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Good practice Imported

TalkingPoints — AI-Translated Family-Engagement Texting Cuts Chronic Absenteeism in Tulsa Public Schools

United States of America · Tulsa · See the United States of America profile

Evidence: Quasi-experimental Top 59% 47/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

An AI-and-human-translated two-way texting platform let families of roughly 30,000 K-7 students across 71 Tulsa Public Schools communicate with teachers in 100+ languages; a propensity-matched study found a 24% drop in absenteeism, though the research is vendor-authored and two g

24%
Reduction in absenteeism (spring 2021 term)
~2 days
Additional days in school, equivalent (over the term studied)
~30,000 students, grades K-5 and 7
Students covered by study
71
Schools in district
100+
Languages supported
TalkingPoints — AI-Translated Family-Engagement Texting Cuts Chronic Absenteeism in Tulsa Public Schools

Details

Promoter
TalkingPoints, with Tulsa Public Schools
Period
2021
Keywords
family engagement, multilingual communication, chronic absenteeism, K-12 administration

Context

TalkingPoints is a nonprofit two-way messaging platform that lets teachers and low-income, multilingual families communicate in each other's language, using a mix of machine translation and human-reviewed templates to cover over 100 languages. Tulsa Public Schools, a 71-school urban district in Oklahoma, rolled the platform out to families across kindergarten through twelfth grade and commissioned a study of its effect on chronic absenteeism during the spring 2021 term.

Objectives

Reduce chronic absenteeism by enabling two-way translated family-teacher communication.

Activities

The platform was deployed district-wide across K-12. Using administrative attendance records and propensity-score matching to build comparable treatment and control groups, the Tulsa study covered roughly 30,000 students in grades K-5 and 7.

Results

The study found a 24% reduction in absenteeism among students whose families used TalkingPoints, equivalent to about two additional days in school over the term studied.

Conclusions

Sixth and eighth grade were excluded from the analysis because the research team could not build comparable matches for those grades, and the report is TalkingPoints' own commissioned research rather than an independently replicated study - a limitation flagged directly in the federal ERIC database record for a companion TalkingPoints evaluation. TalkingPoints separately reports academic-achievement gains and stronger effects for Black, Latino and English-learner families in a different, unnamed large urban district, which this submission does not claim occurred in Tulsa specifically.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — No cost figures disclosed for the Tulsa deployment
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Study covers the spring 2021 term in a single district
Staffing & skills
TalkingPoints - platform/nonprofit operator, Tulsa Public Schools - implementing district, commissioned the study

Conditions for success

  • District-wide rollout across all K-12 grades enabling a large sample size
  • Combination of machine translation and human-reviewed templates covering 100+ languages
  • Administrative attendance data enabling propensity-score matching

Common failure modes

  • 6th and 8th grade excluded from the analysis because comparable matches could not be built
  • The study is TalkingPoints' own commissioned research, not independently replicated - flagged as a limitation in the federal ERIC record
  • Reported academic-achievement gains and stronger effects for Black, Latino and English-learner families come from a different, unnamed district and are not claimed for Tulsa specifically

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes Philanthropic / foundation funding

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Replication kit

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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