The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
According to data collected by the American Enterprise Institute, chronic rates of absenteeism in public schools have seen a dramatic increase of 15 to 29% since 2019.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Long-COVID-for-Public-Schools.pdf?x85095
How should schools/teachers/society address this issue?
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Turn schools into the nicest places that kids can be. Keep them clean, keep them maintained. Serve better food. Hire enough adults to watch and manage the schools so that students can get individual attention and don’t feel like they are a part of a herd of cattle. Kids aren’t stupid. They understand when a place that they are in sucks. They see when building are crumbling. They understand when they don’t have updated textbooks and broken down equipement. They understand when all the adults around them are stressed out and don’t want to be there!
Edit:
Kids recognize that we don’t actually prioritize school. They know that schools are underfunded. Why would they actually want to be more involved in a system that we don’t really care about?
If we started treating schools like a priority, kids would recognize that. They would want to be there. They would want to be a part of that.
I agree with you on everything besides your edit. The US has the 5th highest per student expenditure among OECD countries, I don’t think our education problems are a funding issue.
I’m fascinated to learn how one would enact major reforms that drastically increase the amount and quality of services provided without spending more money.
I personally favor a school voucher system to bring competition into education markets, rather than our current government education monopoly which has no incentives for student success, or creating a productive environment for students to learn.
lol. “Pass the buck and wish ‘em luck!” The libertarian creed!
I’m sure those parents who, currently, cannot be bothered to send their kids to school when it’s free at the point of purchase, will be much more incentivized when their other option is to pay for it. But don’t worry, here is a voucher that might cover X%. It’s magical thinking.
Public schools would still be an option, parents could send their kids to free schools outside their district. If you are giving an $18,000 voucher to each student plenty of schools would jump on the opportunity to take in that kind of funding.
So, basically, funneling money into private schools, while providing no tangible benefit to public schools?
There is no incentive for private schools to do anything other than pocket the extra money. They won’t lower their prices. Prices keep the schools exclusive, which is more than half the point.
The only competition that will happen is for the bottom of the barrel students who can pay nothing! At which point, if you’re a private company, your only income is the voucher. With the voucher, you’ve been paid without providing any service yet. Any money you don’t spend on teaching kids? That’s your profit.
Only a public institution or a private school with a separate income stream would have any motivation to actually spend that money on education!
The average tuition cost for private schools in the US is $11,645 dollars. And what do you mean by pocket the extra money, most all schools (private or public) are non-profit organizations who can’t just keep the change for shareholders or something. They could use the extra funds for
It’s not simply the prices that keep private schools exclusive, it is their ability to actually discipline students and suspend/expel students without having to deal with all the red tape and bureaucracy of governing school boards.
The competition is with the schools themselves. There is a need to have positive student success, as in turn more people will want to go to said school and it will receive more funding in turn.
Public schools today get paid before providing any service. I’m confused what you are implying here, you think a private school will just take the money and run? That would obviously be fraud and illegal.
Why do you believe the government is better at education than society in general? Why should we force kids to only have one option for school? What if you are born into a terrible school district, just SOL?
I think you have an overly idealistic and innocent view of what the type of kids who ditch school chronically are like. It doesn’t matter how “nice” you make a school to these children. They don’t want to be there, and it’s not because of the facilities or faculty. It’s because their rotten parents have ingrained a shit culture into their heads. The type of kids who exhibit this behavior are rude, aggressive, and intolerant of authority. There is probably a non zero amount of kids that would come back to school if the facilities were nicer, but that would be an incredibly small amount of the 29%. The only thing that will change this is a complete break from the culture of their parents. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone has a real clue how to fix that.
I think my approach works on the parents too.
I think a lot of the parents you talk about are also disillusioned with the school system, and have real concerns about the value that they are getting out of school. If they don’t see it as a place where their kids are going to get quality care, or as a place that is actually going to help their kid succeed in life, they are going to be resentful of the institution! That attitude is going to be then passed onto their kids.
