My school counted time out to attend scholarship and college interviews as unexcused absences. After I was not allowed to make up a quiz because of this, my mother started writing me sick notes.
Are you somehow under the impression that the students are providing a service to the school? Because they’re not. Neither is it the schools’s function to train people for the real world. The school’s function is to provide students with the education required to be informed members of the electoral body, so that when they vote, they can do so in an informed fashion. The student’s job is to learn the material in the curriculum, which should be designed for that purpose. If you’re looking for a trade school, the yellow pages are full of them.
There is room for reasonable people to differ on what the requirements of an informed electorate are, and that’s where curriculum decisions are made.
Whether you would fire people for being absent from work is simply irrelevant. The student is not there for the school’s benefit, as an employee is, the school is there for the student’s benefit. Now, if a school set a policy that students arriving late provided a distraction to the other students, and therefore anyone arriving late would not be admitted, I could agree with that rule. If, by virtue of missing class sessions someone was unable to learn the curriculum, then that student should fail the course.
That is true whether the absences were excused or not. If a bridge falls down because the engineer had missed the class on trusses no one will care if she had a good reason.
What you should not do is fail a student who has demonstrated their mastery of the course material simply because the student misses classes. If it proves that the course is so easy that people can pass it without attending, that is the fault of the curriculum, not the student, but it’s always easier to teach if you set the bar low enough.
The only problem is you then have to set some kind of policy in place to punish students who make it obvious that attending the classes is a waste of time. Of course, it’s usually obvious to everyone, but there seems to be some kind of agreement to pretend that it isn’t.
My district didn’t have a “zero-tolerance” attendance policy until I was a senior in high school. The handbook said I could miss 10 days per semester before I was to be flunked.
This was a purely theoretical construct, you understand. I hated school and I think I had a 60% attendance rate my senior year. And that’s only counting my actual classes – I arranged to have a “teacher’s aide” position the first period of the day, because I had already progressed past the end of their offered course paths in math and physics, and there was nothing else I wanted to take. Basically I showed up for my fourth-year French class and my senior English class. When I felt like it.
When I was in my junior year, my sister started carpooling with someone else, who didn’t offer me a ride. I sound remarkably like my mother on the phone, and at that point she told me to start calling myself in “excused”, because she was tired of getting up early just to tell someone I wasn’t going to get my tukus out of bed. She knew where I was, anyway – we lived in Phoenix, it was always too hot to walk around, and my Playstation was inside the house.
That was also the year she told me to start forging her signature on permission slips. She figured the school wasn’t going to take me anywhere too dangerous or too expensive.
I graduated in the top 25% of my class. Maybe the top 20%; I wasn’t looking too closely. I have no idea what my classmates were doing.
I actually agree that comparing school to a job is usually a fruitless and inacuate analogy. However, can you see that providing a way for students to show mastery of the material when they haven’t been there for the assessments is an unreasonable burden on the teachers? I can’t know if you know how to participate in a class discussion, take notes, argue to defend an answer, etc., if you aren’t there.
I can’t really claim credit - I think it was Confucious who said it first. 
If ‘the school’s function is to provide students with the education required to be informed members of the electoral body’ why do dictatorships have schools? 
The school’s function is to give children useful skills and prepare them for society. Pupils learn, for example, :
- how to concentrate
- how to learn
- how to be punctual
- how to be organised
- to be numerate
- to be literate
- what careers will suit them
- how to socialise
- how to get fit
You could argue that the School is there for society’s benefit.
Nevertheless employers do fire people for being late, and the student can usefully learn that lesson at school.
It’s not a ‘policy’ that students arriving late are a distraction - it’s a fact.
The teacher has to settle the class (many of whom are wondering why this pupil was late and what might happen to them).
The late student has to be brought up to date, without boring the rest of the class.
The reason for the lateness should be checked (in case it’s a problem in itself)
Or perhaps you have a native French speaker in a French class.
