The education press is all abuzz about “chronic absenteeism.” As is usual with conversations among the educationists and educrats, they miss the point entirely. Occasionally, they ask the right questions, but their philosophies don’t provide answers, just new psychological dilemmas.
“Skipping school” is nothing new. I vividly remember high school freshman orientation in the early seventies. Mr. Stevenson, the assistant principal, told us, “Every one of you is going to try to skip school, and I am going to catch you.”
He was not trying to appeal to our better natures. He had too much experience with freshman boys to fall into that trap. His message was clear. All of us needed to be in school; non-attendance would be punished.
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That situation has deteriorated rapidly in the intervening decades.
Defining the Issue
Gaining chronic absentee status is easy—simply stay away from school more than one day out of ten. Given the standard 180-day academic year, that means staying away for eighteen or more days—or one day every two weeks.
The U.S. Department of Education (DoE) first officially noted the problem in 2015, responding with its report Chronic Absenteeism in the Nation’s Schools: A Hidden Educational Crisis. At that point, the DoE calculated that sixteen percent of students were chronically absent. Until the COVID pandemic, the numbers stayed relatively level.
All of those indices shot way up with the mass confusion of COVID and the disastrous regime of “distance learning.” Children and parents faced padlocked schools during those COVID years. Even children with good attendance records were often disinclined to attend and participate in classes via computer. Schools had no practical way of determining student engagement. There was no effective monitoring system.
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However, if COVID was the sole cause, reopening the schools should have solved the problem or at least brought it back to pre-COVID levels. That did not happen. During the 2022-23 school year, the chronic absentee rate stood at twenty-six percent.
A March 2024 article in the New York Times describes the issues that chronic absenteeism raises, even for students who attend every day.
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“Today, student absenteeism is a leading factor hindering the nation’s recovery from pandemic learning losses, educational experts say. Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school. And a rotating cast of absent classmates can negatively affect the achievement of even students who do show up, because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track.”
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Education Week, the trade journal of school administrators, frequently discusses it. Here are a few of their headlines from the first eight months of 2024.
- “The Sticking Power of Chronic Absenteeism”—January 31.
- “Chronic Absenteeism Has Exploded. What Can Schools Do?”—February 15.
- “Chronic Absenteeism Is a Crisis. Do Parents Get It?”—March 29.
- “How We Can Fix Chronic Absenteeism”—April 30.
- “Why Chronic Absenteeism Is a Budget Problem, Too”—May 13.
- “5 Things Schools Can Do This Summer to Improve Student Attendance Next Year”—June 21.
- “The Influential Allies These Schools Are Enlisting to Boost Attendance”—July 24.
- “School Attendance Suffers as Parent Attitudes Shift”—August 28.
This list is not complete. One article, not in the list above, illustrates the issue’s core. On May 15, Education Week covered a “White House summit” on chronic absenteeism. If the article is an accurate reflection, the “summit” was long on platitudes and short on solutions.
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A participant, Robert Balfanz of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, offers four reasons that students are chronically absent:
- Barriers: older students having to care for younger siblings or take jobs, a lack of transportation to school.
- Aversion: factors like social anxiety,…increasingly true for students who took online classes during key developmental or transition years.
- Disengagement: students lack a connection to [others] at school, or don’t understand how coursework is relevant.
- Misconceptions: assumptions among parents that students should be kept at home for even minor illnesses or a perception that students can make up work later.
A White House “Summit”
Notice that the list discusses problems related to parents and individual students. It does not mention any fault within the education system.
An official White House “Fact Sheet“ listed five “strategies.”
- More accurate absenteeism reporting.
- Increasing effective communication with families, including using tactics like texting, may be part of creating what Attendance Works refers to as a “culture of attendance.”
- Visiting families at home to help find supportive solutions.
- Making school more relevant for students so they want to be there.
- Meeting the basic needs of students and families, including through investing in Full-Service Community Schools, which, among other features, connect families to supports such as health care, housing, and child care.
Again, the proposed solutions are almost all about parents. Only number four intimates that the schools might play a role in the issue.
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Notice, too, that these suggestions are stated in psychological terms.
Removing the Psychological Jargon
However, the problem is not psychological. Neither Education Week, the New York Times, nor the White House understand what my assistant principal knew over fifty years ago: the primary problem is disciplinary.
The real source of chronic absenteeism is simple. It relates directly to one of the seven deadly sins, sloth. The disinclination to action or labor combined with spiritual apathy fights against every impulse that fosters educational achievement. It is the enemy of every attempt to educate. Remaining ignorant is easy, but gathering wisdom is difficult. Fallen humanity prefers ease to difficulty. Again, this is nothing new. However, the constant presence of so-called smartphones, with their promise of endless passive entertainment, intensifies such tendencies.
Regardless of other factors, however, chronic absenteeism shares one thing in common. They see no advantage in regular school attendance. In the words of the old saying, they vote with their feet, giving school as little attention as possible and leaving it whenever the opportunity arises.
Time for an Old Solution
However, modern schools are uncomfortable with discipline and powerless in the presence of deadly sin.
No one pretends that disciplinary answers work for every student. A few children have issues that defy easy solutions. However, treating all students like inmates in a hospital for the emotionally impaired defeats any attempt to transmit knowledge to a new generation.
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If our society is as serious about education as it pretends to be, it is time to drop the psychological jargon and embrace the clear language of discipline and moral character. Expecting an adult’s discipline from a child or adolescent is foolish. Educators often refer to the innate desire of children to learn. There is truth to this, but it only applies to lessons whose value is immediately apparent. Most learning requires effort and overcoming one’s defects.
The important lessons that help children become virtuous and productive adults require hard knocks and persisitence. It requires a unified strategy that involves students, parents, teachers and school administrators.
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