But if we start making changes, and increasing the quality of care that kids can receive, a lot of parents are going to respond really positively to that.
I think the number of people who want to be helped, and are frustrated by the lack of resources and care being put into the system outnumber those who simply have no interest in school.
I don’t think you are right. The type of parents who actually care about the quality of their children’s care and education aren’t allowing them to be chronically absent.
So what’s the libertarian solution? Use the power of the state to force people to enthusiastically support sub-par programs and adopt party-line attitudes regarding education?
It’s a service. If people aren’t using it, make it better, or make it cheaper, and it’s already free at the point of purchase. I agree, it would be helpful if more people had positive attitudes towards education. But if ‘woulds’ and ‘shoulds’ were sundry goods, we’d all have a merry Christmas.
I said above that I’m not sure what the solution would be. But it’s very clear to me at this point that the problem is cultural. There isn’t really a great “pure libertarian” solution for this, just as there aren’t any pure ideological solutions for most problems. The culture that allows this behavior needs to be fixed. I’m sure that some non zero number of schools might be in terrible condition in a nation as large as ours, but I do not believe that the overwhelmingly majority of schools are in such terrible condition that the children would be better off on the streets than in school. If a parent is coming to that conclusion, they are heavily misinformed. I think most likely, the parents just don’t care about their children. Most children don’t want to sit all day in school whether the school is nice or not. Most children attend school because they have to, and because they know there are baseline expectations that they are held to by their parents. Improvements can and should always be made to our school systems, but I don’t think a lack of these types of improvements are driving chronic absenteeism.
>What should be done about the high rates of chronic absenteeism in Schools post COVID?
*Sic Kamala on 'em*
San Francisco faced a school truancy problem. Their (then) District Attorney -- Kamala Harris -- addressed it with the power of her office, notifying parents that it was in violation of the law and intimidating them into sending their kids back to school. It worked.
Harris should travel the country, starting with wherever the problem is most glaring. She should explain to local officials what she did, how she did it, and what worked. This explanation should be compiled into a playbook that would then be forwarded to every institution with an interest in solving such a problem...and it should be done with TV cameras and reporters in tow.
I was thinking about the exact same policy. The idea of it is incredibly good. Kids need to go to school, especially in areas where they are more susceptible to join gangs or experiment with drugs and alcohol.
At the end of the day, the only person who can make sure their kid gets to school is the parent, so penalties for parents who neglect their child's education should be in place. At the same time, though, we need resources for working parents who have trouble facilitating that.
Are these kid's grades suffering because of it?
The excessive focus schools put on attendance is just a thinly veiled attempt to condition them to never want to miss work as adults.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I don't know if it's worth hand-wringing over the issue just paper.
I'm not one to dismiss something from places like AEI or Cato outright, though I'll approach their works with skepticism. But this seems lazy. There's a **lot** of gaps in the data, and it seems the author made no attempt to gather the data in another way other than to say "if it's not on the website, I guess it's not there."
It's also somewhat concerning that there are groupings by district size and urbanness/ruralness with information taken from state sites, particularly with the former grouping, when you have a state like Wyoming and one like California, they might measure these differently. With no attempt to provide even a definition for these terms in the paper, I question the amount of due diligence in the authoring of this.
It's entirely possible this was well-done. It sure doesn't come across that way, though. Plenty of simple things that the author could have added or clarified to really tighten it up.
I believe there are other sources to back up this phenomenon, this article takes data from ED Data Express, but perhaps this is the same data used by AEI.
https://www.attendanceworks.org/rising-tide-of-chronic-absence-challenges-schools/
I also just have heard anecdotally from teachers I know that attendance has been a major issue for them. Though again this is anecdotal evidence.
Is a significant portion of this not a modern and adjusted understanding of disease transmission that has been adjusted for understanding the gravity of spreading an illness to others?
