This month is labeled the first-ever “Attendance Awareness Month” by the advocacy group Attendance Works, and there is plenty to which we ought to be paying attention. A 2008 study by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) estimated that one out of every 10 children nationally is chronically absent (meaning he misses at least 10 percent of scheduled days) in his first two years of school. On the state and local level, things can be even grimmer: almost 20 percent of students in Hawaii are chronically absent. More importantly, though, a growing field of study links chronic absenteeism in the early years to diminished academic outcomes in later grades, leading to an increased likelihood of both lower test scores and dropping out before graduation. The NCCP study finds, for example, that chronic absenteeism in kindergarten is associated with lower academic performance in first grade. And another recent report by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research...