Average daily attendance in
Louisiana public schools is lower than it should be. This is not a good thing.
Poor school attendance hurts not only the child who misses too much instruction
-- it hurts the whole school.
How? When children don’t come to school, teachers
must go back and re-teach significant chunks of material – making it hard for
those who do come to school every day to learn as much as they should.
True, children who miss too many days receive makeup instruction. It is
also true that “recovery instruction time” costs our school extra money.
Recovery instruction time rarely brings a child with chronic absenteeism up to
“grade level expectations.”
There’s no substitute for
showing up and participating in class when it comes to being successful on
tests. But, showing up is also a basic work skill that must be learned and
practiced if our youth are to be properly prepared for the adult world of work.
Louisiana state laws seem
harsh when it comes to punishing parents who allow their children to stay home
too often without valid excuses. Some school districts in Louisiana use the
courts as a remedy, because it is the only tool available at this time to pressure
parents to send their children to school once absenteeism has gotten out of
hand. Parents can be fined or jailed for allowing their children to be chronically
absent without valid excuses.
But, we need alternative
strategies to solve the problem of chronic school absenteeism -- strategies
that directly focus on interventions that will promote daily student attendance
and prevent court actions later on.
Teachers should not be
blamed when children fail to come to school, so, it seems fair that the failing
grades of chronically absent students are not counted against them in their
teacher evaluations.
But, when chronic absentee
test scores are not counted in teacher evaluations, the problem of chronic absenteeism
is temporarily avoided, not solved. A school’s performance score will be lower
when there is chronic absenteeism because the students who don’t come to school
naturally score lower on state tests. Until we fix our state evaluation system,
all of our students –those who come to school and those who don’t are included
in our school performance score. Our
school reputation is hurt by those who don’t come to school.
How do we solve this problem
of excessive student absenteeism? For
one thing, we need to identify this root cause of truancy in Louisiana that is often
ignored.
Presently, school attendance rates are lower
in Louisiana because there are no immediate and direct consequences for any
school or school district that tolerates high rates of truancy. Lower school
performance scores happen so late in the education cycle that they are as
useful as beating a dead horse.
School districts must be
incentivized to address the problem of chronic absenteeism as early as possible
so that interventions focus on correcting absenteeism before it gets out of
hand.
Louisiana schools are funded
annually for every student who is enrolled on a particular day in October.
Whether or not a child comes to school for the remainder of the year, if that
child is enrolled in the school on the designated head count day in October,
the school is paid in full for the year for that child.
The same thing happens for
online public schools. K-12, INC and other “approved” online schools receive
annualized payments whether or not they teach students for a full year. We would be better off ensuring that educational
services were actually delivered before sending our annual state tax dollars to
any K-12 teaching institution.
Other states tackled their
chronic low attendance problems by changing school payment formulae from a
single head count day once per year to what is called “Average Daily
Membership,” or ADM.
With the ADM model, school
districts receive funds for the days when students actually attend classes
throughout the year, rather than for just one day, annual head count day.
It is too easy for busy
administrators to defer action when a student is chronically absent in a
funding system that pays the district in full using the annual headcount
method. The ADM model would ensure that school administrators and school board members
take the issue of chronic absenteeism seriously by managing the daily attendance
of all students enrolled in their schools on a daily basis – not waiting to
react until a child’s absenteeism is out of control.
Money talks in our society.
But, money should also walk -- especially when school districts, charter
schools, and online K-12 alternative schools cannot demonstrate they did
everything in their power to work with parents to get their children to school
every day as the law requires.
Copyright July 30, 2014
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