Across 10 years of listening to families and educators, one message has come through loud and clear: when parents and teachers team up around student learning and well-being, students and schools thrive. This theme culminated into Learning Heroes’ new 10-year report, Centering Families in the Future of Education: Insights & Perspectives from 10 Years of Research. Family engagement is a strategy that many states have yet to fully apply as they tackle one of education’s most crucial challenges: chronic absenteeism.

During the pandemic, nearly 1 in 3 U.S. students was chronically absent, according to Attendance Works. In 2023, that number dropped to about 28%, but chronic absence remains far higher than before COVID — with the steepest gaps among students of color, students with disabilities, and those from low-income backgrounds.

In response, a coalition led by Attendance Works, EdTrust, and Nat Malkus from AEI launched a national campaign, “The 50% Challenge,” to cut chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years, and 17 states plus Washington D.C. have since joined. Family engagement has been identified as a core lever, and Learning Heroes is proud to be a part of this effort.

Attendance improves not because families are told what to do, or because they’re presented with a lot of data, but because they feel seen, supported, and part of the solution

Additionally, EdTrust recently released an interactive tool that details what 23 states are doing to encourage school attendance. As states design strategies to meet the 50% Challenge, one insight from Learning Heroes’ research and educator development stands out: effective family engagement is not a goal but rather a strategy to achieve school, district and even state goals. When families and educators work together toward shared outcomes — such as improving literacy rates or reducing chronic absenteeism — partnership becomes the means, not the end. Yet one of the biggest barriers to realizing this strategy is the way in which grade inflation often masks how students are doing, sending false signals to families about their child’s grade level performance.

For nearly a decade, Learning Heroes’ research has highlighted the “perception gap,” the fact that approximately 9 in 10 parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math, while only 30% of eighth graders demonstrate proficiency and above in those subjects on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). When families perceive that their child is doing well in school, they may allow their child to miss too many school days.  States can help close this gap by ensuring families regularly receive clear, timely, and family-friendly information — beyond report cards — about how their child is doing and how showing up every day can help students gain important life skills.

FACE Impact Study

Recent research offers strong empirical evidence of just how powerful family engagement can be. In partnership with TNTP, Learning Heroes launched the Family and Community Engagement (FACE) Impact Study to test a simple but powerful hypothesis: schools with stronger relationships with families were better equipped to withstand the effects of the pandemic.

Using Illinois’s 5Essentials Survey — one of the country’s largest validated data sets on school climate — researchers found that schools with strong family engagement before the pandemic had much smaller increases in chronic absenteeism during COVID. In fact, the effect of family engagement on absenteeism was stronger than the effect of poverty.

Phase Two of the study, releasing in early 2026, examines “bright-spot” schools across Illinois that outperform similar “partner” schools on family engagement.

Connecticut’s LEAP Program

Connecticut is a strong example of a state investing in family engagement to address chronic absenteeism. In 2022, the state launched the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP), which helps districts build relationships with families whose children are chronically absent — pairing educators with community organizations to conduct home visits, identify barriers, and connect families to resources before absences accumulate. Early results are promising: state data shows LEAP participants improved attendance by roughly 8 to 16 points within nine months of launch. This is all part of building trust, which our report identifies as essential to effective family-school partnerships.

LEAP’s design reflects what research confirms: attendance improves not because families are told what to do, or because they’re presented with a lot of data, but because they feel seen, supported, and part of the solution.

A National Call to Action

The “50% Challenge” is catalyzing action across states — from revising attendance metrics in accountability systems to funding wraparound supports. Yet most states still treat family engagement as peripheral, rather than central, to these efforts.

Learning Heroes’ 10-year research, together with the FACE Impact findings, suggests a different approach: make family engagement a foundation of every state’s attendance strategy. Here’s what this could look like in practice:

• Embed family engagement into state attendance plans and accountability frameworks. Set expectations that districts include family-partnership strategies into attendance plans. Our report’s “Make Family Engagement a Strategy, Not a Goal” insight underscores that engagement works best when it’s tied directly to outcomes like attendance and proficiency.
• Fund and scale proven strategies that help build relationships between home and school. Programs like LEAP show that investments in home visits, family liaisons, and professional learning for teachers on sharing multiple measures of student progress can pay off.  This aligns with the report’s “Prioritize the Parent-Teacher Team” insight — give educators time, tools, and structures to partner with families around learning.
• Pair data with trust (and plain language). Many states, such as Rhode Island, now provide robust attendance dashboards. The next step is to pair those tools with family-facing communication that is transparent, accessible, and includes multiple measures of student achievement.
• Foster cross-sector coalitions. States can look to communities like Tarrant County, Texas, where more than 80 organizations — including schools, community-based nonprofits, and business partners — have united through the Go Beyond Grades campaign to strengthen family engagement and literacy. By addressing the perception gap and aligning messaging, Tarrant County has sparked a community-wide focus on learning that is also building stronger, more trusting relationships between schools and families.

Reducing chronic absenteeism calls for a fundamental shift in how education systems view families. When states embed family engagement into policy initiatives — and ensure families receive clear, timely, and understandable information about their child’s progress — they can move the needle.

The “50% Challenge” gives states a clear opportunity to act boldly: connect data with relationships, invest in the systems that strengthen trust between schools and families, and build structures that center families. The real measure of success will not just be fewer absences — it will be whether every family feels seen and heard and have the tools they need to partner with their child’s teacher on behalf of student learning and well-being.

David Park is the president of Learning Heroes. As part of our commitment to elevating diverse perspectives, EdTrust occasionally features guest blogs. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect EdTrust’s views or positions.