The city’s rate of chronic absenteeism shot up from 25% of students before Covid to 34.8% last year. WSJ

Jason L. Riley

An empty elementary school classroom in the Bronx, N.Y., Aug. 17, 2021. PHOTO: BRITTAINY NEWMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned four years ago after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, is now running for New York City mayor as the answer to problems he helped to create.

Mr. Cuomo signed bail-reform legislation that made it more difficult for prosecutors and judges to keep violent repeat offenders off the streets. He blessed sanctuary policies that made New York a magnet for pretend asylum seekers and multiplied the homeless population. He banned fracking, which led to higher energy costs.

Perhaps voters will consider the sorry alternatives in this year’s election—including scandal-plagued incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is sucking up to President Trump for help—and decide to give Mr. Cuomo a shot at redemption. Unfortunately, the people who suffered the most lasting damage on his watch are either no longer with us or too young to cast a ballot.

Mr. Cuomo was the architect of the state’s Covid response, and one of his worst decisions was ordering nursing homes to accept Covid patients from hospitals, which helped spread the virus among the elderly. But it was New York City that bore the brunt of his overzealous lockdown edicts. In deference to teachers’ unions, he and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio kept New York City schools closed longer than in other parts of the state. Schoolchildren are still suffering the consequences, and many may never recover.

According to a new study from the Manhattan Institute, more kids in New York City public schools are attending class less often. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more school days in a given academic year, climbed from 25% before the pandemic to 34.8% last year, which is well above the national average. Broken down by grade level, the chronically absent rate for the 2023-24 school year was 40.7% for kindergarten, 35.4% for first grade, and 32.4% for second grade.

These figures are especially alarming because educators have long known that the ability to read by third grade—when a child goes from learning to read to reading to learn—is a reliable predictor of future success in everything from high-school graduation to avoiding the criminal-justice system.

Since the pandemic, parental attitudes toward school attendance have changed for the worse. “Many NYC educators can attest that parents have become more lenient about their kids skipping school if they say they are sick,” writes Danyela Souza Egorov, the study’s author. “In general, many parents have come to believe, as one educator put it, that ‘missing school in non-testing grades is not a big deal.’ ” As concerning, she adds, is a recent decision by New York state to accommodate this trend by minimizing the importance of school attendance. Under a new plan adopted by the state, chronic absenteeism has been eliminated “as a measure of school quality, which means that this will not be one of the measures by which the state evaluates the performance of school districts.”

What’s happening in New York City is consequential because it’s home to what is by far the nation’s largest school system. The rise in chronic absenteeism stemming from the pandemic, however, isn’t limited to Gotham, and neither are the social and economic consequences. Absenteeism leads to learning losses, which aren’t spread evenly across demographic groups. Children who were already behind pre-Covid have fallen further behind, and those same kids are the ones mostly likely to be regularly missing school.

These young people are future workers. Their productivity, and thus the nation’s, will depend on the skills they learn in school and bring with them into the labor force. People with fewer skills are less productive, and less productive countries are poorer.

In an academic paper published last year, Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and Bradley Strauss tally the economic costs of pandemic learning losses. “Based on the available research on the lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5-6% of lifetime earnings,” the authors write. “Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century.” To put that figure in context, they note that it dwarfs “the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or the recessionary losses in 2008.”

The most effective way to address the problem in the short run would be to re-emphasize the importance of school attendance, identify and reward the most effective teachers in the system, and steer the most vulnerable students in their direction. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association will resist such changes to preserve their control over the status quo, but teachers unions and the politicians they control are why we’re in this mess.