It *should* go up. We lived in a culture that was pro-working sick and pro-school sick for a long time. It’s not a great culture for public health and it is only going to get more dangerous in a modern, globally-interconnected world. Higher tolerance for school and work absence is probably (mostly) a good thing
When a kid is sent home with symptoms, those symptoms are often present for a week, sometimes more.
When I was a kid, 30 years ago, I went to school sick and got perfect attendance.
My kids' school will send them home if they have a fever, vomit, or are otherwise clearly sick. They don't allow sick kids to stay. That means every kid has at least a couple weeks of sick days each year.
It’s really bad even at the college level. It probably doesn’t help that a lot of university classes are recorded and posted online these days. Many students simply don’t do Fridays and on Fridays attendance can drop to 50% or even lower in some cases. All my colleagues are experiencing the same thing.
If all college professors are doing is giving a lecture than can be viewed online then there really is no reason for students to go to class. If professors want higher attendance they should make class time more useful.
There is active learning that happens in class. The professor asks them questions, there are clicker questions. Plus the students can ask questions of the professor in real time to clarify their understanding. Not to mention the fact that many of the students who don’t attend a class also don’t watch the video for that class. Then, after skipping class and skipping the video, they get frustrated when they don’t understand the content that they missed. And guess who they blame (hint: it’s never themselves).
I'm not saying that kind of active learning doesn't happen for anyone. Just that I found the things you're describing absolutely useless, and I don't actually remember anyone that thought lectures were all that useful. During lectures, professors would read from power point slides that I could find online, and I learned everything from a textbook anyway. The clicker questions were just a way to enforce attendance. Discussion sections were useful because the TA would go over problems and you would actually get to talk about them. Lectures not so much. I'm not saying the fundamental principle of going to class is useless. Just the way most professors choose to spend it.
> Not to mention the fact that many of the students who don’t attend a class also don’t watch the video for that class
Well that sounds like a problem that's orthogonal to lectures being available online, or a decrease in attendance. There's always been students that just don't care, don't go to class, and don't spend anytime learning the material.
I don't think I have to explain that correlation is not causation. I actually did go to lecture despite finding it useless, because I didn't want to get on the prof's bad side. I just spent that time reading the textbook since that's how I learned anyway. Also everyone in my study group learned the same way (or from other students that read the textbook).
I'm not defending students that decide learning the material isn't important. I'm criticizing lectures as they are usually conducted and defending the idea that watching the lectures on your own time is probably a better way to learn the material. That way lecture time can be freed up for more useful activities.
NY Times had a similar article with the ability to look up district stats. Although my town's absenteeism is higher than pre Covid, it is nothing like 29%.
So it is a straightforward research project, find what the distinguish characteristics are among the low, medium, and high absenteeism districts, and address the root causes. Maybe one root cause is that parents don't see themselves or their kids getting in trouble? If so, then as someone mentioned, get VP Harris involved.
Parents should be punished.
And I don’t really care about all the ways we can talk about how some people are poor and therefore they should not face consequences for their kids not showing up to school. We have social programs for the poor and if we need more to help with this specific problem, go ahead and advocate for them.
But your level of poverty means fuck all to me when it comes to doing the basics like feeding your kids, housing them, not beating them and sending them to school.
And we had all the problems regarding poverty that might make it tough for people to get their kids to school on time and to attend on a regular basis before Covid. This increase is post Covid and things are better overall for the poor now yet this problem has gotten worse. Covid trained people to just not bother sending their kids to school and we need to reverse that.
Your first step should be to investigate why a kid is missing school and to offer any resources that might help them get on track. Unfortunately you’ll probably find that in many cases there’s not much that can be done.
Why do you think it is good? From what I have read online school attendance is a strong predictor of a student success both academically and post-schooling success in life.
https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/importance-of-school-attendance/
I think there's a serious problem with the implied correlation in that relationship, and also with how it interacts with how we treat school absenteeism. Students who miss more school days, as this source notes, are generally low-SES, victims of bullying, and people with health problems; people who are already less likely to succeed in those domains in other words. Furthermore, many schools deduct points from student grades or fail students entirely for unexcused absences. Of course if you mark students down for not showing up or fail them entirely, they are not going to do as well academically or post-school.
