside of enrollment loss, Covid-19 case rates, and school masking policies. According to Dee’s analysis, the growth in chronic absenteeism was on average similar across states with different masking rules and the spike in chronic absenteeism can’t all be explained by Covid-19 illness and a delay in students returning to in-person learning.
When Dee analyzed data at the district level, he determined that the increases in chronic absenteeism, though similar for male and female students, were larger for low-income students as well as Black and Hispanic students.
“I looked across a number of states and chronic absenteeism was consistently larger among minoritized students, and also among economically disadvantaged students,” said Dee. “That being said, it was also quite broad, even among students who were not economically disadvantaged and among white students, where we saw substantial increases.”
Chang found similar patterns in the data.
“High levels of chronic absence are especially concentrated in places that are economically challenged,” she said. About 69 percent of schools in which 75 percent of their students take free and reduced price lunch now have extreme levels of chronic absence whereas only about a quarter did before the pandemic, according to Chang.
When it comes to race and ethnicity, Native American, Pacific Islander, Latino, and African American kids are disproportionately affected by chronic absenteeism.
There has also been a shift for English learners, 36 percent of whom are now chronically absent, Chang said.
“In California, for example, it used to be that young English language learners, let’s say kindergarteners, were actually not really more likely than English-speaking peers to be chronically absent. And in some communities they actually showed up more often,” Chang said. “That is no longer the case. Something happened [in] the relationship between English learner families and schools. I think it is connected to who got heavily affected by the pandemic. They were essential workers.”
In addition, there were changes by grade level. There have typically been higher levels of absences in middle and high school, and they remain heavily impacted, but the largest increase in absences is happening in elementary schools. Before the pandemic, there were about 3,550 elementary schools with extreme levels of chronic absence, meaning 30 percent or more of their kids were chronically absent. Now, close to 20,000 elementary schools have 30 percent or more of their students deemed chronically absent.
High levels of chronic absenteeism don’t just affect the children who are absent. “The churn is affecting the learning experience [and] the teaching experience of everyone in the school,” Chang said.
What’s behind the chronic absenteeism surge
By many measures, the pandemic has been education’s most substantial disruption for the way it impacted students of all backgrounds. When it comes to attendance, the pandemic disrupted habits, exacerbating traditional causes of chronic absence and introducing new ones.
Reasons for missing school fall into four categories, according to Attendance Works: “barriers,” “aversion to school,” “disengagement,” and “misconceptions about the purpose of attendance.”
Barriers include illness, poor transportation, neighborhood violence, housing and food insecurity, and responsibilities at home. Asthma, which is more prevalent among low-income and racial and ethnic minority students and students in urban areas, is the leading chronic illness that forces kids to miss school. Some studies have found that students who take the school bus have fewer absences while another linked long bus rides to chronic absenteeism.
Low-income parents with young children lack access to affordable child care and sometimes resort to having older children look after younger siblings at home. These students deprioritize school to meet family responsibilities.
“Students missing in urban areas might be working jobs or having health care issues like asthma and obesity. Students in suburban areas may be considered chronically absent but they’re missing school for reasons like college visits and family vacations,” said Childs. “What it means to be chronically absent can be different based on where students live, the type of school they’re in, and the resources that they have access to.”
Students who are school averse struggle with academic or behavioral challenges; they might not feel like they fit in socially and face anxiety as a result. The NIH found that young people reported greater anxiety and depression after the pandemic. An EdWeek Research Center survey conducted between August and September 2023 of more than 1,000 high schoolers found that anxiety, aside from bad weather, was a top reason they missed school. Bullying may create an unwelcoming school environment and force kids to stay home. Students with undiagnosed disabilities and unmet disability needs are also likelier to stay home.
Studies have found that when students find classroom lessons to be boring, unchallenging, or culturally unresponsive, they might stay away from school.
Ultimately, if families don’t understand the impact of even a few absences, the importance of school attendance won’t be prioritized at home. Some parents might think that missing two days of school each month is no big deal or that attendance only matters at higher grade levels. Others might believe that excused absences don’t matter, unaware of how broader absence patterns form.
Some education leaders warn that the pandemic changed the way parents and students think about school. Attendance is now viewed as optional for some parents, while others have grown more sensitive to the slightest signs of illness in their children.
In August, the chief medical director for the Los Angeles Unified School District posted an online notice to parents stating that it is “not practical for working parents to keep children home from school for every runny nose” and that it is not “in the best interest of children to continue to miss school after pandemic school closures.” The district, which has seen a large spike in absenteeism related to student medical issues, instructed parents to send kids to school if they test negative for Covid-19, where they can wear a mask if they have mild symptoms.
