Chronic absenteeism

Philadelphia

Rates for 2024-25 range from 4.3% at Penn Alexander to 56.0% at Comegys. The district median is about 38%. For reference, national chronic absenteeism was near 15% before 2020 and has since run in the mid-20s.

Brooklyn

For 2018-19, rates in this group range from 5.1% at MS 51 William Alexander to 29.3% at PS 282 Park Slope. The New York City median that year was 28.6% across 1526 schools. PS 11 Purvis J. Behan was 15.3%. These ten schools are Park Slope and the adjacent neighbourhoods, not a sample of the borough.

Addresses at Grand Army Plaza itself are zoned to PS 282 Park Slope on the west side and PS 9 Teunis G. Bergen on the east. PS 11's zone begins roughly a kilometre north, in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. Resolved by point-in-polygon against NYC Open Data, School Zones 2024-2025, layers cmjf-yawu (elementary), t26j-jbq7 (middle), ruu9-egea (high), checked by confirming PS 11's own building falls inside PS 11's zone. New York allows out-of-zone enrolment, so the zoned school is not necessarily the one a child attends.

* 2019-20 was cut short by the shutdown and 2020-21 was largely remote, with attendance counted differently. Those columns are not comparable to the others — PS 154 reads 0.9% and MS 51 reads 34.3% in the same remote year, which is a measurement artifact, not a fact about those schools.

How zoning works in New York

The city is divided into 32 community school districts. The schools above sit in two of them: PS 9, PS 11, PS 133 and PS 282 are District 13; PS 321, PS 107, PS 39, PS 118, PS 10, PS 154 and MS 51 are District 15. District membership is the main admissions priority after the zone itself, so which district an address falls in constrains the realistic options more than distance does.

Elementary is the level that is actually zoned. Most residential addresses have one zoned elementary school. Every child is guaranteed a public school kindergarten seat somewhere in the city, and the DOE describes the zoned school as where a child is “most likely” to go: most zoned schools make offers to every applicant living in the zone, and some have room for children outside it. It is not an absolute guarantee of a place at that specific school — an oversubscribed zoned school can waitlist zoned applicants. The DOE also notes that a zoned school is not necessarily the closest school to an address.

There is no single citywide priority order. Each programme publishes its own, visible on its MySchools page, and the DOE’s rule is that every applicant in priority group 1 receives an offer before any applicant in group 2, and so on. The groups are usually some ordering of: a sibling already attending, living in the zone, currently attending the school’s pre-K, and living in the district — then borough, then citywide. Where a priority group has more applicants than seats, each child is assigned a random number and offers within that group are made by lottery. Schools without a zone use the same kinds of priority without the zone step.

That ordering explains how a child can attend a school they are not zoned for. PS 11's zone begins roughly a kilometre north, in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. An address on the Prospect Heights side of Grand Army Plaza is zoned to PS 9 Teunis G. Bergen, and on the west side to PS 282 Park Slope. But PS 11 is in the same district, so a family there needs PS 11 to have room rather than to live in its zone. PS 321 is District 15, which is why it is not a realistic option from that address however close it looks on a map.

Middle and high school work differently. District 13 has no zoned middle schools at all — middle school places there are applied for across the district. The layer's own note for this address reads: “Zoned to District 13. No zoned school.” High schools are not zoned anywhere in the city; admission is citywide choice. The high-school layer records this address as “Citywide High School Choice”. Pre-K and 3-K are not zoned either, and charter schools run their own lotteries outside this system.

Authoritative references: the DOE on how students get offers (priority groups, admissions methods and the random-number lottery), its kindergarten admissions pages (zones and the seat guarantee), and MySchools, where each programme’s own priorities are listed. Zone lines and priorities change year to year; the lookups here use the 2024-25 layers (NYC Open Data, School Zones 2024-2025, layers cmjf-yawu (elementary), t26j-jbq7 (middle), ruu9-egea (high)).

All three places, one federal measure

Philadelphia, Tuscaloosa City and New York each publish attendance their own way and over different years, so their own figures cannot be laid side by side. The federal Civil Rights Data Collection asks every district in the country for the same count in the same year, which makes it the one genuine three-way comparison available. It is older than the figures above — 2022-23 — and it agrees closely with New York's own numbers for the same year, which is some evidence the definitions line up.

Philadelphia and Brooklyn, one shared year

Chronic absenteeism cannot be compared between the two cities: Philadelphia does not publish it before 2020-21, and New York's school-level series ends in 2020-21. They overlap only in the remote year, which is worthless. Average daily attendance is defined the same way in both, and both report 2018-19 — so that is the comparison.

Teacher and student non-attendance

Across the eleven Philadelphia schools, student chronic absenteeism and teacher attendance have a correlation of r = -0.70. The sign is negative because the two are published in opposite directions: schools with higher student absenteeism have lower teacher attendance. Expressed both as non-attendance, as in the table below, the two move together. The correlation is computed across 11 schools, which is a small sample.

Summary

• The range within each city is larger than the difference between them. Philadelphia runs 4.3% to 56.0%; this group of Brooklyn schools runs 5.1% to 29.3%. On the shared 2018-19 attendance measure the two cities' schools interleave through the middle, with Philadelphia at both ends.
• Absenteeism correlates with the other school-level measures on this site — teacher retention, teacher attendance and achievement level correlate with each other at 0.75 to 0.93, while principal turnover correlates with teacher retention at 0.004.
• Attendance depends on factors outside the school: housing, health, work schedules and transport. These figures record what happened, not what caused it.

Caveats

• Different windows. Philadelphia's chronic figures are 2020-21 to 2024-25; New York's are 2016-17 to 2020-21. Only the ADA chart puts the two cities in the same year.
• The pandemic years are marked and should not be read as normal.
• District schools only — no charters, which enroll roughly a third of Philadelphia's public school students.
• The Brooklyn set is a convenience sample: Park Slope and the schools around it, not a random draw. The citywide median is given as the reference point.
• Small denominators move these numbers. A single school year at one building is noisier than the tables imply.