A Response to the NYT Piece on Chronic Absenteeism
A Response to the NYT Piece on Chronic Absenteeism
Pizza incentives, learning outside of school, and other thoughts.
When I was a principal, I had an attendance coach. The coach would show up at my school unannounced, request a meeting with me, and I’d begrudgingly agree (I dislike unplanned meetings…and meetings in general?). The coach would ask how attendance was going, I’d say, “Not good enough,” they’d say, “Ok, so how are you going to make it better?” I’d reply, “I don’t know, isn’t your role as coach to help me with ideas?” and they’d say, “How about a pizza party incentive?”
In the history of US K-12 public education, an untold number of pizzas have been baked and served in the name of improving student attendance. And yet, as The New York Times reported last week (and again on their podcast yesterday), chronic absenteeism has reached an unacceptable peak (Maybe Taki’s would be a better incentive?) I’m grateful for The Times bringing this to the public’s attention. Even so, I have some thoughts about the article.
The trends suggest that something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school, in ways that may be long lasting.
Something fundamental has shifted in society more broadly. Schools reflect a society and its values. In the US, fewer workers go into the office. We order more takeout, go to the movies less often, and abuse drugs more frequently.
The habit of daily attendance — and many families’ trust — was severed when schools shuttered in spring 2020.
This is a bit of editorializing. We can’t say from this data that families no longer trust schools as a result of the pandemic. There is data from Pew Research that suggests the US citizenry has less faith in the institution of education, but it doesn’t point to causality. It could be COVID or it could be the social media algorithms that feed a distorted view of education or the politicians who’ve been stoking the flames of culture wars via book bans and anti-CRT laws.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school.
This just isn’t true. It assumes a lot, including that “learning” can only be demonstrated on standardized tests, which are used to measure learning loss and learning recovery.
In a chapter called “The Future of Learning is Not the Future of Schooling,” from the book Redefining Education, Professors Liz City, Richard Elmore, and Doug Lynch write about schools as “portals to learning.” “One way to view school,” they write, “is as a portal through which some combination of information, knowledge, and learning flows.” As the amount of information to be learned grows, they argue, schools look proportionally small and inefficient in allowing that information to “pass through” the portal to students. Hence their conclusion that “the future of learning is not the future of schooling.”
It made me think about AOL. Back in the early 2000s, American Online was the de facto portal to the internet. You got your CD-ROM with 500 free hours in the mail, listened to the annoying beeps and scratches of the dial-up modem, and were inevitably greeted with the iconic “You’ve got mail!” alert. But as the internet grew and expanded, that portal was far too small and inefficient in allowing the public to access the internet. Maybe school as we know it is becoming AOL.
It’s absolutely true that students can learn when they’re not at school. I didn’t have any grad school classes last Friday and I still learned a lot. I taught my 4yo to ride his bike and he spends 30 minutes or so each week, at home, learning how to read (this is the book to use if you have a 3-5yo and want to teach them how to read). Plenty of students learn from TV, social media, their families, and their friends.
Beyond that, there’s plenty of evidence from around the world that even when we get students physically into school, they’re not learning as much as we’d like. The Rebirth of Education highlights this tension between “schooling” and “learning” by sharing data from developing countries, where just getting students into school had long been the aim since the United Nations declared universal elementary education a goal for all nations. The world expanded access to schooling at a dramatic rate — but learning, at least as measured by tests, didn’t expand at the same rate.
Of course I still want students in school. Schools are important for building community and socializing. As a society, we have fewer and fewer reasons to gather in community: we increasingly watch movies at home, exercise at home, shop online and work from home. Schools are one of the last bastions of gathering together in diverse spaces. A better way to phrase what the NYT was trying to say might be, “Students learn differently (and maybe more) when they are in school.”
But hybrid culture is here to stay. The Times piece rightly connects the rise of hybrid work to the increase of absenteeism — if workers want the opportunity to stay home a few days, it makes sense that students would as well. Many students probably see their parents doing work and college from home and think, “Why can’t I do that?!” As the article also says, hybrid workers can also take more vacations, which means pulling their kids from school.
Districts alone cannot solve this problem — they’re already dealing with mental health issues, a rise in disciplinary issues, and trying to figure out AI’s role in education. But they can start by beefing up their online learning management systems (LMSs). Even in grad school, where all my classes use Canvas, the use varies from class to class. At best, some instructors embed all the instructional content, including quizzes, exams, and assignments, right on Canvas. At worst, some instructors just post their syllabus. In an ideal world, teachers would recreate their entire courses on an LMS so students could complete the learning remotely.
I’m skeptical of the idea, mentioned in the article, that more engaging lessons will miraculously entice students back to school. A similar strategy hasn’t encouraged workers to voluntarily return to the office — only mandates have been effective. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have good lessons and incentives, and this issue is more complex than just straightforward solutions suggest. Perhaps if schools were serving DeLorenzo’s pies (the best and don’t bark at me about this), food incentives alone could be the antidote to chronic absenteeism. My hunch, though, is that there’s no amount of lackluster pizza (the standard, overly-cheesed and under-sauced slab that most strip mall shops in the country serves) that can bring students back to school en masse.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!