joining us live now is nat malkus with the american enterprise institute and the creator of the returnlearn tracker that we just showed you. nat, thanks for joining us. >> glad to be here. >> all right. so we define chronic absenteeism as 10% right. missing 10% of school. but there are different layers. and there are a lot of kids also missing. not quite chronic but a whole lot of school. >> yeah. post-covid we saw attendance slip. and look, chronic absenteeism is the percentage of kids that miss 10% of the year. that's not really a magical number. attendance has gone up sort of across the board . and we've also seen that the really severe chronic absenteeism that students that are missing 15 or even 20% of the year have gone up tremendously uh- across the nation and in california. >> so can i just ask you, obviously, you know, kids have always played hooky to some extent. what about it during the pandemic that made that number jump? and then what about it that made it so it didn't quite fully come back after the pandemic? >> well, it's know, before the pandemic about 15% of students m