Fully 18 percent of Oregon students missed 10 percent of last school year, an investigation by The Oregonian found. No other state has been found to have as bad an absenteeism problem as Oregon.
… Oregon continues to rank in the national basement at shepherding students to diplomas. For the class of 2012, Oregon's on-time graduation rate was second-lowest among the states, behind Nevada.
Who is responsible? Round up the usual suspects! Oregon has been disinvesting in public education – drastically – since at least 1990. Oregon school districts as a group have made the same uniformly unpleasant choices in the face of dwindling resources from the state. Statewide you will find that art has been cut; music has been cut; PE has been cut; sports have been cut; librarians have been cut; counselors have been cut; classroom teachers have been cut. 
The teachers have less time to spend preparing for class or helping students – not necessarily because of huge class sizes. Class size is certainly a major factor but – day by day – absenteeism actually brings the numbers down. (That’s one way to address huge class sizes.) Teachers also have less time because they have to learn how to demonstrate and report that they are following state standards or Common Core. They must spend much time and creativity inventing “measurements” that show (spuriously) progress or achievement. They have less time for their curriculum because they have to teach to, and administer, multiple high-stakes standardized tests.
The cruel oxymoron of “school choice” is another challenge although it’s not as bad in Oregon as in other states. “School choice” is a formula for gutting public schools, which, regrettably is on the political agenda of the very rich. For the rest of us “school choice” is a way to funnel public funds to special interests whether they be faith-based charter schools or profit-based charter schools.
Teachers can tell you stories like: remembering a student they overheard in the hall saying, “The only reason I came to school today was for band”. Today, now that band has been cut, that student is absent or unsuccessfully looking for a job. These halls are not inviting or exciting or safe places to be. Public schools are under siege and they look it. Teachers and administrators are at the end of their rope. Students are bewildered, frustrated, demoralized and angry.
You will not fix this by making teachers accountable - the schools are not failing because of bad teachers. You will not fix this by giving parents choice – parents all want good neighborhood schools. You will not fix this by raising standards – raising standards without increasing support simply increases your rate of failure.
The widely celebrated Grand Bargain last year and the promising passage of Measures 66 and 67 in 2010 combined have “restored” school funding to approximately 75% of adequate, according to the Quality Education Model commissioned by the legislature. The millions of dollars of “savings” from public pensioners (PERS) will blow up when the Supreme Court - again - finds that illegal transfer to be unconstitutional. That “savings” will then have to be paid back to PERS, obliterating that supposed windfall and once again, beggaring the schools. 
This did not just happen. We got here by choice and the choices we made were well-understood with clear consequences. It is by choice that we will fix it and those indicated choices, frankly, are equally clear. This is a no-brainer.
Here in LA we were issuing more suspensions than high school diplomas. We were arresting kids and putting them into the juvenile in/justice system for tardiness. In the last year or two, we are finally trying to turn things around and in spite of mandated testing and other BS and pressure to turn public schools to charter schools, find ways to rearrange existing resources. But mostly, rethink how we treat the kids. This link takes you to an overview of some of the approaches in California now -- just a starting point as it's not as in-depth as really finding out what individual schools have done and what the outcome has been. http://www.fixschooldiscipline.org/toolkit/# For example, at Garfield, (which used to issue 600 suspensions a year and then went down to 1 and then zero, and where they have a strong teachers union) they now assess the reading level of every kid before entering 9th grade. 25% couldn't read at grade level. Kids would rather be known as troublemakers than as stupid. If you can't read or keep up with the class, you're going to ditch or get yourself thrown out. They now start individualized instruction -- some of it, admittedly by computer -- and bring everyone up to speed, most by the end of the semester, all by the end of their first year in high school. And they have managed to keep creative programs: music as well as a class in video production in which students write and perform in their own videos. We talk about School Climate rather than School Reform because the word "reform" has been hijacked by the forces of privatization and union-busting. I hope, Lanning, you can help spark a movement in Oregon. The kids deserve it, the teachers deserve it and so does the state and the nation.
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