District leaders have recognized that because there are so many different reasons why students miss school, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving chronic absenteeism. When the Connecticut State Department of Education conducted a summer 2023 survey of families and received 5,400 responses in English and Spanish, they realized the full extent of the challenges families faced, from RSV and the flu to allergies and mental health roadblocks. “Kids had kind of gotten used to not having to go to school every day for all of these reasons,” said Sullivan Custer. “And a lot of parents stay home for work now, too. We fell out of that habit and practice of get up, get ready, and go. Getting everybody to come back has been part of the challenge.”
States are already putting new initiatives to the test
Experts fear that federal, state, and local investments in academic recovery won’t work if students aren’t there to benefit from them. Through the American Rescue Plan, the federal government has invested nearly $190 billion to support academic recovery efforts across all states. The education relief package is intended to help bolster pandemic response efforts, provide fiscal relief to state and school budgets, and support student academic and mental health recovery efforts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. States reported that they planned to use most of the money on academic interventions such as tutoring and hiring more educators and other staff.
“Educators are facing these challenges at a time when the resources available then for them to do this may be vanishing due to the so-called fiscal cliff,” said Dee. “This is a critique of states and districts that have had these resources for years and have been slow to spend them or to spend them with transparency. But we’re now in a position where these very serious educational challenges remain, but the resources available to meet those challenges are going to disappear.”
Some states and localities are already responding to the rise in chronic absenteeism. Connecticut used $10.7 million in Covid-19 relief money to develop a home visit program that addressed more than 8,600 students in 15 opportunity zones. An analysis found that the home visits increased individual students’ attendance rate by about 4 percentage points in the month right after the visit and continued to increase in the months after. Connecticut’s chronic absenteeism rate shot up from 10 percent in 2018–19 to 24 percent during the 2021–22 school year. It slightly decreased to 20 percent in 2022–23.
A core purpose of the home visits was to build relationships with students and their families to understand their barriers, find solutions, and not place blame. Leaders expect the absenteeism rate to continue to decrease in the coming years.
Other states, including Maine and New Jersey, are launching similar efforts and setting up attendance teams in schools to analyze attendance data and develop solutions to meet student needs.
New Mexico state guidance requires school districts to create an attendance plan that includes tiered interventions, starting with prevention efforts for all students and shifting to intensive ones that target students facing severe challenges. One Detroit school paired chronically absent students with adult mentors in the school building, developed a home visitation system, tracked attendance patterns, and provided incentives such as trips to the movies for students and food shopping gift cards for parents. Previous reports identified transportation challenges as a leading cause of chronic absenteeism in Detroit.
Experts agree that punitive responses to chronic absenteeism only damage school relationships with students and families. Fines alienate families and suspensions only cause students to miss more days.
It’s also about meeting families where they are. “As researchers we can point to the high numbers and shout about all the kids who are missing and how this is bad and problematic,” said Childs. “But to a family that’s got to make a decision about whether you can put food on the table or attend school, there are some clear choices around that.”
Despite these efforts, chronic absenteeism still plagues school districts — a sign that battling it will take time and consistent effort. Leaders in Santa Fe hired new attendance coaches and offered students incentives, such as a pop-up science exhibit, to improve their attendance in response to their 2021–22 rate, yet just over half of students remained chronically absent in the 2022–23 year, according to Chalkbeat. After the start of the pandemic, New Mexico’s absenteeism rate rose to 40 percent and remained at 39 percent the following school year. Before the pandemic, it was at 18 percent. The results prove that there is no immediate fix to chronic absenteeism. “We know we still have work to do,” Crystal Ybarra, the Santa Fe school district’s chief equity, diversity, and engagement officer, told Chalkbeat. “We’re still trying to figure out the steps post-pandemic. Everybody wants to see a quick fix, and that’s just not how initiatives work.”
Schools have also tried a number of other creative ideas, from increasing teacher pay to upgrading facilities. Others have increased correspondence with families by sending postcards and text messages, which has proven effective.
To address transportation issues, some schools are adding bus stops for various neighborhoods or arranging chaperoned walking groups. Other schools have recognized how food insecurity affects their students and that free breakfast is necessary. Laundry rooms at schools is a novel strategy that has helped some chronically absent students who don’t have access to washing machines at home. Some community schools have beaten chronic absenteeism by giving families access to the resources they need, all on one campus.
There are so many crises in education, researchers told Vox, and it’s key to not lose sight of progress.
