Reply to Who leaked the MCPS attendance documents to the Washington Post?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Anonymous wrote:
Start by demanding that family vacations are not excused regardless of the socioeconomic status of the family. Write letters to the BOE and Smith on this issue specifically. Ask why a week at Disney is an educational experience, but attending the funeral of a cousin is an excused absence.

Stop deflecting. Neither a funeral or a week at Disney would add up to 47 unexcused absences.

47 days is 9 weeks. 9 weeks. Who goes on vacation or goes to a funeral for 9 weeks?

47 unexcused absences is 47 classes. My kid's high school has 7 classes per day. So 7 days of school. Not 9 weeks of school.[/quote]

The article HEADLINE is [b]missing 47 DAYS OF ENGLISH[/b]. This is 9 weeks of a core class. Do you really think that these kids are hustling it in for math on those days? No.

This isn't about trips [b]and it isn't happening at wealthy schools.[/b] It isn't a front office staff typing something in incorrectly. Einstein is failing large numbers of kids and hiding it to keep their numbers up. [/quote]
The heck it's not. It is just students and parents at wealthy schools (and UMC students in general) know how to play the game and write excused notes all the time. I have kids that are routinely absent one or two days per week the entire year. (That'll add up to more than 40.) Strangely, they seem to fall on days of big quizzes and tests. Or there are the students who are doing to many activities and routinely take a day or two off every couple of weeks to catch up. And there are the kids who feel a little stressed out by school and find that they can get their friends to tell them what happened in class and do enough self-studying while they are home to keep up. The biggest problem I have with the Washington Post article is that it misses the actual scope of the problem by not including excused absences, and ignores the data that came out with the Maryland school report cards that shows the extent of chronic absences (which only includes full days).

Our current system of high school and awarding high school diplomas was based on a model of school attendance to gain access to information that could not readily be obtained elsewhere from last century. Ever since the internet and the readily available information on everything, the actual need to go to school to learn has been reduced. I can't believe one of our own board members said "It seems incongruous that you could pass high school math and not be there". Clearly she has never heard about Khan Academy.

We are really at the point where we need different types of diplomas that match the learning needs and desires of students. Some need a more traditional approach for a college ready educational experience. Some would do better with a self paced, online, demonstration of mastery process. And some would do best with a minimal, just meeting the graduation requirements diploma (22.5 credits only, thank you). Getting hung up on attendance accounting right now is missing the bigger, overall problem.[/quote]

There’s a lot of truth in that post. I’m an educator and actually don’t have a problem with kids occasionally taking a mental health day or a day to catch up. They’re people, just like us. But I agree that it’s the UMC families who know how to work the system. [/quote]

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