A Modest Proposal: Absenteeism In The Public Schools

Great Debates
1

As it is now, most places, schooling one’s children is mandatory. Kids need an education. If you have kids, you must either send them to public school, or furnish proof that you’re either sending them to private school or homeschooling them.

I agree with this. Who wants stupid kids?

But an issue has arisen: what do you do when the kids say “No?”

There are a great many single parents out there who are having trouble with their teenage kids. Kid won’t go to school. And short of Mom putting her life on hold to escort the little monster, she can’t MAKE him go. And every day that kid won’t go to school, the school informs the truant officer, and Mom gets a ticket. Tickets mean fines. So Mom and the whole family are being punished financially because this one kid is a rotten little …

Well, you get the idea. And I understand it’s becoming an issue, some places. No one seems to know what to do about this. Can’t punish the kids. Don’t want to punish the adults. Can’t penalize the voters. I mean, with a traffic fine, well, you CHOSE to exceed the speed limit or run that red light. But how fair is it to penalize you for something you apparently cannot control?

When I was a kid, my parents MADE me go to school. No choice. My parents exerted firm control over me when I lived at home. But as time marches on, I find more and more parents who are up in arms. They can’t control their children! And in some ways, it seems to be perpetuated by society. Can’t beat the kid; Child Protective Services will bust you. And for some reason, there are a few kids who just won’t drop into line by having their Xboxes confiscated, their clothing narrowed down to uniforms, their bedrooms stripped to a blanket, mattress, and nightlight. Today, we have a few willful children who simply refuse to obey, no matter what.

I know. I’ve had to teach a few. They don’t teach well, because if they won’t listen to their parents, why the hell should they listen to ME? But yet, the schools are responsible for hordes of these little monsters. It’s their* right.* And their parents are very big on that. It means that from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, the parents either have a little peace and quiet, or some time to go earn a living, or both. At public expense.

I think it’s time to shuffle the cups on this one. It isn’t the best solution.

Answer: **eliminate compulsory schooling. **

Starting on (thus and such a date), at the beginning of a school year, every American citizen will have the right to fourteen years of public education. Period. Years already taken will count. A year may be spent on kindergarten, or not, at the parents’ option. In addition, twice annually, standardized tests are currently held in most states to test the kids. Why not let a kid test to graduate? If a ninth grader already can pass the Senior Exams, give him his diploma and let him get on with his life. Why waste his time and our resources teaching him stuff he already knows?

So, if your child simply chooses not to go to school, fine. No more public punishments, no more probation, no more fines. Hellwiddim. Let him get in all the trouble he likes; we have police, we have jails. Let him get a job, if he likes (and if he can, subject to child labor laws). Let him learn what he can do without an education. If he drops out in ninth grade, *let him be a loser. Let him learn the hard way. * If he chooses to return to school at age 25, let’s say, (hell, even age fifty or more,) he has that right, subject to existing laws and regulations on his behavior (he’s still got to stay in dress code, for example).

Twelve years. With one extra year for kindergarten, and ANOTHER extra year for those of us who screw up. Once. When your fourteen years are done, you have lost your right to a free, appropriate public education. You’re done. You have the option to try for a GED at your own expense. If, however, you SUCCEED, game over. You win. Diploma awarded, you pass Go, you get your two hundred Monopoly dollars.

And just for giggles, you have the option to buy additional years. If you screwed up two years, and you don’t have enough free ones? Buy one. Earn money and pay tuition, like a college student. Extra funding for education!

This plan has loads of advantages. It means the schools aren’t wasting time, energy, money, and resources on children who refuse to be educated, leaving more for those who want it. It also means that future classrooms will have more adult students who WANT their education, who VALUE it, and will therefore help the teacher police the classroom and keep order, as well as providing valuable role models and advice for younger kids (“You think you wanna drop out? You think I’m cool 'cause I dropped out? You don’t know dick, kid, and this is why…”)

Providing a free public education for every American is a fine and noble goal, worthy of our great nation. Making it compulsory, on the other hand, makes people value it less.