I don’t see how it places an unreasonable burden on the teacher, the teacher simply passes out the same examinations as always, and grades them to determine who has mastered the material. Those who do not pass, fail the course, whether they have attended 100% of the classroom sessions or none. Those who pass, pass.
Why should a student’s grade be based on how many hours he or she kept his or her ass in the seat? What possible benefit is derived from that? I suppose there are courses such as debate where class discussion and defending an answer are required, but the vast majority of high school classes are not that style. Either one gets the material or not, and if the material is learned no one should fail the course for attendance reasons.
In the courses where discussion and debate are required, go ahead and grade on that. If people pass on the merit of their achievements rather that their attendance they may take a more of an interest.
Funny, if I go to the Department of Education in California (where my kids go to school):
I see career listed alongside citizen. My point stands - part of the mission of the school is to educate the young to be productive little drones in the workforce. An inability to show up on time makes you a poor contributor to the workforce.
Our school used to have excellent trade programs - they were called vocational technical and were very effective in training our children for the workforce. Sadly, we now labor under the impression that everyone should go to college instead (ignoring the statistics). In either case, tardiness detracts from your college grade too. Miss a college exam, flunk the class and you don’t get your money back.
Finally, when I have dealt with those students who are constantly missing class - they are NOT students who can nail an A on the exam. In fact, they are the ones who want a study guide, a copy of my powerpoint, and for me to tell them what exactly will be covered on the exam. I tell them that the syllabus shows what will be covered - the textbook, the reader and my lectures. I bring extra material into my lectures that are not in the text or the reader. You skip class, you will not be able to do as well on the final or the midterm unless you find someone with great notes.
These constantly tardy kids in high school who think that they don’t have to play by the rules turn into the narcissistic slackers in my undergraduate classes (if they are smart enough to get into a decent school, which I do NOT automatically agree assume). They then morph into low level employees who will get bitch-slapped in their first few weeks at work when they find out that they have to arrive on time and be presentable.
You don’t want to come to class in high school because you have mastered the material? Fine - go get your GED. You don’t deserve, however, a diploma from the high school as you have NOT played by all of the rules that others have followed.
There is material covered every day that is useful, even if it is not on the final exam or quiz.
However, if you don’t want to forced to show up to school - fine.
Daily quizzes at the end of the period. Miss too many, and you fail the course.
To prevent cheating, you must take the quizzes before they are presented to the class if you wish to skip. If any information from the quiz gets to the rest of the class, you fail for academic dishonesty.
Or we can just tell students at the beginning of the year that attendance is measured, just like in the real world.
Or, we could actually try teaching. It’s probably a little more difficult than failing someone for learning the material outside of class, but it’s just crazy enough to work.
All this rigamarole and hubbub over what is a very simple concept: If your teaching is valuable, students will come to class, or they will fail. If your teaching has limited marginal utility, students can pass the course without you. The solution to that is to provide more value, not to fail students who come to class already possessing the limited knowlege you impart. Teach something they don’t already know, if you don’t know more than they do, they are not the problem.
I don’t know where this real world is that you’re talking about where you’re paid for attendance. I’m paid to complete projects, not spend a lot of time doing them. I work for customers who pay me pretty well, and they are overjoyed when I can solve their problems in a short time. I get paid extra for that, not less.
Call centers.
Cashiers.
Bartenders.
Wait Staff.
and any number of other careers where you might spend a good bit of your time standing around waiting for a customer. Granted, attendance isn’t the ONLY thing you’re being paid for, but neither is it the ONLY thing you are being graded on.
If the kid doesn’t want to go to school, he can always have his parents home school him. It’s impossible to tailor make a school program that fits each individual’s needs to a T. That’s why we make students conform to a certain standard, and one that is fairly easy to follow. Society is all about conforming your impulses a bit for the greater good of the society, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
High school students, for the most part, have no clue whether or not the material is useful. Listen to how many of them think that proper English is not needed, that math is irrelevant, that world history is a bore, etc. These kids are NOT at a place in life to make that decision - that is why we have mandatory education and truancy laws.
