Chronic absenteeism and truancy in DC
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Anonymous
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DCPS changed the whole game with their ridiculous excuses to not open schools for a year and a half. The message was clear: schooling does not matter. Who can blame parents now? |
Anonymous
This x 1 million |
Anonymous
Why are you making excuses for negligent parents? Give them a pass because of COVID which was 4 years ago. It’s OK because if a remote pandemic that has resolved , because they don’t care enough about keeping their kids in school and getting an education. People like you are part of the problem. |
Anonymous
I've had 3 employees (all women) who were illiterate. Two went to Maryland schools and graduated and one graduated from a Florida high school. Their work was embarrassing. If you don't have basic literacy you will be stuck in entry level jobs your entire life. |
Anonymous
| Did I really just read that a HS kid who is arrested and convicted of a crime be excused from truancy? |
Anonymous
+100 We make so many excuses and then wonder why people are on welfare and SNAP. We continue to allow this cycle of poverty and low expectations. |
Anonymous
I think the poster was trying to absolve the school, not the student. Schools are being faulted for not adopting policies and programs that increase attendance. But sometimes (like when the student is absent because he’s incarcerated or hospitalized), it’s beyond anything the school could possibly do. |
Anonymous
In this situation, I would think the school would disenroll the student if he is incarcerated and no longer attending. |
Anonymous
But he will presumably be attending next month? I think punative measures have limited effectiveness for truancy since the kids/parents clearly don’t want to be in/send them to school so decreasing the access or convenience or benefit of school will only makes things worse. I have no good ideas for solutions though and agree it is important to make sure kids aren’t missing a ton of school. |
Anonymous
PP here, my assumption was the kid was going to be incarcerated for more than a month. When you are convicted of a crime, I don’t know of many such short jail time of 1 month I agree that decreasing access might be an obstacle to sending them to school but consequences need to be given and that is to disenroll them from school. Lastly, it might be best that the kid not go to school and to some rehab program or center for youths. I doubt at this point he is getting anything out of school or trying and likely is a bad influence on the other kids at school. Would you want your kids to go to school with a criminal or drug dealer? |
Anonymous
A good option is if the city has a trade school that caters to convicted and trouble youths while also providing youth services and support to these kids. But the issue here is that the parents would need to consent to enroll the kid. Or with the conviction the court mandates that the kid go there after serving for a year |
Anonymous
Part of this is a function of DC's lottery system that encourages comparison of schools with extremely different populations. So a school is blamed for the high truancy rates and low test scores of its large at risk population and compared 1:1 with a school with a largly high-SES population where truancy rates are low and test scores are higher even though the school could actually be doing very little to make those things happen -- they are highly correlated with higher SES families. The truth is that there are highly effective schools in DC with very high truancy rates because "highly effective" when it comes to populations where poverty and family dysfunction is the norm may mean moving truancy rates from 70% to 50% (a huge lift actually). But when you look at it in terms of absolute comparisons between schools the school with the 50% truancy rate will be viewed as bad no matter what. What we really need to do is look ONLY at the population of schools with large at risk populations and then compare attendance and truancy. Then look at the schools that are doing better in these areas despite high at risk numbers and ask why. It might be something about the way the school encourages attendance (or punishes truancy) or it might have to do with overall culture or something specific about the family population. There may also be external factors like if a school has a high OOB percentage in addition to having high truancy rates it raises the question of whether we should be doing more to make it easier or possible for at risk kids to attend IB or nearby schools that make attendance easier on the family. I don't mean to simplify the issue -- it's pretty complex. But in DCPS often these issues get obscured by the huge disparities in the district. I mean the first page or so of comments to this thread were people arguing DCPS doens't have a truancy problem (it definitely does!) because their experience at no-doubt high-SES schools (likely in upper NW or CH) is very limited to stuff like getting flack from DCPS for their kid missing school for a family vacation. But none of the high SES schools have what would be considered low attendance or high truancy rates -- they aren't even part of this conversation really. But that's the limited experience of a lot of posters as well as unfortunately a lot of policy makers. Too few people in positions of authority really understand the challenges of schools serving large at risk populations in DC. |
Anonymous
+1. Growing up, my school had classes for trade work (carpentry, auto repair, etc) and allowed students to "co op" for part of the day. They got those kids training in something useful, they got to make some extra $$, and the kids got an incentive to show up. The idea that everyone needs college prep courses is a complete failure and actually counterproductive. |
Anonymous
DP. PP isn't excusing the parents' behavior. The point is, that even among negligent parents, there used to be a societal norm that getting up and going to school every day was important for children (and required by law). Even people who were lousy parents by any standard would often be able to make that happen. However, we (as a society, in certain parts of the country) told those parents that missing 18 months of school was not a problem. Assuaging those with the flimsiest theories of risk were more important that children attending school (and let's face it, these kids that aren't going to school now didn't actually participate in remote class work). Society lost the "school attendance is important" norm. Parents got used to not having to bother, and they were told it was all going to be fine. You're going to have to do something dramatic to convince them otherwise, especially now their kids are years behind and not capable of catching up on their own. |
Anonymous
This. All of it. It's the bolded poster above who's part of the problem. |