December 6th, 2010

Going Punitive: Does it Improve Attendance?

We’re often asked do punitive measures improve school attendance?

The Vera Institute took a look at the situation in New York state, where a child’s truancy can lead to educational neglect charges against the parents. The report, Getting Teenager Back to School: Rethinking New York State’s Response to Chronic Absence, found that these neglect charges were gumming up the child welfare system without demonstrating any results.

According to the report:  

The child protective system is not well equipped to help teenagers improve their school attendance. Nonetheless, educational-neglect reports involving teens consume a large portion of the child protective system’s resources and are diverting the system’s attention from children with more serious safety and neglect issues. The most common responses to teenage chronic absence around the country are punitive, contrary to what adolescent development and school engagement research tell us about what motivates teens to go to school.

The report further points out that the ultimate penalty in a neglect case is moving the student into foster care. But foster children typically have high rates of chronic absence.

In an Associated Press story about the report, a spokesman for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was not ready to “take parents off the hook for their children’s behavior.

 “The mayor’s office believes that reports of educational neglect in children over 12 years of age can lead to underlying issues of abuse and neglect for both the student in question and for his or her younger siblings.”

Our view is that there is a place for punitive measures for parents and students in the attendance continuum, but only after many, many positive interventions. That includes:

• broad strokes emphasizing to students and parents just how important attending school is to academic achievement
• incentives that reward students for coming to school and improving their attendance
• regular outreach and communications with parents when absences occur
• intervention from health and social services providers when necessary

 Only after all these efforts fail should the case go to the courts.

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November 30th, 2010

Early Attention to Chronic Absence Can Help Create Grad Nation

Grad Nation, a part of Americas Promise Alliance, released a powerful report today showing the progress made in reducing the number of high school dropouts and the number of schools characterized as “dropout factories.”

 Bob Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins University researcher who coined the phrase dropout factory and co-authored the report, discussed statistics showing there are now 261 fewer high schools with that dubious distinction. Tennessee and New York have been particularly effective in increasing graduation rates.

 But the report is quick to point out that we have a long way to go toward achieving their goals of a 90 percent graduation rate nationally by 2020. To make that happen, they’re launching a “Civic Marshall Plan.” And they’re looking beyond high schools to middle and elementary schools. After all, the class of 2020 is in 3rd grade right now. It will take attention to reading proficiency and chronic absenteeism to ensure they make it to graduation day, the report says.

 The Civic Marshall Plan calls for starting early, tracking the 3.7 million students in that class, said John Bridgeland of Civic Enterprises, a co-author of the report. That means early warning systems with students supports to reduce chronic absence by third and fourth grade. And it means “substantially increasing the number of struggling students reading at grade level by fifth grade.”

 The connections to Attendance Counts and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading go beyond this emphasis on chronic absenteeism and reading proficiency. Grad Nation is showing what can happen when we shine a spotlight on a problem and work collaboratively to solve it. 

 Allen Bourff, superintendent of the Richmond Community Schools in Indiana, spoke at today’s event about his anger when one of his high schools showed up on Balfanz’s list of dropout factories. But after talking with the Hopkins researcher, he asked for his help.

 “The conversation in our community changed,” Bourff said. “Students even in kindergarten started talking about the importance of a high school diploma. We created a graduation meter and kept it in front of everyone.” Now Richmond’s graduation rate has climbed to 83 percent.

Balfanz’s ideas are implemented in a program called Diplomas Now, which brings together his Talent Development tenets for curriculum and instruction, “near peer” mentors from City Year and social service interventions coordinated through Communities in Schools. Click here to see a CBS Evening News segment on Diplomas Now.

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November 13th, 2010

Why Early Absences Hit Low-Income Kids Harder

Researchers have long recognized  the connection between children’s socio-economic status and their cognitive abilities. A new study looks at the extent to which school absences in the early grades exacerbate these class differences and fuel the nagging achievement gap.

The findings, put simply, are that low-income children are more likely to be adversely affected by absences because they miss out on time in a language-rich environment, i.e. school.

Researcher Douglas D. Ready of the Teachers College at Columbia University explains why: Lower-income children typically start kindergarten with fewer literacy skills than their more affluent peers. But kindergarten and 1st gradecan be greatequalizers, allowing these children to close some of the gap. If they come to school, that is. Children who miss too much school are missing out on that chance to catch up.

This is particularly true in reading, since much of the focus in the early grades is on literacy skills. Ready’s research found that those with poor attendance rates, missing 10 days or more, gained roughly 14 percent fewer literacy skills in kindergarten than those with average attendance rates. And the negative impact of the missed days was 75 percent greater for a low-income child than for one from an average-income family.

In other words, school matters more for poor children. Ready draws the natural corollary to the summer learning loss, another phenomenon that affects poor kids more significantly and exacerbates the achievement gap. The prescription for both problems is the same: spend more time on task.

Attendance Counts is trying to achieve that, by pushing for better practice and policy to reduce chronic absence, while the National Summer Learning Association works to combat the “summer slide.”

Ready’s work, using an analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s ECLS-K longitudinal student data base, also found that low-children were more likely to rack up absences than their peers. Consider:

• More than one out of three children with poor attendance in kindergarten and first-grade lived in a single-parent home, compared to less than a quarter of those with average or good attendance.
• Students with poor attendance were more likely to speak a language other than English at home

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