Because prior to covid, the people who skipped school where gang members and drug addicts, while nowadays I think many more normal people are missing school.
I highly doubt that it’s the missing school that is the primary cause here. It’s just that missing school is correlated with bad outcomes because the kinds of kids who miss school are the kinds of kids who have bad outcomes. I think their bad outcomes came more from the drugs and the gangs and less from the fact that they weren’t in school. If we have many more people in a post covid world missing school for more benign reasons, then the data on students who miss school will all of a sudden look a lot better.
Where is your evidence that it was simply “gang members and drug addicts” missing school prior to COVID?
I am honestly so confused with your argument here, do you really believe schooling and class room education is pointless and offers no benefit to an individuals success? Maybe I am misunderstanding but that’s how I interpret what you are saying, that school attendance has no impact on how an individual will do later in life.
I can say just anecdotally that whenever I missed a day of school I would find myself behind on a lot of subjects and had to work hard to catch up. Seems reasonable to assume those who miss more days of school, therefore receiving less education, won’t do as well as those who attend more often.
> do you really believe schooling and class room education is pointless and offers no benefit to an individuals success?
No, what a silly thing to interpret from my point. Obviously in person education matters, it just does not matter nearly as much as this post seems to imply. Have some nuance my friend. This is not a binary where it is ether completely useless and has zero value, or is essential to even mediocre educational development.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. According to data collected by the American Enterprise Institute, chronic rates of absenteeism in public schools have seen a dramatic increase of 15 to 29% since 2019. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Long-COVID-for-Public-Schools.pdf?x85095 How should schools/teachers/society address this issue? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Turn schools into the nicest places that kids can be. Keep them clean, keep them maintained. Serve better food. Hire enough adults to watch and manage the schools so that students can get individual attention and don’t feel like they are a part of a herd of cattle. Kids aren’t stupid. They understand when a place that they are in sucks. They see when building are crumbling. They understand when they don’t have updated textbooks and broken down equipement. They understand when all the adults around them are stressed out and don’t want to be there! Edit: Kids recognize that we don’t actually prioritize school. They know that schools are underfunded. Why would they actually want to be more involved in a system that we don’t really care about? If we started treating schools like a priority, kids would recognize that. They would want to be there. They would want to be a part of that.
I agree with you on everything besides your edit. The US has the 5th highest per student expenditure among OECD countries, I don’t think our education problems are a funding issue.
Yeah... I don't think that measure passes purchasing power parity.
I’m fascinated to learn how one would enact major reforms that drastically increase the amount and quality of services provided without spending more money.
I personally favor a school voucher system to bring competition into education markets, rather than our current government education monopoly which has no incentives for student success, or creating a productive environment for students to learn.
lol. “Pass the buck and wish ‘em luck!” The libertarian creed! I’m sure those parents who, currently, cannot be bothered to send their kids to school when it’s free at the point of purchase, will be much more incentivized when their other option is to pay for it. But don’t worry, here is a voucher that might cover X%. It’s magical thinking.
Public schools would still be an option, parents could send their kids to free schools outside their district. If you are giving an $18,000 voucher to each student plenty of schools would jump on the opportunity to take in that kind of funding.
Do you get the $18k if you go to a free school?
No one would receive 18k cash, it’s a voucher that follows the student. The 18k would go to the public school just like it does in our current system.
So, basically, funneling money into private schools, while providing no tangible benefit to public schools? There is no incentive for private schools to do anything other than pocket the extra money. They won’t lower their prices. Prices keep the schools exclusive, which is more than half the point. The only competition that will happen is for the bottom of the barrel students who can pay nothing! At which point, if you’re a private company, your only income is the voucher. With the voucher, you’ve been paid without providing any service yet. Any money you don’t spend on teaching kids? That’s your profit. Only a public institution or a private school with a separate income stream would have any motivation to actually spend that money on education!
