When I was at LSU, there were people whose seemingly entire job was to make sure athletes showed up to class. They'd stand at the door with a clipboard and check each athlete’s name off as they arrived. The whole system was built on the assumption that if you left it to the athletes, they wouldn't show up.

New research out today from the American Enterprise Institute suggests that assumption gets it backward — at least at the K-12 level. Looking at day-level attendance data for 262,000 Indiana high school students, researchers found varsity athletes weren't just showing up more during their seasons. They were showing up more in the offseason, too — when no coach was taking roll. Their chronic absenteeism rates were about a third lower, even after adjusting for poverty, race, and test scores. The Washington Post's Laura Meckler has the story.

The finding lands in the middle of a growing body of evidence that the most powerful attendance interventions aren't punitive — they're relational. Annie Lowrey's recent Atlantic piece on Communities in Schools told a similar story from a different angle: researchers found that placing trained navigators in Texas schools — people who help families cover rent, sign up for benefits, and get kids stabilized — boosted graduation rates by 5.2 percent and increased earnings years later. As Rob Watson of the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education put it, kids spend only 20 percent of their time in a classroom between kindergarten and 12th grade. If we want them to thrive, we have to think about the other 80 percent.

Sports, social support, a coach who knows your name, a counselor who fills your fridge — the mechanism varies, but the through line is the same: kids show up when they have a reason to be there.

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