November 9th, 2010

Incentivizing Attendance: Should We Reward Kids for Coming to School?

As part of its chronic absence initiative, New York City this week joined with Old Navy to give winter coats and $50 gift cards to the 300 students who had shown the most improved attendance in 25 pilot schools. The idea drew negative reviews from a New York-based parenting blog where a mother scoffed at the effort, saying “it hardly seems like $15,000 worth of free clothes is going to save at-risk youth.”

Sure, but what role should incentives play in getting kids to come to school? And what are the best sort of incentives to offer?

Some schools, of course, have tried giving students cash for attending school and doing well. These include the esteemed Harlem Children’s Zone and its Promise Academy Charter Schools, where high school students can earn as much as $120  a month.

Founder Geoffrey Canada explained it this way in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last year: “People say, ‘Well Geoff, look, don’t you want kids to do it for the intrinsic value?’ Sure, I’d love them to do it for the intrinsic value. And until then, I’d love them to do it for money. I just want them to do it.”

Plenty of schools offer incentives that don’t involve money. Burton Elementary School in Grand Rapids, Mich., rewards kids with ice cream socials and their pictures on the school television after one month of perfect attendance. Gladden Middle School in Murray County, Ga., enters students with two or fewer absences per semester  in a drawing for prizes. And Creekview High School in Cherokee County, Ga., gives 10 points on each of their final exams to students who miss two or fewer days in a semester.

Our Attendance Counts handout on incentives provides these simple guidelines:

• Incentives are most effective when part of a comprehensive approach that includes outreach to families with more significant challenges to attendance.   
• Simple rewards—recognition from peers and the school through certificates or assemblies, extra recess time, homework passes even dancing in the hallways–go a long way toward motivating students.
•  Student can often tell us what they consider a meaningful incentive.  
• Interclass competition is a powerful motivator.  
• Avoid recognizing only perfect attendance.  Students should be rewarded for improved attendance, as well.
•  Reward timeliness not just showing up to school.  
•  Send home information highlighting both the value of attendance and incentives and the consequences of poor attendance. 

Feel free to use our handout, giving proper credit to Attendance Counts.

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October 29th, 2010

For City Year, Good Attendance Starts with Hello!

The simple act of saying good morning to every student is an effective start toward  increasing attendance and ultimately reducing drop-out rates for at-risk schoolchildren. It’s an approach used by City Year, a national nonprofit that places AmeriCorps members ages 17 to 24 in 160 high-need schools in 20 U.S. cities including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Little Rock. The greeting is just one part of a broad range of efforts that are helping to keep kids in school and on track to graduate.

As part of City Year’s Attendance Initiative, each student is individually welcomed by corps members every morning as they arrive at school.  “We’re personalizing the school environment,” says Jeff Jablow, City Year’s vice president of strategy and operations.  “Students know that there is someone waiting to greet them by name every morning, who cares about them, and who will support them throughout the day.”

City Year’s work with 3^rd through 9^th graders is guided by a groundbreaking 2006 study from Johns Hopkins University that found that if 6th-grade students demonstrated “early warning indicators” – poor attendance, behavior issues, and low achievement in math and English coursework – their chances of graduating from high school plummeted to 25 percent.  City Year focuses its work on providing interventions to ensure students reach the 10^th grade without exhibiting the “early warning indicators,” which increases their chances of graduating on time to 75 percent.

The City Year team of eight to 20 corps members works with school staff to bolster student support from the beginning of the school day, through classes and then through afterschool. Students benefit from near peer relationships with the City Year members, learning from the young adult tutors and mentors, while teachers and principals benefit from having a second team of adults in the classroom and throughout the school.

Those tutors receive extensive training in how to provide academic support to students as well. The Walmart Foundation awarded City Year $1.2 million earlier this year to establish a literacy training academy to give 2,000 City Year volunteers the skills and resources they need to help struggling readers. Once they complete the training, those tutors will work with more than 45,000 public school students to help them excel during the next school year.

The City Year strategy has yielded some promising trends.  Last year, more than half of the students who were below 90 percent in average daily attendance (ADA) in the fall, who received attendance coaching from City Year corps members, achieved over 90 percent ADA by the spring.  Similar results were seen among students with ADA less than 80 percent in the fall achieving ADA over 80 percent in the spring.

In the Diplomas Now collaboration with City Year, Communities In Schools and Talent Development, one year of intervention (2009 –2010) in participating Philadelphia middle schools achieved significant results: 

• 55 percent reduction in students with less than 80 percent attendance
• 52 percent reduction in students receiving three or more citations for behavior
• 78 percent reduction in students failing English
• 82 percent reduction in students failing math

City Year corps members began the morning greeting two years ago.  As soon as a child is identified as being absent, the corps members get to work, making phone calls to find the student.  Beyond getting kids to school, the corps members also work with teachers to provide attendance and academic coaching and make sure that the students who are absent don’t fall behind. Corps members also call homes to  praise students’ performance,  as part of an effort to engage parents in their children’s education.  Other Attendance Initiative elements include identifying and working with students most at risk for absences and leading school-wide attendance incentive programs and recognition events.

City Year has set a challenge to expand its work to reach half of all the off-track students in the 20 cities where they operate.  To reach this milestone, City Year is working with schools, districts, elected officials, stakeholders and the private sector to increase the number of corps members from 1,700 to 6,000.

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October 21st, 2010

San Diego County School Improves Attendance with Calendar, Incentives

We’re always excited to hear about school districts that are using chronic absence data strategically to improve attendance. Today, we look at the Julian Union School District in San Diego County. One look at the attendance analysis told district leaders they had a problem: 37 percent of students at the district’s only elementary school were missing too much school in the 2007-2008 academic year. Now, that figure is below 5 percent. At the same time, test scores rose.

The first step to turning around this trend was looking at the data produced by the San Diego Children’s Initiative which collected statistics from Julian to examine poor attendance in its countywide Report Card on Children and Families .  The report card examines how many students miss 5 percent of school days, or about nine days a year.  Because they want to promote prevention, the Children’s Initiative sets a more stringent definition of poor attendance.

 The Children’s Initiative then worked with the superintendent and the school principal to develop an action plan based on focus groups with school staff and parents. They identified several barriers to good attendance, including transportation hassles with half-day kindergarten, vacation schedules that didn’t align with the high school district’s calendar and the extended vacations traditionally taken by Latino families at Christmas. To address these they:

• Synchronized the elementary school calendar with the high school district so families did not miss school because their children had different vacation days.
• Extended the winter break to three weeks to accommodate the needs of the Latino families.
• Reinstated an incentive program for on-time attendance that takes advantage of the motivation created by interclass competition. The school promised a pizza party to the first class with enough days of perfect attendance to spell out the words “Perfect Punctuality.”
• Provided information on attendance as a prominent component of conversations and meetings with parents as well as the school newsletter. A large wooden sign indicating whether attendance is improving greets everyone who enters the school.

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