“[We need] celebrations, [for] who’s doing well, those students who have improved attendance … those schools that are seeing a difference,” Sullivan Custer said. “Just seeing that it can be done, it’s not hopeless … We definitely have the ability to turn this around. It might take a little while, but we’re just going to keep right at it, being positive and focusing on the successes.”
Even socialists are bristling at the rising cost of fast food.
Over the holidays, extremely online progressives debated the most important theoretical question facing the American left today: Is grousing about the price of a Big Mac counterrevolutionary?
For months now, political observers have been squabbling over whether the Biden economy’s unpopularity reflects its genuine weaknesses or voters’ collective failure to recognize its virtues. On the one hand, the president did preside over a sustained period of exceptionally high inflation. On the other, Americans’ real wages and net worths are higher than they were before the pandemic, unemployment is near historic lows, paychecks are rising faster than prices, and economic growth exceeded 5 percent in the third quarter of 2023.
But in late December, the socialist commentator Doug Henwood noted that a far more important economic indicator showed the US economy in crisis, posting on X, “Can’t imagine why people think this isn’t a great economy. Lunch for three at McDonald’s: $44!!”
Many liberals proceeded to accuse Henwood of tacitly lamenting fast food workers’ wage gains. After all, such workers had secured large raises in recent years, thereby increasing their employers’ labor costs, and thus, menu prices. As Matt Yglesias noted, Big Macs had historically been $1.53 more expensive in social democratic Norway than in the United States. Complaining about a $44 McDonald’s bill was, therefore, a textbook case of bourgeois deviationism.
All this was a bit unfair. Henwood insisted that he was merely citing his extraordinary Mickey D’s bill as an illustration of elevated food prices. Which is reasonable; the costs of commodities like bread and beef are major determinants of burger joint prices. And the socialist radio host was also, almost certainly, a victim of price-gouging: Henwood said he had purchased his meal at a highway rest stop, where fast food chains often exploit famished drivers’ limited options by charging them a premium for quick calories.
Nevertheless, Henwood is far from alone in bristling at inflation in the quick eats sector. Recent months have witnessed many a viral complaint about, say, $18 Big Mac combo meals. And for progressives, such discontent may be symptomatic of a genuine political challenge.
Reducing wage inequality typically requires increasing the cost of labor-intensive services, at least for a period. In the long run, thinning the ranks of the working poor can leave almost everyone in society better off. In the short term, however, middle-class households can experience low-income workers’ wage gains as a burden. Ideally, we would mitigate that burden by tackling other cost pressures through public policy. But at a minimum, progressives should avoid affirming the idea that the measure of our economy’s vitality is the affordability of its quarter-pounders.
As income inequality fell, public discontent with the economy rose
In recent years, the US economy has grown less unequal and more unpopular.
Between 2020 and 2022, workers at the bottom of America’s income distribution saw their real wages grow by 5.7 percent, even as those at the top saw their real pay drop by 5 percent. As a result, income inequality shrank. Since the height of the pandemic, roughly 40 percent of that post-Reagan jump in inequality has been erased, according to a recent working paper from the economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew.
As low-wage workers’ living standards rose, however, the American public’s assessment of the economy soured. In January 2020, more than 60 percent of US adults described their nation’s economic conditions as “excellent” or “good” in Gallup’s polling. By last fall, that figure had dropped to 20 percent.
These two trends aren’t necessarily related. After all, the median US worker saw their purchasing power decline for most of 2021 and 2022 as prices rose faster than wages. And while inflation slowed markedly in 2023, the price level remains elevated. Inequality is an abstract concept; prices are a concrete burden. We wouldn’t expect the typical American to care more about a reduction in the Gini coefficient than an increase in their grocery bills.
Yet there is some reason to worry that the newfound bargaining power of low-wage workers is contributing to the broader public’s discontent. With a high demand for labor, such workers have been able to demand better compensation or quit unremunerative jobs. That in turn has reduced the availability and affordability of labor-intensive services. Child care has grown harder to come by as workers have left that industry for higher-paying jobs. And, as Henwood’s controversial post illustrated, fast food has grown more expensive as food service workers have secured better pay.
The Republican Party was quick to politicize the latter phenomenon. In June 2021, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) — the body responsible for electing a GOP House majority — released an official statement blaming Joe Biden’s “socialist stimulus bill” for the fact that Chipotle was raising its menu prices by 4 percent in order “to cover the cost of increased employee wages.” In so doing, the GOP effectively bet that opposing raises for food service workers was good politics.