2

I like it. And it certainly beats the crap out of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”. (That guy was looney-tunes.)

Unfortunately, like most other sweeping proposals that make at least some sense, it stands very little chance of coming to fruition. As such, it probably must be consigned to the same fictional bin as was Mr. Swift’s proposal.

3

The next steps would be abridging all books and altering firemen’s job descriptions accordingly (F451).

4

What problem are you trying to solve? I really don’t think too many truancy tickets being issued is a big enough problem to get rid of compulsory schooling. It seems like you have a solution and just searching for a problem.

5

I’m speaking as a teacher.

Truancy tickets are a problem for some families. I’ve been screamed at in parent meetings by parents who literally have little or no control over their children and hold me, as a representative of the school and the System, responsible for this hunk of money that must suddenly come out of their monthly budget.

I’ve taught kids I WISH were truant. A kid who does not want to be there and will disrupt the education of others (at best) or take it out on those around him (at worst) is not conducive to much of anything in the classroom.

At the bad end, you have kids who just ain’t gonna benefit from the usual education. At the other end, you have kids who could graduate early, if given the resources and opportunities.

Why waste the resources? If a kid can clear the hurdle and get out, LET him. If a kid does not WANT his free public education, then why jam it down his throat? Let him knock around the real world until he DOES want it. And if he manages to succeed without an education, well, how much did he really need it anyway?

6

There was an “alternative school” in my old town for kids like this. EVERY.SINGLE.PERSON I knew who worked there (this place was simply a mandated warehouse and did not take attendance or lesson plans) believed that the laws should be changed regarding involuntary sterilization, and that the school should have a urologist and gynecologist on contract to do exactly this to all incoming students, and their parents too if they could be located. :eek: Girls who arrived pregnant who had their babies should have them taken away immediately after birth and placed for adoption.

It really was that bad of a place - and it was in a rural Midwestern town of 40,000 people.

Income didn’t have a lot to do with it, either. The very worst kids they ever saw there were the son and daughter of a prominent child psychiatrist and his prison chaplain wife. Talk about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes.

7

I thought that the idea behind truancy laws was that, if you don’t make schooling compulsory, you have too many parents who keep their kids home from school, so they can work on the farm or babysit their siblings or stay locked in the basement all day, or just because the parents can’t be arsed to pay any attention to their kids’ lives at all.

8

I understand that. But I think your proposed solution would impact a great many people with a minor benefit to a tiny minority of parents who actually give a shit, but can’t do anything about it.

Yep, that sucks. Being a teacher, especially for those kinds of students, isn’t awesome. And getting rid of compulsory education would most likely benefit teachers.

But, again, I don’t think those benefits are outweighed by the benefits of compulsory education. With the high correlation between education and income and opportunity (at least the last I checked 20 years ago), I think mandatory attendance at school gives numerous students, students who would be forced to work the family business, babysit littler siblings, or just be ignored even more at home, a chance they wouldn’t have otherwise. YMMV.

9

What if, rather than getting rid of compulsory schooling, we tweaked the system we have now to allow those students who have problems another option? If you allowed that once a student had two truant tickets on record they could go before a judge and explain why school just isn’t for them and choose from a list of options that might be a better fit (like working or volunteering at least 30 hours a week, moving to technical school instead of a standard high school, joining the military, etc.) that would provide the opportunity to make life better for the kids, their parents, the teachers, and the other students who aren’t bothered by the jerk-wads anymore.

10

I’d rather eat the kids. Any kid caught outside school during school hours are free game for cannibals

11

So basically you’d rather have these kids go to jail (which is where bored, hopeless, unemployable kids go) where we get to pay for their entire upkeep?

We need to figure out what works for these kids, no just give up on them.

12

It won’t work to simply let children decide for themselves if they want to go to school. Children aren’t able to make that decision competently.

I always did okay in school – varying at times from straight-C level to straight-A level. Overall, I didn’t like school, and if I had my druthers I might not have gone. I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t gone to school.

