Science Startup Uses Simple Approach to Reduce Student Absenteeism

For many, starting a new business venture can be a longwinded and circuitous process, marked by pivots and pie-in-the-sky visions. But Todd Rogers and his team at EveryDay Labs were guided by a singular goal: Reduce the number of days students are absent from school, which is a national problem preventing kids from succeeding in school.

Rogers is an APS Fellow and professor of public policy at Harvard University with a passion for translating behavioral science into innovative strategies that strengthen society. He previously worked on how to better mobilize voters, running hundreds of large field experiments alongside campaigns and civic-engagement organizations, but shifted his focus to K–12 schools and how to better mobilize families.

“I missed being among other behavioral scientists and so after four years [building a civic-engagement organization in Washington, DC], I started spending weekends writing papers and came back on the academic job market and returned to academia,” Rogers said. 

In 2012, Rogers began working with other researchers on education interventions. The team included Avi Feller (now at University of California Berkeley), Carly Robinson (now at Stanford University), Karen Mapp (Harvard University), and Hedy Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works.

The team identified family engagement to reduce student absenteeism as a promising strategy to increase educational success for children. Rogers led a series of randomized field experiments testing interventions that could effectively reduce the number of days students missed school. 

They were inspired by Opower, an energy company that leverages research on descriptive social norms to reduce energy use by mailing letters that compare a household’s energy consumption with that of its neighbors (see Schultz et al., 2007; Allcott & Rogers, 2014).

They modeled an intervention after this effort, delivering repeated rounds of personalized attendance information by mail to parents in the School District of Philadelphia. Their pilot experiment reached just over 3,000 families. And after seeing promising results, they replicated the findings the next year, with an experiment universe of more than 28,000 families.

Each project saw a clear reduction in absences (Soman, 2024), and the intervention proved to be unusually cost effective—around $6 USD per net school day recaptured, which Rogers said was 50 to 100 times more cost effective than the next best-known interventions. After this, the team expanded their efforts. 

“At one point, our lab was working with, I don’t know, dozens of school districts on dozens of different field experiments,” Rogers said. “Often we tested the same intervention redundantly across multiple school districts because once you’ve solved the logistics and bureaucratic stuff, the marginal cost of doing it in multiple places is lower.” 

Rogers and his coauthors eventually placed multiple papers in academic journals showing the effectiveness of the absence intervention (e.g., Rogers & Feller, 2018; Robinson et al., 2018). 

“It was so effective that the districts themselves asked if we could continue implementing it as an intervention, not as research anymore,” he said. “That’s when the university said that if it’s not research, we couldn’t implement it from within the lab.” 

After an unsuccessful effort to raise money for a nonprofit to house the project, Rogers and his team turned to a for-profit business structure to help scale the project.

As of September 2025, EveryDay Labs has grown to employ 30 full-time employees and 10 part-time employees. They deliver millions of interventions to reduce student absenteeism each year, resulting in students attending an estimated total of 3 million days of school they would have otherwise missed.

“The company has been a vehicle for investors and school districts to channel tens of millions of dollars toward the single most cost-effective thing we know to reduce absenteeism,” Rogers said. “And I don’t think without this vehicle we could have directed all these resources to demonstrably reduce absenteeism in districts this much.” 

From the days of research to the current era of the company, Rogers and his team have been singular in their focus with EveryDay Labs—reduce days missed or bust.

“Culturally, we seem to celebrate these pivots—these companies that were doing one thing, were not successful at it, and then found a new thing,” he explained. “We did not want whatever we started to do that. Its purpose is to reduce absenteeism. We don’t want it to pivot to become something else that has no evidence base.” 

Rogers’ current work is focused on how to help people maintain and strengthen social connection, with a special focus on sports fandoms. Each new project he is launching has its own imagined path to scale, if it proves effective. Some may involve partnering with professional sports leagues or school districts, others might involve starting a social enterprise (nonprofit or for-profit), and some might involve public policies.

With every research project he pursues, Rogers hopes to address an important social issue by leveraging insights and tools from behavioral science. If the results contribute to scholarly knowledge and end up in an academic journal, that’s a great bonus.

“The main question when I returned to academia was not how to get tenure. It was how to use behavioral science to tackle important problems. I’m outrageously fortunate to have been able to do both,” he said. “That said, I believe the social-connection work I’m diving into now will be the most useful work I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve learned about incredible psychological science others have been doing and can’t wait to build on it and find ways to help others benefit from it.”

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