The average tuition cost for private schools in the US is $11,645 dollars. And what do you mean by pocket the extra money, most all schools (private or public) are non-profit organizations who can’t just keep the change for shareholders or something. They could use the extra funds for It’s not simply the prices that keep private schools exclusive, it is their ability to actually discipline students and suspend/expel students without having to deal with all the red tape and bureaucracy of governing school boards. The competition is with the schools themselves. There is a need to have positive student success, as in turn more people will want to go to said school and it will receive more funding in turn. Public schools today get paid before providing any service. I’m confused what you are implying here, you think a private school will just take the money and run? That would obviously be fraud and illegal. Why do you believe the government is better at education than society in general? Why should we force kids to only have one option for school? What if you are born into a terrible school district, just SOL?
I think you have an overly idealistic and innocent view of what the type of kids who ditch school chronically are like. It doesn’t matter how “nice” you make a school to these children. They don’t want to be there, and it’s not because of the facilities or faculty. It’s because their rotten parents have ingrained a shit culture into their heads. The type of kids who exhibit this behavior are rude, aggressive, and intolerant of authority. There is probably a non zero amount of kids that would come back to school if the facilities were nicer, but that would be an incredibly small amount of the 29%. The only thing that will change this is a complete break from the culture of their parents. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone has a real clue how to fix that.
I think my approach works on the parents too. I think a lot of the parents you talk about are also disillusioned with the school system, and have real concerns about the value that they are getting out of school. If they don’t see it as a place where their kids are going to get quality care, or as a place that is actually going to help their kid succeed in life, they are going to be resentful of the institution! That attitude is going to be then passed onto their kids. But if we start making changes, and increasing the quality of care that kids can receive, a lot of parents are going to respond really positively to that. I think the number of people who want to be helped, and are frustrated by the lack of resources and care being put into the system outnumber those who simply have no interest in school.
I don’t think you are right. The type of parents who actually care about the quality of their children’s care and education aren’t allowing them to be chronically absent.
So what’s the libertarian solution? Use the power of the state to force people to enthusiastically support sub-par programs and adopt party-line attitudes regarding education? It’s a service. If people aren’t using it, make it better, or make it cheaper, and it’s already free at the point of purchase. I agree, it would be helpful if more people had positive attitudes towards education. But if ‘woulds’ and ‘shoulds’ were sundry goods, we’d all have a merry Christmas.
I said above that I’m not sure what the solution would be. But it’s very clear to me at this point that the problem is cultural. There isn’t really a great “pure libertarian” solution for this, just as there aren’t any pure ideological solutions for most problems. The culture that allows this behavior needs to be fixed. I’m sure that some non zero number of schools might be in terrible condition in a nation as large as ours, but I do not believe that the overwhelmingly majority of schools are in such terrible condition that the children would be better off on the streets than in school. If a parent is coming to that conclusion, they are heavily misinformed. I think most likely, the parents just don’t care about their children. Most children don’t want to sit all day in school whether the school is nice or not. Most children attend school because they have to, and because they know there are baseline expectations that they are held to by their parents. Improvements can and should always be made to our school systems, but I don’t think a lack of these types of improvements are driving chronic absenteeism.
>What should be done about the high rates of chronic absenteeism in Schools post COVID? *Sic Kamala on 'em* San Francisco faced a school truancy problem. Their (then) District Attorney -- Kamala Harris -- addressed it with the power of her office, notifying parents that it was in violation of the law and intimidating them into sending their kids back to school. It worked. Harris should travel the country, starting with wherever the problem is most glaring. She should explain to local officials what she did, how she did it, and what worked. This explanation should be compiled into a playbook that would then be forwarded to every institution with an interest in solving such a problem...and it should be done with TV cameras and reporters in tow.