13

Nobody is saying we should let the kids decide. I proposed we quit hammering the PARENTS.

14

So, are you saying that these kids are just born bad, then? If you’re not, then how they turned out is their parents’ doing and we shouldn’t feel too bad for people who did such an inept job at parenting it now costs them money.

15

How they got bad is irrelevant. The problem exists.

And I fail to see how simply bleeding people of fines on a monthly basis addresses the problem. It puts pressure on them to exert more control over the kid, sure. But what happens when this does not work? How does it solve the problem?

Jailing the kid never happens. In rare cases, a parent has been jailed for nonpayment of fines, but this doesn’t happen often, simply because most judges understand that kicking someone’s life apart is not appropriate punishment for a misdemeanor crime.

So what better solution? Quit punishing the adults. Make the kids responsible for their own lives. You wanna finish school, get a life, make big bucks? Peachy. The resources are there. Do it.

You too cool for school? Fine. If you change your mind later, you have the rights designated you as a citizen. If you’re so sure you can make it without an education, or you just wanna be a gangsta? Peachy. You aren’t interfering with other people’s education, and there are systems in place to deal with you THAT way, too.

16

Poor people have enough punishment just from being poor. But there’s a certain portion of the public who never tires of punishing them more.

17

My point being: the kind of kid who is going to pull this nonsense is the kind of kid who’s going to pull this nonsense. Change the law to fit the OP? I might have said, “Oboy, no more school for ME!” when I was a puppy kid. And my old man would have looked me in the eye and said, “Lose that line of thought NOW. You are going to school tomorrow, or you will bitterly wish you HAD.” And the plan above will not stop this. I see nothing wrong with parents forcing their kids to go to school. Hell, if they can force their kids to go to church, why not school? Or making them clean their rooms, or mow the yard, or any number of other horrors and indignities suffered by the poor putupon American youth?

But if life has taught me anything about human nature, it is that some people simply will not learn until they step in the bad stuff. So** let **them. And let them fix it and correct their errors later on. What’s wrong with that?

18

You don’t teach elementary school, do you?

I’ve had four kids where truancy was a real issue in the K-3 age range. For two of them, eventually the social worker swore out a warrant for the arrest of the parents. After the warrant was sworn out, the kids started coming to school.

I can’t really speak with expertise to the advisability of truancy warrants for older kids. But at the elementary level, it’s vital. These kids aren’t missing school because they’re out of control. They’re missing school because the parents don’t make it a priority for them.

And I guaranfuckingtee you that the kids who are missing school at K-3 aren’t kids who can afford to miss school. I mean, sure, I’ve taught some super-genius kids who might miss a couple of weeks of school because their families are going to NYC to watch plays on Braodway and visit museums or whatnot; these parents apply for and receive waivers. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about families where the dad might want to keep the kid at home to play video games all day, or the mom can’t be bothered to set her alarm clock, or the parents move somewhere in March and think it’s not worth their time to enroll their kid in a new school for the last three months. I’m talking about kids that desperately need every advantage public school can give them.

19

No, I do not teach elementary. And I agree that this is NOT a point, developmentally, where a kid can just skip school, optional, who cares. You seem to have found a hole in my idea.

But I do not teach elementary, and I had no idea that you had parents who’d just say hellwiddit and not see to it that their children attended school. Why WOULDN’T they? The kid is still small enough that you can pick him up and MOVE him when he throws a tantrum!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Lord knows I’ve met parents I wouldn’t trust with a stuffed animal, much less a live baby human.

Thank you for the input. Plainly I need to think about this some more…

20

  1. The principle of parental responsibility is under threat.

  2. The family’s role has already waned in the modern industrial society. If parents are no longer supposed to contribute to their offspring’s socialization, the family will soon resemble a dead man walking.

I’m not saying these consequences are good or bad; I’m just pointing out that under the current social paradigm they may be regarded as possible negative results of your modest proposal.