Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta.

And today we have a special guest, Adam Harris, who's a staff writer at The Atlantic.

He's the author of The State Must Provide why America's colleges have always been on equal and how to set them right.

Before joining the Atlantic in 2018, Adam was a reporter for the Chronicle for Higher Education or of Higher Education

covering federal higher education policy and HBCUs. At the Atlantic, he writes about politics

and education, two of my very favorite topics. Adam, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much

for having me. I've been reading your stuff for a long time, and there are two articles

you've published in the past month that are just really fascinating.

One about how reconstruction shaped American schools and the other about chronic absenteeism in American schools since the pandemic began.

Let's start with that second article.

You wrote this piece called Where Are All the Missing Students and the sort of subtitle is

schools are struggling with abnormally high rates of absenteeism since the pandemic began.

You wrote this one month ago.

Tell me, what's going on?

What are the trends since the start of the pandemic?

Yeah.

So since the pandemic began, right, teachers, administrators for a long time, as you probably

know, have been worried about absenteeism, right?

Students missing class in part because once folks really started digging into how absenteeism

affects students, right?

It's not necessarily, oh, you miss 20 days and everything starts to slide.

...