Perspective | Why dual language programs may be one of our best school attendance levers

Chronic absenteeism doesn’t have a single cause. Anyone working in schools right now knows that — and knows how exhausting it is to address something so tangled up in circumstances that extend far beyond the school day.

Across the United States, roughly one in seven students was missing 10% or more of the school year before the pandemic. Those numbers climbed after 2020 and, in many states — including North Carolina — haven’t fully recovered. Districts are responding with real commitment: attendance teams, family outreach, early warning systems, community partnerships. That work matters, and it is making a difference in many places.

After more than 30 years partnering with schools on dual language education, I’ve become convinced there’s another lever worth pulling. That lever is dual language immersion: a program model well known for its academic and bilingual outcomes, but rarely examined through the lens of attendance. The evidence suggests it should be.

North Carolina is well positioned to lead this conversation. The state ranks fifth in the nation for dual language programs, with nearly 250 schools offering immersion education across urban and rural districts alike. That depth of experience gives us something valuable: enough data, enough years, and enough student stories to start making a serious case.

The connectedness question

Students miss school for reasons that often have nothing to do with what happens inside a classroom. Illness. Transportation. Work obligations. Caregiving. Housing instability. Any honest accounting of chronic absenteeism has to start there.

And yet researcher Christopher Kearney, whose work on school absenteeism is among the most cited in the field, has documented consistently that students who feel genuinely connected to their school attend more regularly — even when their circumstances outside of school are hard. Michael Gottfried at UC Santa Barbara has found similar patterns, with school connectedness functioning as a real buffer against chronic absence across grade levels and income groups.

That finding doesn’t diminish the complexity of the problem. It opens a door. If connectedness is protective, then it’s worth asking which school experiences build it most reliably — and for which students.

What dual language classrooms do

Dual language classrooms create a particular kind of engagement that is difficult to replicate through other means. Students are doing something genuinely demanding — learning academic content across two languages — and they know it.

For students whose home language is the partner language, that experience carries an added dimension: their language and cultural identity are not incidental to school, they are central to it. Django Paris at Michigan State and Gloria Ladson-Billings at the University of Wisconsin have both documented what happens when that affirmation takes root — students develop a stronger sense that school is genuinely theirs. 

For all students in these programs, there is also a particular kind of pride that comes from acquiring a skill most of their peers will never have. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s foundational research on motivation tells us that meaningful challenge — when students believe they can meet it — generates engagement rather than discouraging it. That engagement, sustained over years, gives students something concrete to show up for. One parent from a dual language school in Participate Learning’s North Carolina network described it this way: “I believe the work they do in class is challenging and engaging, so my child is never bored. She’s constantly growing and learning new and exciting things.”

That kind of daily enthusiasm doesn’t stay at the school door. When parents see it at home, it changes their relationship to the school itself. Choosing a language immersion program becomes an active, long-term investment, and that investment runs in both directions. Joyce Epstein at Johns Hopkins has spent decades documenting what happens when that family-school relationship deepens: students attend more consistently, and schools become places families feel they truly belong to. 

That belonging shows up in how families talk about these programs. “My daughter looks forward to school each day,” one North Carolina dual language parent shared. That day-to-day experience builds trust in the program — and the data reflects it. Across Participate Learning’s network of 125 schools in 41 districts in North Carolina and Virginia, 90% of parents say they would recommend the program to other families — not just a satisfaction score, but a measure of genuine trust.

Academic growth as a daily reason to show up

There is one more piece worth naming, and it may be the most straightforward of all.

Students who are experiencing real academic growth have evidence, every day, that showing up is worth it. Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, whose longitudinal research on dual language outcomes spans more than three decades, have found that well-implemented programs consistently produce stronger results in reading and math — not despite instruction in two languages, but in part because of what bilingual learning demands of developing minds.

In North Carolina, data from nearly 5,000 fifth graders show students in Participate Learning’s dual language programs reaching math proficiency at 64%, compared to 55.4% of their non-dual language peers — a gap that holds across districts and demographic groups.

Academic success builds investment. Investment builds attendance. We’ve seen this play out in our network for more than 30 years.

A broader point

I want to be careful not to over-claim here. Dual language immersion doesn’t solve chronic absenteeism on its own — nothing does. The causes are too varied, the circumstances too different from one family to the next.

Research is consistent on this point: the instructional environment — whether students feel connected to their school through identity, achievement, and community — deserves a place in the attendance conversation alongside the outreach and support systems already doing important work.

In Rockingham County, North Carolina, where dual language programs operate in three rural elementary schools, 2025 end-of-grade results show dual language students outperforming both district and state averages at every tested grade level. School leaders there have made these programs central to their vision of preparing every student for a meaningful future. That kind of ambition, made real in daily instruction, changes how students and families experience school.

We don’t often think of curriculum and program design as attendance strategies. Maybe we should start.

When students feel that school is genuinely built for them — that it affirms who they are, challenges what they can do, and connects their families to something worth investing in — they find reasons to be there. That’s not a small thing. And it’s something dual language programs, done well, have been delivering for a long time.