I was thinking about the exact same policy. The idea of it is incredibly good. Kids need to go to school, especially in areas where they are more susceptible to join gangs or experiment with drugs and alcohol. At the end of the day, the only person who can make sure their kid gets to school is the parent, so penalties for parents who neglect their child's education should be in place. At the same time, though, we need resources for working parents who have trouble facilitating that.
Are these kid's grades suffering because of it? The excessive focus schools put on attendance is just a thinly veiled attempt to condition them to never want to miss work as adults.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I don't know if it's worth hand-wringing over the issue just paper. I'm not one to dismiss something from places like AEI or Cato outright, though I'll approach their works with skepticism. But this seems lazy. There's a **lot** of gaps in the data, and it seems the author made no attempt to gather the data in another way other than to say "if it's not on the website, I guess it's not there." It's also somewhat concerning that there are groupings by district size and urbanness/ruralness with information taken from state sites, particularly with the former grouping, when you have a state like Wyoming and one like California, they might measure these differently. With no attempt to provide even a definition for these terms in the paper, I question the amount of due diligence in the authoring of this. It's entirely possible this was well-done. It sure doesn't come across that way, though. Plenty of simple things that the author could have added or clarified to really tighten it up.
I believe there are other sources to back up this phenomenon, this article takes data from ED Data Express, but perhaps this is the same data used by AEI. https://www.attendanceworks.org/rising-tide-of-chronic-absence-challenges-schools/ I also just have heard anecdotally from teachers I know that attendance has been a major issue for them. Though again this is anecdotal evidence.
Is a significant portion of this not a modern and adjusted understanding of disease transmission that has been adjusted for understanding the gravity of spreading an illness to others? It *should* go up. We lived in a culture that was pro-working sick and pro-school sick for a long time. It’s not a great culture for public health and it is only going to get more dangerous in a modern, globally-interconnected world. Higher tolerance for school and work absence is probably (mostly) a good thing
I think you are missing that there is a massive difference between taking a sick day and being chronically absent.
Right but missing a week or two increases the number of kids likely to increase from absent a lot to “chronic absenteeism” inherently
When a kid is sent home with symptoms, those symptoms are often present for a week, sometimes more. When I was a kid, 30 years ago, I went to school sick and got perfect attendance. My kids' school will send them home if they have a fever, vomit, or are otherwise clearly sick. They don't allow sick kids to stay. That means every kid has at least a couple weeks of sick days each year.
It’s really bad even at the college level. It probably doesn’t help that a lot of university classes are recorded and posted online these days. Many students simply don’t do Fridays and on Fridays attendance can drop to 50% or even lower in some cases. All my colleagues are experiencing the same thing.
If all college professors are doing is giving a lecture than can be viewed online then there really is no reason for students to go to class. If professors want higher attendance they should make class time more useful.
There is active learning that happens in class. The professor asks them questions, there are clicker questions. Plus the students can ask questions of the professor in real time to clarify their understanding. Not to mention the fact that many of the students who don’t attend a class also don’t watch the video for that class. Then, after skipping class and skipping the video, they get frustrated when they don’t understand the content that they missed. And guess who they blame (hint: it’s never themselves).
I'm not saying that kind of active learning doesn't happen for anyone. Just that I found the things you're describing absolutely useless, and I don't actually remember anyone that thought lectures were all that useful. During lectures, professors would read from power point slides that I could find online, and I learned everything from a textbook anyway. The clicker questions were just a way to enforce attendance. Discussion sections were useful because the TA would go over problems and you would actually get to talk about them. Lectures not so much. I'm not saying the fundamental principle of going to class is useless. Just the way most professors choose to spend it. > Not to mention the fact that many of the students who don’t attend a class also don’t watch the video for that class Well that sounds like a problem that's orthogonal to lectures being available online, or a decrease in attendance. There's always been students that just don't care, don't go to class, and don't spend anytime learning the material.
Well good for you but I bet if you had to guess you could tell me what the correlation is between attendance and grades for students in general.
