About This Episode
Season 8. Episode 10.
Years after the pandemic disrupted classrooms across the country, chronic absenteeism remains a major challenge. But getting students back to school isn’t always as simple as telling them to show up.
Hedy Chang, founder and CEO of Attendance Works, joins Education Insight to explore what chronic absenteeism really means and why so many students continue to miss school. From illness and mental health to transportation and family challenges, we examine what may be keeping students away, how parents can navigate difficult decisions about attendance, and when schools need to look inward and ask why students aren’t showing up.
Featured Guests
Hedy Chang
CEO and President, Attendance Works
Biography
Hedy is the CEO, president, and founder of the nonprofit initiative, Attendance Works. Founded in 2010, Attendance Works is the nation’s go-to resource for attendance policy and practice. A skilled presenter, facilitator, researcher and writer, Hedy co-authored the seminal report, Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, as well as numerous other articles about student attendance.
Deeply committed to promoting two-generation solutions to achieving a more just society, Hedy has spent over three decades working in the fields of family support, family economic success, education and child development. She served as a senior program officer at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and as co-director of California Tomorrow. Hedy has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and B.A. from Occidental College. In 2024, Hedy was named as the Policy Leader of the Year by the National Association of State Boards of Education.