Since then, menu prices at fast food restaurants have increased considerably. Such prices rose 6 percent last year, after advancing by 6.6 percent in 2022 and 8 percent in 2021. Inflation has been even more pronounced at some signature chains. In its earnings call in October, McDonald’s said that it expected to have raised menu prices at its US locations by roughly 10 percent by the end of 2023, after hiking prices 10 percent the previous fiscal year.
Many viral complaints about burger prices have ensued. Last year, a Financial Times journalist expressed shock on X at a $17.59 Big Mac combo meal and had his incredulity written up by the New York Post. TikTok influencers have turned their anguish at exorbitant McDonald’s bills into hit video content, with legions of commenters expressing their own outrage at the cost of such unhappy meals.
How do we know that rising wages have helped supersize McDonald’s prices?
Fast food prices are determined by a variety of factors. According to Michael Reich, an economist with University of California Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, food accounts for one-third of the quick-service industry’s operating costs; commercial rent and non-food materials account for another third; and wages make up the rest. Therefore, when rent and meat get more expensive, that puts upward pressure on fast food prices.
Businesses don’t merely charge what they must in order to meet expenses; they charge what they can get. When consumers have more money to spend, fast food chains tend to have more scope for raising prices without losing business. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen substantial increases in both demand for quick-service meals, and the costs of food and rent. So, wage growth is by no means solely responsible for the rising cost of Egg McMuffins.
Nevertheless, the improving fortunes of low-wage workers is a key part of the story. Between the pandemic’s onset and August 2023, the average hourly wage at a limited-service restaurant increased by nearly 30 percent, according to Labor Department data reported in Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. According to Reich, for every percentage point increase in a fast food firm’s labor costs, one might expect to see a bit less than a 0.333 percentage point increase in menu prices. This is a rough estimate, but it’s a decent rule of thumb. And it would imply that rising wages have nudged fast food prices up by more than 9 percent since the pandemic’s onset.
In other words, to an extent, costlier quarter-pounders are the price of progress on wage inequality.
When workers get raises, the economy can profit
If the burgeoning bargaining power of less-skilled workers comes at middle-class consumers’ expense in the short run, almost everyone stands to benefit from rising working-class wages in the long term.
Middle-class households can more easily afford servants in many developing countries than they can in the United States. Yet America’s middle class is nevertheless far wealthier than its counterparts in India or Pakistan. Even the privileged are generally better off in an economy with high levels of labor productivity than in one with a large pool of hyper-exploitable workers.
And there’s reason to believe that rising working-class wages are a key driver of productivity gains. When workers’ time is cheap, businesses have little incentive to develop labor-saving technologies or production methods. As wage bills rise, by contrast, innovation often becomes imperative.
Ironically, conservatives often cite this reality as an argument against increasing the minimum wage. Specifically, right-wing economists and commentators have often warned that raising the wage floor will cause employers to automate jobs away. Yet this is another way of saying that minimum wage hikes increase investment in productivity-enhancing technology (which is the ostensible aim of just about every Republican tax cut plan).
In any case, it is true that when wages rise at the bottom of the labor market, firms invest in labor-saving technology. In 2018, Grace Lordan and David Neumark demonstrated this empirically. Those economists reviewed 35 years of government census data, identified jobs that could be automated given existing technology, and found that after minimum wage increases were enacted, “the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers” declined. In other words, minimum wage hikes spurred capital investment and increased productivity by mechanizing tasks that did not require uniquely human skills.
The notion that high wages spur productivity gains is consistent with the American economy’s broader historical record. As Neil Irwin observed in 2018, productivity booms have tended to follow labor market booms, while deep recessions have given way to productivity slumps.
This relationship between wage gains and productivity can be witnessed within today’s food service industry. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes, as restaurant wages jumped between 2020 and 2021, the sector’s output per worker hour soared by 21 percent.
In the short term, these productivity gains have not been sufficient to reduce restaurants’ operating costs and, thus, prices. But in the long term, when businesses increase the labor efficiency of their production processes, their wares tend to become more affordable.
A world of cheap burgers and high working-class wages is therefore possible. Middle-class consumers need not see the rising fortunes of less-skilled workers as a threat to their standard of living.
For the moment, though, there is a genuine tension between boosting compensation for America’s most vulnerable workers and minimizing the cost of labor-intensive services for the nation’s consumers. Precisely how liberals can best navigate this tension isn’t easy to say. At the very least, though, we should not encourage our fellow Americans to mistake the symptoms of rising worker power for those of a deepening economic crisis.