Abstract
Aims - Students' absenteeism has serious negative consequences for both absent students and their schools. Until now, Czech school policies addressed mainly the problem of unexcused absences (truancy) on the individual level.
Many other school systems abroad, on the contrary, are concerned with monitoring, preventing, and reducing the negative impact of high absenteeism regardless of its causes. Th is paper has two objectives: First, we review some approaches to defi nition of chronic absenteeism.
Second, we estimate the rate of absenteeism in Czech compulsory schools. Methods - The open data released by the Czech School Inspectorate (data on 11625 lessons visited) and microdata from a pilot school (N = 957 students) were used.
Results - Our explorative analysis suggests that both the average absence rate (12% in primary grades a 13% in lower secondary grades) and the share of chronically absent students are rather high in the Czech primary and lower secondary schools. Conclusions- Th erefore, the issue of absenteeism deserves more attention in the future, and should be explored both by researchers and school administrators and politicians.
More indicators than just the absolute number of hours missed should be used for further investigation.