California continues to experience a chronic absenteeism crisis, with almost 1 in 5 students chronically absent across the state last year. When students miss school frequently, they risk lower academic performance and future challenges such as poverty and unemployment. Chronic absenteeism also strains school resources and disrupts learning environments. Many of the ways we in California use data about chronic absenteeism leave educators feeling shamed or blamed when student outcomes move in the wrong direction. Too often, the data we rely on makes it hard to tell whether a change reflects something meaningful, or just normal ups and downs in a complex system. When we can’t tell the signal from the noise, we tend to chase the wrong explanations and roll out solutions that don’t match the problem. Or we miss the moments when something truly shifts — when patterns emerge that could help us learn what’s working and where support is most needed. Modeled on learning health networks, the RAISE Network connects 23 districts serving more than 350,000 students to learn together how to reduce chronic absenteeism. To support that learning, the network has developed tools that help California schools and districts ignore meaningless variation and focus on the data that can drive real solutions. These tools are called control charts, and they help us learn from variation. If we use them, we will no longer make these two costly mistakes: Overreacting to normal variation. For instance, when attendance rates dip slightly or test scores fluctuate, we may jump…
