There appear to be widespread problems with the tracking of truant students at Chicago Public Schools, according to an inspector general report released Thursday that said chronic absenteeism is likely being masked by some administrators aiming to make their schools look better.

The misreporting of truant students as missing, dropouts or outgoing transfers in many cases means schools didn’t properly check on children’s whereabouts and attempt to re-engage them with their classes as required, the report said. The investigation looked at issues prior to the pandemic but the practice likely worsened when schools closed and, by some estimates, CPS needed to reconnect with up to 100,000 children who weren’t regularly engaged with school.

There’s a reason administrators might want to hide truancies: The district’s school rating system, currently suspended and under reform, has penalized schools for high absenteeism and dropout rates. Critics have often called the rating system punitive and inequitable.

“The schools are entrusted to provide this information to the district. And at the same time, they are rated on absenteeism, and they have an incentive to have a low absenteeism rate,” Inspector General Will Fletcher said in an interview. “It calls for better centralized monitoring and oversight of the data that’s coming out of those schools. And thus far, we haven’t seen that happen.”

CPS spokeswoman Mary Fergus said in a statement that the district is creating a team to improve data reporting around transfers and dropouts and support students and schools on transfers.

“CPS also informed the OIG that it has already provided guidance to schools regarding the revision of recording their outreach to truant students and will continue to centralize relevant data,” Fergus wrote in an email.

The investigation, included in the CPS Office of Inspector General’s annual report that details its biggest cases of the past year, reviewed records from the 2018-19 school year, the last full one before the pandemic. State law and CPS policy require accurate recordkeeping of any student who leaves a school’s enrollment.

Investigators started with an unnamed elementary school that reported a particularly high rate of transfers, saying administrators there “deliberately miscoded students who were truant as transfers or lost children so that these students’ absences would not count against the school’s attendance rate.”

A school culture coordinator and two clerks were found to have been regularly removing truant students from enrollment by recording them as transfers, the report said. In one school year, 20 kids were recorded as transfers but the school had no supporting documentation. Emails showed that in many cases, staff knew the student was actually truant.

Truant students who are mislabeled as transfers are unlikely to receive the support and re-engagement efforts from the district as they otherwise would.

The investigation further found evidence that these problems spread district-wide and “call into question the reliability of transfer and dropout data that CPS uses in calculating key metrics such as attendance and graduation rates.”

A review of 100 schools’ records found 36 that had falsely reported to CPS that they had verified a student transfer. In those cases, the schools didn’t have the required records showing the student had actually transferred to a new school.

That misreporting was originally flagged by CPS officials when the district began auditing schools’ self-reported transfer data in 2018.

But the district isn’t following up with changes, Fletcher said.

In the elementary school that started the IG’s investigation, the data misreporting was discovered in a district audit but then “neither CPS nor the elementary school took any action to reform the school’s procedures for reporting transfer data, and the school continued to report inaccurate transfer data to CPS in the following school years.”

“We don’t see the corrective action taking place,” Fletcher said. “I don’t know why that is. But unless that problem gets solved, I don’t know that we won’t be having this problem indefinitely.”

The IG’s office hasn’t been able to investigate transfer and truancy data since 2020 because CPS paused those audits when the pandemic began, and they haven’t resumed.

“It stands to reason that it’s not going to get any better when you have students at home for remote learning,” Fletcher said. “It’s not going to get any better when students are scattering across the district or not coming into school.

“Every indication would lead you to believe that certainly this would become more of a problem after the pandemic. But we just don’t have the data because those audits haven’t resumed.”

These problems are not new.

In 2015, WBEZ and the BGA found that thousands of high school students were being mislabeled as verified transfers when they were in fact dropouts or went to alternative schools in the district. This resulted in inflated graduation rates, which the school district ultimately recalculated to reflect the discrepancies identified in the WBEZ/BGA investigation.

This systemic issue had been brought up before with the inspector general consistently finding over the past decade that individual schools were mislabeling students.

In 2015, the school district also promised to take steps to ensure data integrity, but the inspector general noted that it has yet to accomplish this goal.