Now, there are a few at the far end of the bell curve who are cheated by the standard nature of the high school situation, I admit. But those that don’t show to class are not anywhere close to 100% correlation with that particular tail.
Students do come to my classes, because they know that they will be tested on what I say. Some TRY to just do the reading (thinking that they are truly that smart), and then complain to the Dean when they fail my exams. It seems that someone at the high school level let them get away with skipping class and just taking a Mickey Mouse final.
The majority of workers in America do NOT get paid for doing projects. They get paid for a multitude of work that shows up during the workday. If my staff (yes, I both teach and work) does not show up, I cannot give them additional tasks that hit over night.
You are applying your personal work experience (project based work for clients) to the workforce as a whole. The majority of Americans get paid for coming to work and doing their jobs on a daily basis, not on showing up when they please and simply finishing a project.
If school is just like a job, as you say, why not eliminate all of the student except the most efficient one? We could just fire the rest, because they’re doing redundant work anyway.
The only reason I even brought up my work experience was because people out there kept going “Whaaaat about the workforce. Won’t someone pleeease think about the poor employers out there who will suffer when folks don’t come to work.”
If you have data showing that people who pass the final exams without attending classes make bad employees, I’ll look at it, but I still don’t think the proper function of state education is to groom employees. As I said before, the yellow pages are full of trade schools. Those educators might be happier teaching in one.
If they come to your classes, and fail if they don’t, clearly you are providing valuable information and are doing your job. Why do you want to make it easier for the teachers who aren’t? To me an attendance policy still says, at the risk [certainty] of repeating myself,
“I have limited value as an educator, and the students in my class do equally well whether they attend classes or not. I dislike having this pointed out, and would like a way to punish students who have the affrontery to learn the material without me, thus underscoring my uselessness. Therefore, even if students who skip class demonstrate mastery of the subject superior to that of the students who attend, I plan to fail them while passing those students with inferior knowlege.”
I understand why it bothers teachers when this happens, but don’t worry, there will always be plenty of students who will happily stroke your ego for the difference between an 85% and a 90%. Why should those who will not be punished?
Which is why I quoted the Department of Education for the State of California’s mission statement - one of the roles of the public school is to train employees.
We reward the best students, we punish the worst. If you want to be efficient, get your GED. You can go take a test and carry a high school diploma - very efficient.
Note, I teach at the University level and have much more latitude in my classroom than the typical high school teacher. I simply have to deal with the results of that high school experience. If we allow everyone to simply take the final without taking the course, then we need 3 day finals, multi-page papers, and Oxford style tutorial qualification exams where you must stand before the faculty and answer all questions. Unfortunately, the taxpayers do not seem willing to provide the necessary staffing to handle these types of comprehensive exams.
In English class–lots of discussion, defending answers
Science class–labs
Social Studies–again, participating in class discussions, defending answers, learning to take notes (huge skill that isn’t really tested, but needs to be practiced)
Math–you may be right about math. Howeve,r a note on math at the end of this.
Many of these things do not lend themselves to quantifiable grading. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t an important part of the course, and when someone gets credit for the class, it should mean they’ve demonstrated that they can do these things. This means that grades are not a precise measure of performance, but hell, we know that’s true. That’s why employers look much more closely at what you have credit for than at your particular grade, and it’s why I don’t think a kid should get credit for my class if they haven’t practiced and deomonstrated those things–and I don’t have the time to reconstruct all those things after school.
As far as math goes, the fact is that kids have very bad judgement about their ability to learn on their own. If you let a 13 year old not show up to class for the first six weeks of algebra one because he is sure he can get it once he studies and then he up and fails the six weeks, he may not be ABLE to catch back up. So he will struggle and fail the whole year and have to retake it. That’s a ridiculous penalty to have to play for what’s pretty standard 13-year old behavior.