In this series: Massachusetts Chronic Absenteeism.

In Mashpee^↗ET, the Cape Cod town that is the ancestral and present-day home of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, 34.4% of Native American students were chronically absent in 2024-25. The rate for white students in the same district: 16.8%. That 17.6-point gap exists in a community where the tribe operates its own education department, runs a Wampanoag language immersion school, and has formal partnerships with the public school system. If the gap persists there, it persists everywhere.

Across Massachusetts, Native American students are chronically absent at a rate of 27.3%, more than double the white rate of 13.9%. The 13.4-percentage-point gap between the two groups has widened by 4.2 points since before the pandemic, the largest expansion of any racial group in the state. Hispanic students saw the second-widest gap expansion at 3.6 points. Black students, by contrast, saw their gap widen by just 0.3 points.

The widest gap, the slowest recovery

Before COVID, the Native American-white absence gap was 9.2 percentage points. Both groups saw their rates roughly double during the pandemic: Native American chronic absenteeism climbed from 18.9% in 2019 to 37.8% in 2022, while white rates went from 9.7% to 22.1%. The absolute increase was similar. What happened next was not.

White students have recovered 66.1% of the ground they lost during the pandemic. Native American students have recovered 55.6%, the second-slowest of any racial group after Pacific Islander students at 54.0%. The gap peaked at 16.5 points in 2023, a year after the overall COVID peak, then narrowed to 14.1 in 2024 and 13.4 in 2025. The improvement is real but decelerating: Native American rates fell 5.0 points from 2023 to 2024 but only 1.2 points from 2024 to 2025.

The average Native American student in Massachusetts missed 14.4 days of school in 2024-25, compared to 10.5 days for the average white student. Before the pandemic, those numbers were 11.9 and 8.7. The absolute gap in missed days grew from 3.2 to 3.9.

A national pattern with local roots

Massachusetts is not an outlier. A December 2024 investigation by the Associated Press and Chalkbeat found that in half of the 34 states with available data, Native American chronic absenteeism rates exceeded the state average by at least 9 percentage points. In 24 states, the pandemic widened the gap more sharply for Native American students than for any other group.

The reporting identified multiple reinforcing causes. Poverty rates are higher in Native communities. Health challenges, including the disproportionate toll COVID took on tribal elders, created ongoing grief and instability. And there is a deeper structural factor: the legacy of federal boarding schools, which for 150 years forcibly removed Native children from their families and communities.

"If families experienced boarding school separation, they are not going to trust big systems and specifically, they are not going to trust the educational system." -- Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 2024

That historical distrust does not mean Native communities do not value education. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's education department runs afterschool programs, a language immersion school for children ages three to nine, and college readiness initiatives. The Aquinnah Wampanoag, on Martha's Vineyard, maintain similar programs. These are communities investing in their children's learning through institutions they control.

But the public school system is a different institution, one built without their input and, for many families, associated with cultural erasure rather than cultural affirmation. Districts that have made progress nationally, like San Carlos Unified in Arizona, did so by bringing tribal community health services, food banks, and cultural coaches into schools, reducing chronic absenteeism from 76% to 59% in a single year. No comparable program exists in Massachusetts.

Where the gap lives

Of the 110 Massachusetts districts reporting Native American absence data in 2025, 74 of them, 67.3%, had higher chronic absence rates for Native American students than for white students. The gaps in individual districts are often enormous, though they must be read with caution: small population sizes mean a handful of students can swing a rate by 10 or 20 points.

Boston^↗ET had a 43.2% chronic absence rate for Native American students, compared to 17.6% for white students, a gap of 25.6 points. Cambridge^↗ET showed 50.0% for Native American students versus 15.7% for white, a 34.3-point chasm. In Mashpee, the gap was 17.6 points.

Mashpee's trend is particularly volatile. Native American chronic absence in the district spiked to 48.2% at the COVID peak in 2022, remained at 48.2% in 2023 while other districts improved, then plummeted to 25.0% in 2024 before rebounding to 34.4% in 2025. That kind of year-to-year swing, nearly 10 points in a single year in either direction, is characteristic of small populations where every student matters statistically.

The small-population caveat

Native American students make up less than 1% of Massachusetts public school enrollment. This is a group small enough that statewide rates can shift meaningfully based on what happens in a few districts. The 110 districts reporting data represent a fraction of the state's 395 districts; in the other 285, Native American student populations are too small to report.

That smallness does not make the gap less real. It makes it harder to address. State-level attendance interventions, like the Healey administration's "Your Presence is Powerful" campaign, are designed for scale. They target the largest populations where improvement yields the biggest aggregate gains. A group this small rarely shows up in statewide policy conversations, even when its members are missing school at twice the rate of their white peers.

Recovery that has not arrived

Every racial group in Massachusetts improved its chronic absence rate from the 2022 peak. But the pace and extent of recovery vary enormously. Black students have recovered 71.5% of their COVID-era increase, the strongest rebound of any group. White students recovered 66.1%. Hispanic students, 62.1%. Native American students, 55.6%.

The statewide chronic absence rate for all students fell from 27.7% to 18.8%, a 60.1% recovery. Native American students trail that benchmark by 4.5 points of recovery. At the current pace of improvement, 1.2 points per year, the Native American rate would not reach its pre-COVID level of 18.9% for another seven years.

The Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, created by the legislature in 1974 to assist Native Americans in their relationship with state agencies, does not have a mandate specifically addressing K-12 attendance. Its educational work focuses primarily on administering the Native American Tuition Credit for state colleges and universities. No state agency is tasked with closing this specific gap.

The question is whether a 13.4-point disparity affecting a small population will generate the institutional attention it needs, or whether it will remain invisible inside statewide averages that are, for most groups, slowly improving. In Mashpee, where the Wampanoag have lived for 12,000 years, one in three Native American students missed enough school last year to be classified as chronically absent. That rate is not a number that belongs to a spreadsheet. It belongs to a community.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.