*Today I received an email from the Association of American Educators seeking input on the nationwide problem of chronic absenteeism. I wrote what follows. Before reading, understand my criticism is directed at the entire education system, not my own district. Even the anecdotes described are not intended to criticize my district, as the issues described were essentially prescribed by politicians and policymakers far above the school district level.
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It's a serious problem, perhaps the most serious problem we face in education today. How can we teach students who don't show up? Who don't make up missed work? Who don't take advantage of the vast resources available to help them learn when they aren't in class? Because that's where we are. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10% of class days, is making it virtually impossible to educate this post-Covid generation.
We all wring our hands and ask why? Why don't kids come to school anymore? To me the answer is simple.
We taught them school wasn't important, that attending school isn't important. We closed down the schools when there were only a handful of Covid cases in the US, supposedly to save lives. But we didn't save lives. People died and kept dying.
On top of that, we gave them grades, credits, and promoted them for work they weren't required to do. We trained them to believe that grades are just arbitrarily assigned with nothing really required. We convinced them there's no such thing as EARNING a grade, and that it didn't matter if they learned.
Then, when we "came back," we sent them home for 14 DAYS if they heard the word Covid, or saw someone on TV with Covid. EVEN. WHEN. THEY. WERE. NOT. SICK! And did we require them to learn while they were gone? NO! I actually got in trouble for broadcasting my classes to my quarantined kids SO THEY COULD CONTINUE TO LEARN! I was banned from streaming my lessons live after my first round of quarantined students proved that it worked! They tuned in to join the lesson, asked questions, and participated in class work from home. They were gone for two weeks, but came back and performed normally on the test without missing a beat. And I got scolded and was prohibited from continuing the practice. Then those kids were quarantined over and over and over again, but no longer allowed to learn.
In all of that, we forced their parents to take off work to care for them and watch them. So doing, we trained the parents to think what we're teaching doesn't matter either. We convinced parents their kids can succeed without coming to school. We convinced parents that it's no big deal if kids miss school.
Now we want them to return to their pre-Covid behaviors, as if they even remember what the pre-Covid world looked and felt like. My juniors were in the 7th grade when we sent them home. My seniors in the 8th grade. They don't have any idea what high school was like--the expectations or the workload--before Covid.
Kids aren't the problem. They are what we made them. We taught them and their parents school isn't important, that what we offer them isn't important. We created this mess and now we're paying the price. Now the education industry wants to solve this problem we created. The question is, how?
We should start by admitting our mistakes and apologizing to parents and students for our failures during Covid.
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