School attendance and school absenteeism have been studied for over a century, leading to a rich and vast literature base. As with theory of change approaches, the purpose of this discourse is not to provide a roadmap but rather a compass to develop multi-stakeholder partnerships that can leverage shared resources and expertise to achieve a final mutual goal. School attendance and school absenteeism were one of the first areas of study for emerging disciplines such as education, psychology, and criminal justice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
With the advent of the labor rights movement, new employment laws, and the needs for an educated workforce and greater social order, children were increasingly moved from industrial and agricultural settings to more formalized school settings Rury and Tamura, School absenteeism thus became viewed as a legal as well as a societal problem in need of remediation, with a concurrent focus on illegal truancy as well as delinquency as a primary cause Williams, ; Kirkpatrick and Lodge, ; Gleeson, Many of these approaches centered on students and their families, a predominant focus of many professionals even today.
Only later in the 20th century, and especially following the civil rights movement of the s as well as a revival of Marxist theory via the emergence of social stratification research, did researchers and other stakeholders more intensely examine broader contexts of school absenteeism that included the school environment, the surrounding community, and economic, cultural, political, and other macro influences Bourdieu and Passeron, ; Willis, ; Weinberg, ; Sleeter, These approaches can be divided generally into systemic perspectives that focus on overarching contexts and structural concerns as well as analytic perspectives that focus on specific contexts and individual concerns Kearney, At the same time, however, the breadth and multifaceted nature of these varied systemic and analytic approaches has led to myriad avenues of investigation that are not always well-coordinated or integrated.
On top of all of this are relatively recent revolutionary and fundamental changes in human communication and interaction that are spurred in part by climate change, demands for equity and social justice, demographic and migration shifts, globalization, health crises, political movements, and technological advancements Krishnamurthy et al.
As such, the very nature of educating children is being radically altered and will continue to evolve or devolve quickly over the next decades. As such, broad strokes are emphasized at the expense of greater detail regarding specific investigations. The article is divided into three main sections.
