If attending a public school retards learning, this is good news, for some races
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(we used to calll it “truancy”)
Although SFUSD is not alone in this phenomenon — 72% of public schools saw an increase in chronic absenteeism for both students and teachers during the 2021-22 school year — the district’s twofold rise to 24.8% is well above the national average of 17%.
The term was coined in 2010 by education consultant Hedy Chang who found students who are chronically absent in kindergarten are less likely to read at grade level by third grade, less likely to succeed academically in middle school and more likely to drop out in high school. Soon thereafter, she founded Attendance Works, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on improving attendance practices and policy at all levels of governance.
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The other large increase occurred among the two-thirds of African American, Pacific Islander and foster students and half of Latino students who were chronically absent in 2021-22. This is a significant increase from 2020-21, the year most disrupted by the pandemic — when 45% of African American students, 47% of Pacific Islander students, 46% of foster students and 25% of Latino students were chronically absent.
Even prior to the pandemic, however, students in these ethnic groups saw higher levels of chronic absenteeism in San Francisco and across the nation, according to educational researchers.
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The impacts of absenteeism
According to Hutt, whose research at UNC focuses on the metrics used to quantify school performance, the single oldest measure is attendance. He noted that although the quality of a school used to be determined by its average daily attendance — or percent of enrolled students who came to school on a daily basis — the reality is that taking attendance has long been an ambiguous metric.
“School districts almost immediately realized that these numbers are easily manipulated,” Hutt said. “It’s very hard to verify who is in the building and so districts will engage in all kinds of shenanigans to make their numbers look good.”
If students missed consecutive days, for example, districts would drop students and re-enroll them when they returned so as not to count their absence in the final metric.
This went on as recently as 2017, when a Washington, D.C., high school graduated all of its seniors despite a majority missing more than six weeks of school. Some couldn’t even read or write.
Michael Gottfried — a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education — found that chronic absence has four distinct impacts on students, their classmates and their school.
The first is on school finances, given that California schools receive funding from the state based on how many students show up each day.
Similarly to Chang, Gottfried found that chronic absenteeism impacts both literacy and math achievement in a negative way. However, absences tend to impact math more than reading because while parents will read to their children at home [I’m betting that’s not a universal practice — Ed] , they don’t feel as equipped to teach math.
…. Lastly, Gottfried found that classmates are impacted as well. For example, if a student has missed a few days of school, the teacher may slow down to catch them up, affecting the learning of the rest of the class. In contrast, if the teacher doesn’t slow down, the student may be confused and disengage from the lesson. Either way, learning is altered.
Randi “Children are Resilient” Weingarten might be interested in this part of the article:
Pandemic-imposed absenteeism
In studying factors that contribute to absenteeism, Gottfried established four distinct drivers: routines, transitions, engagement and health. Seeing twofold increases in chronic absenteeism post-pandemic, Gottfried said the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have disrupted all four drivers.
Routines are all about practice, Gottfried said, and while many are out of practice, there are kindergarten through third graders who have never practiced going to school before. Likewise, many made the transition from elementary to middle school or middle to high school online.
“Middle schoolers have missed this entire huge developmental piece of growth of preadolescent development,” Gottfried said. “They haven’t been able to have those moments in school that are super engaging, either making those connections with teachers or curriculum or with peers.”
