Let's examine your logic here a bit more carefully.
13% of students are absent. How can we expect education to succeed. The problem here is that that overlooks that 87% of students are fairly consistent in attending school, and, according to you, are still finding the education system to not be succeeding. One could have qualms about the last claim (I, myself, do not believe the American education system is in a crisis to warrant such implications), but that's the import of your statement if you think about it.
Now here's the thing about absenteeism: it means a lot of different things. Some of it are deep community or economic issues that the school, alone, cannot address. It could ameliorate the issues, but it would be incredibly difficult to ask much more. Other times there's consequences for school policies and/or staff practices that are inappropriate or outmoded. And yes, independent of both of those things, there's also other students that are simply truant for the sake of being truant and doing something else.
Families from lower socio-economic backgrounds often have family situations that pit a family's security and well-being against a kid going to school that day (which our society has also argued is a basic component of security and well-being). I've known students who had to work in order for their family to have food on the table, for other family members to be taken care of, and so on. It's a massive problem, but that doesn't exactly lay the blame on the student. There's also parents out there that aren't doing their job in getting their kids to school. I have, and others too, have probably seen both during their time working with children and youth.
Furthermore, the data also included students with disabilities. Students with disabilities do represent a grouping of students with more absenteeism, however, there a number of reasons for that. One is the consequence of school policies and procedures with regard to discipline that often clash with a student's disability and the reluctance to find what we call a "manifestation determination,"(i.e. the behavior that was penalized was as a result of the student's disability), create meaningful behavioral plans, and act on them. This carries for a large number of students with disabilities, but becomes especially huge with students with emotional and behavioral disabilities or difficulties. Some of this, for instance, may be because of an issue with a student's disability that needs to be addressed, because, perhaps their anxiety is as such that they can't get out of the bedroom, no matter how hard mom or dad try. I've also helped students try to use public transportation consistently because their anxiety would trigger as soon as the school bus shows up and they just wander the community or go back home.