It's fair to say that those who are of compulsory school age and do not attend school on a regular and consistent basis are on the path that will take them away from good employment prospects and opportunities, leaving them instead with few real good choices and a life derailed. Each child in a country as rich as America is entitled to a good education and this education should provide to that future adult the ability to read, to write, to understand right from wrong, and to process basic mathematics, so that their education on a fundamental level permits them to be able to function at a literate baseline level in society. It almost goes without saying, that if you don't bother to show up to school, and/or don't attend your classes in school, as well as taking the demands of school seriously, than you will not do well scholastically at school.
While there are plenty of laws and rules that demonstrate how the State is omnipotent and can make students as well as their parental authorities made to suffer for their lack of diligence to school attendance, that type of "tough love" isn't necessarily productive. There are already way too many people that are well aware that getting onto the wrong side of governmental power is not the place that you want to be, and this does more to build up resentment as compared to corrective behavior. While there will be intransigent students and it is good to identify them early so as to possibly rectify that behavior, punishment is seldom going to be the route that will be most effective for all involved.
As the saying goes, "a stitch in time saves nine," and with the powerful ability for governmental agencies to process and compute information, school agencies should avail themselves more often of these very tools. That is to say, every student should be tracked to their attendance, and every absence should be duly noted and followed up within the shortest possible period of time. So that, if a student is absent that day, parental authorities should be contacted that very same day notifying them of that absence, in conjunction with this the school system should provide absentee students with some sort of student aid mentor to help to keep them "on point" in regards to their attendance. In addition, it's too easy for school systems to just accept any excuse as to an absence; every excuse should be scrutinized and correlated against that student. The school system should make it vividly clear that while they understand those children that are medically sick, should be excused from school, not every student that misses school, will be found to be truly medically sick.
Over and above all things, schools should try to get to know their students, so that rather than just seeing students as one, big anonymous blob, they are instead dialed into students specific habits and proclivities. Although schoolwork is demanding, most students, at least, initially, are willing to step up to that demand, if given the right toolset to deal with it. The bottom line is that most students that miss school do not fill that vacuum with anything of real value, but rather fill that absence with frivolity or worse. The schools should make it their point, to do their best to not leave anyone behind, and at a minimum provide these young charges with at least the basics to deal with the reality of a world that is far more cutthroat and foreboding.