In New Orleans, the nation’s first all-charter district, a quarter of students are “chronically absent.”
But help is on the way! A new initiative, funded by the DeVos Foundation and the Grand Rapids public Schools, will educate students and parents about why it is a very bad idea to miss school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Brilliant. They’re going to have a big (and undoubtedly expensive) initiative to inform and encourage students to NOT be absent more than 5 days. Wouldn’t want to reward positive behavior though. You know: stickers, stars, certificates. And the message that coming to school every day makes you a winner rather than “don’t be absent much”. Lord. None of these people should be anywhere near children.
Best thing to happen for Louisiana would be for John White to be permanently absent.
LOL. Yes.
We’ve got to elect enough state education board members willing to fire John White…here’s a candidate willing to do it…http://electdrwyatt.com/
My son’s school district has been working on this for a decade without the help of ed reform or ed reformers. I think a lot of public schools work on it- in this area, anyway. It’s been a focus for years and they have had some success.
But Betsy DeVos wouldn’t know that, of course, given her complete lack of interest in public schools, public school students and anything practical or useful for them, other than transferring to a charter or private school.
Based on reports about DeVos and commitment to work, is she the best person to lead the initiative?
I feel like “getting kids to school consistently” is too mundane for ed reformers. Nothing requiring their unique transformational brilliance there!
Maybe they start adding some practical value after they succeed in privatizing the entire system, like they have in New Orleans. The “secret sauce” doesn’t produce the magic solutions of all problems so they have to start actually contributing something.
New Orleans is just a school system now and so it has all the problems of public school systems all over.
Public schools actively reach out absentee students by contacting parents and sending out social workers or attendance officers. I doubt a marketing campaign from DeVos will have much impact.
and “getting kids to school” is not just a mundane action, it is such a truly essential part of bringing success. More proof that the “reformers” have little interest in actually seeing kids succeed.
I think the proliferation of charter schools has produced one indirect benefit to public schools- when a system reaches X number of charters and all the same problems all public schools have pop up, ed reformers all of a sudden become very open-minded about the possibility that it might not all be the fault of the school.
Their eyes are magically opened to multi-faceted, nuanced factors outside of schools, once we’re talking about charter schools.
Charter supporters in Ohio sound like public school supporters a decade ago. “We have all these issues! We need more funding! Wow- this is REALLY hard!” 🙂
It’s gratifying a little, I admit. So it WASN’T just greedy union members and status quo, blah, blah blah? It wasn’t just a matter of “high expectations”? Do tell.
In NOLA, the “reformers” blame the lack of teacher training and the lack of a rigorous curriculum, not their ideas.
Chiara: love this post.
If I had to guess I would say that New Orleans is a spread-out city and fragmenting and privatizing their school system makes getting them to tens of different schools all over the city much more complicated and expensive.
But, again, these are the mundane concerns of the status quo and it’s below the ed reform pay grade. They’re idea people! Not school bus people! That’s status quo stuff. Very 20th century.
Just say no absences! That should totally do it.
Nancy Reagan stopped the drug crisis didn’t she, by “Just Say No.”
Like Melania’s “Be Best.” I think she meant “Be Beast.”
LMAO!
Do not forget DARE to do drugs or whatever that initiative preached to the kids.
Common Core, NGSS and other skills-focused curricula repel kids. Fix the curriculum and we’ll start to fix absenteeism.
I agree that standardized testing and curricula are repellent, but I disagree that jettisoning them will make chronic absenteeism go away. Chronic absenteeism is usually yet another symptom of poverty. When I taught in South Los Angeles, I had students who missed school regularly to raise their younger siblings while their parents worked without access to free child care, or to hustle some extra cash to help their families. Privatizing and/or eliminating the social safety net doesn’t solve those problems, but makes them worse. The charter sycophants just wind up, as in NOLA, telling everyone to have more grit while millionaires suck all the remaining money out of starved communities. The only viable solution to chronic absenteeism is wealth equality, and the only way to strive for equality is to legislate higher wages and taxes for more social services. So much for charter magic snake oil! Privatizing New Orleans: epic fail.
