It used to be all you needed to do was “fog a mirror” to get a high school diploma. And showing up for homeroom was the big deal. Attendance was taken there for official attendance, and that’s where the money was tied to. Heaven forbid you missed homeroom.
No longer. Students don’t even need to show up.
At some high schools, graduation rates are rising, even though many students aren’t showing up for class, writes Max Diamond for RealClearInvestigations.
Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School in Washington, D.C., seemed to be doing great: A public school that enrolls only economically disadvantaged students, its graduation rate hit a recent high of 94.5 percent during the 2016-17 school year.
Yet in that same year, three-quarters of the students at Phelps were absent more than 10 percent of the time.
. . . “It’s really easy to graduate more kids,” said David Griffith, a policy associate at the Fordham Institute. “You just graduate them.”
In 11 states that provided data for 2016-2017, “many schools had high rates of chronic absenteeism – students missing 10 percent or more of the school year for any reason – while still reporting high rates of students who graduated from high school in four years,” reports Diamond.
Schools will have to track and report student absenteeism, starting in December, under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, writes Emily Richmond on the Educated Reporter blog. Educators “are trying just about everything to improve student attendance — from offering cold cash to students who show up regularly to texting warning messages to parents when their kids miss class.”
A new Attendance Works report estimates that 15 percent of students were “chronically absent” in 2015-16, missing three weeks of school or more. In about 4 in 10 high schools, 30 percent or more of students are chronically absent.
Schools are using text messaging to improve attendance rates, writes Richmond.
Teacher absenteeism also is a problem, reports the Fordham Institute.