Okay, we have the mean. What are the median and mode? Averages can be skewed by one student missing nearly all the days and a bunch of students missing only a few.
Don’t confuse us with facts - we’re on a roll.
Good math thinking there, but it likely doesn't apply here. There are 66,000 students in Detroit schools, so it would take 15,000-plus missing half of the 180 school days to drag the absence average up to 46 days each for the other 45,000 kids with perfect attendance. Tripling the interquartile range (the difference in days missed for student #15,000 and student #45,000) makes it very unlikely that there are any statistical outliers... especially since we just showed that you would need 15,000 outliers to skew a perfect-attendance record for the other 45,000... so it is close to statistically impossible that there are enough statistical outliers to make the 46-day figure misleading.