I agree that bad curriculum is not the only cause. Many causes are beyond a school’s control. What do you think about CA’s new scorecard (the “dashboard”) that makes absenteeism one of the main determinants of school quality?
Rating school quality is wrong. I think California is trying with the dashboard to tame and overcome an unjust federal law. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act wrongly and wrongfully requires school ratings, and California is rightly and rightfully mitigating the use of single digit or letter grade ratings and overuse of test scores with the more comprehensive (and complicated) dashboard. Making absenteeism part of the dashboard makes as much sense as using test scores as part of the dashboard, but the federal government is forcing us to use something, so why not absenteeism combined with other “metrics”? It makes as much sense as including the number of students who dress for p.e., but we have to do something to kiss Betsy DeVos’ behind.
The fact is that public schools have long had problems with absenteeism. There were solutions that people tried that were abhorrent and solutions that were good. One solution came from my wife’s uncle Ira, now departed some twenty years ago. Uncle Ira was on the Burma road during WWII. He grew up impoverished in the town of Mitchell, NE where his family lived in the 1930s for a time in a wall tent. Ira was known to exaggerate a story, so watch out.
The story was that there was a boy who was uncommonly fond of skipping school to go down to the Platte River fishing. For any of you who have never seen the Platte, you need to know that the river is mostly a meandering, flat body of water, lazily making its way to the east along the route of the Overland Trail in the mid nineteenth century. Periodically stopping to deposit itself into pools three or four feet deep, it is mostly three inches to a foot deep flowing quietly through the mud.
This boy was on the bank of one of these deep pools attempting to lure the fish with his bait one day when he spied the approaching Bull Anderson, principal of thlocal high school. Anderson was called bull because he was one of those former football coaches who had neck muscles that made him appear to be without a neck. He was striding down the road toward the Platte with authority and a short length of rubber hose.
Seeing this reality, it seemed to the enterprising fisherman that the deeper pools in the middle of the river might afford better protection from the angry principal in his three piece suit, so he waded out into the river to escape. Bull Anderson waded in after him and delivered a fierce thrashing with the hose.
Of course the moral of the tale, to hear Uncle Ira, was that what the kids need is a good beating so they will straighten up.
Well, now that is a good story. For me it serves to illustrate that public school people were trying to solve problems one way or another long before modern purveyors of solutions both carrot and stick, certainly long before the modern age of education reform.
Is state board member (favorite of the charter schools), Kira Orange Jones, chronically absent from meetings or, is she an example of good behavior to model?
Maybe the DeVos initiative could start at the top.
“A new initiative, funded by the DeVos Foundation and the Grand Rapids public Schools, will educate students and parents about why it is a very bad idea to miss school.”
Did you hear my very loud explosion of laugher a moment ago when I read this?
Sadly, sometimes those things backfire. My district tried the letter approach when students were absent a lot.
One parent, whose daughter had a massive concussion, started cancelling her daughter’s appointments because of the letter, which vaguely threatened “additional measures” would be done if she continued to be absent.
BUT, the student NEEDED those appointment so that she could heal.
That was one of several other problems with that situation, which the district ditched after two years.
Poor kids. I wouldn’t want to spend my days in a charter school either. Maybe Ms. DeVos should try, challenging as it might be for her, to think about why children in New Orleans don’t want to attend their charter schools.
And maybe some brave soul can try to teach Ms. DeVos and the good people at her foundation the difference between “less” and “fewer.” They mean “Fewer than five,” of course.
DeVos can’t be taught if she doesn’t show up for instruction. “Unexcused Absences: DeVos Calendar Shows Frequent Days Off”(American Oversight)
Even if DeVos showed up for instruction, no matter how hard the teachers worked to help her learn, since she already thinks she knows everything, she still would be unable to learn anything rational.
I think DeVos and the other billionaires funding the destruction of public schools and the rest of the public sector are incapable of leaving their corrupt bubble built from greed to learn anything.
Most public school teachers know that if a child doesn’t want to learn, for whatever reason, no matter how hard the teacher works, that child will learn little or nothing and DeVos doesn’t even qualify to be a child let alone a rational adult.