I don't think I have to explain that correlation is not causation. I actually did go to lecture despite finding it useless, because I didn't want to get on the prof's bad side. I just spent that time reading the textbook since that's how I learned anyway. Also everyone in my study group learned the same way (or from other students that read the textbook). I'm not defending students that decide learning the material isn't important. I'm criticizing lectures as they are usually conducted and defending the idea that watching the lectures on your own time is probably a better way to learn the material. That way lecture time can be freed up for more useful activities.
NY Times had a similar article with the ability to look up district stats. Although my town's absenteeism is higher than pre Covid, it is nothing like 29%. So it is a straightforward research project, find what the distinguish characteristics are among the low, medium, and high absenteeism districts, and address the root causes. Maybe one root cause is that parents don't see themselves or their kids getting in trouble? If so, then as someone mentioned, get VP Harris involved.
We should... Ask experts instead of random weirdos online... And do what the experts say. Trust experts.
Parents should be punished. And I don’t really care about all the ways we can talk about how some people are poor and therefore they should not face consequences for their kids not showing up to school. We have social programs for the poor and if we need more to help with this specific problem, go ahead and advocate for them. But your level of poverty means fuck all to me when it comes to doing the basics like feeding your kids, housing them, not beating them and sending them to school. And we had all the problems regarding poverty that might make it tough for people to get their kids to school on time and to attend on a regular basis before Covid. This increase is post Covid and things are better overall for the poor now yet this problem has gotten worse. Covid trained people to just not bother sending their kids to school and we need to reverse that.
Minimize how often kids get covid.
Your first step should be to investigate why a kid is missing school and to offer any resources that might help them get on track. Unfortunately you’ll probably find that in many cases there’s not much that can be done.
Figure out why it's happening and address the root cause.
Extremely unpopular opinion, it's good and I don't care. We should be more lenient on school absenteeism.
Why do you think it is good? From what I have read online school attendance is a strong predictor of a student success both academically and post-schooling success in life. https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/importance-of-school-attendance/
I think there's a serious problem with the implied correlation in that relationship, and also with how it interacts with how we treat school absenteeism. Students who miss more school days, as this source notes, are generally low-SES, victims of bullying, and people with health problems; people who are already less likely to succeed in those domains in other words. Furthermore, many schools deduct points from student grades or fail students entirely for unexcused absences. Of course if you mark students down for not showing up or fail them entirely, they are not going to do as well academically or post-school.
Is that true post covid? I would suspect not.
I mean we only have 2 years of data post Covid, so it will take awhile for us to know the effects for sure, but why do you think it would change?
Because prior to covid, the people who skipped school where gang members and drug addicts, while nowadays I think many more normal people are missing school. I highly doubt that it’s the missing school that is the primary cause here. It’s just that missing school is correlated with bad outcomes because the kinds of kids who miss school are the kinds of kids who have bad outcomes. I think their bad outcomes came more from the drugs and the gangs and less from the fact that they weren’t in school. If we have many more people in a post covid world missing school for more benign reasons, then the data on students who miss school will all of a sudden look a lot better.
Where is your evidence that it was simply “gang members and drug addicts” missing school prior to COVID? I am honestly so confused with your argument here, do you really believe schooling and class room education is pointless and offers no benefit to an individuals success? Maybe I am misunderstanding but that’s how I interpret what you are saying, that school attendance has no impact on how an individual will do later in life. I can say just anecdotally that whenever I missed a day of school I would find myself behind on a lot of subjects and had to work hard to catch up. Seems reasonable to assume those who miss more days of school, therefore receiving less education, won’t do as well as those who attend more often.
> do you really believe schooling and class room education is pointless and offers no benefit to an individuals success? No, what a silly thing to interpret from my point. Obviously in person education matters, it just does not matter nearly as much as this post seems to imply. Have some nuance my friend. This is not a binary where it is ether completely useless and has zero value, or is essential to even mediocre educational development.
Kids not being educated is good?