Yesterday a parent showed up at our school to yell at the principal about a teacher. She was mad that this teacher didn’t explain a math problem to her child. Fair enough right?
Here is the background. Her child, although nice enough, and certainly bright enough, has an attendance percentage in the single didgets. She has yet to make a full week of school in a row this year, and at this point the last time she came to school was sometime in January. When she found out she was pregnant sometime in February, it became the latest in a long line of excuses why she isn’t in school.
What the teacher told this student was she needed her in class to help her. That there is no way to teach her through algebra II by just sending work home, especialy since math is not her forte.
Ok. Ok. I am getting to the rant. Why the fuck should we drop everything and ignore the rest of the class because your little precious has deigned to show up for her quarterly visit. Why the hell did you teach this child that slight asthma, the cramps, a headache or a bump on the arm is an acceptable excuse to skip school? Why did you make it her responsibility to get you and her siblings to every appointment or meeting you had? This child has missed so much school she is eighteen and is a sophmore in high school. I know she thinks she gets teased by girls in the school, but frankely, she isn’t here enough to really show up on their radar screen.
If this child was an abnormality this wouldn’t be so hard, but she isn’t. Because of truancy, most of our students do not read at grade level, and almost none of them write at grade level. It didn’t start in high school. These kids have been missing for years. It seems to start as early as first grade. Every time a teacher has to stop to catch one of them up, the rest of the class slows down, gets bored, and starts to learn that they too do not have to come to school regularly. Someone else will catch them up.
We keep hearing schools are failing, and we are. There are lots of things we can do to improve, but it gets damn hard to teach empty seats.
I had a friend in school who missed a day of classes every 28 days like clockwork. Her mother’s philiosophy was “I can’t tell if you’re sick, only you can tell if you’re sick.”
Me? I had to be vomiting blood before by mother would consider letting me skip a day of school. It’s held over to my career…I’ve called in, saying “I’m sorry, I was up all night vomiting…I won’t be in until noon.”
I hope the parent got put on notice, but it sounds like it’s a bit late for this girl.
The problem starts in first grade. By the end of grade one, in many inner city classrooms, half the class has 60% attendance. That isn’t the schools. Usualy kids want to go to 1st grade. Their friends are there. There is new stuff to do. I think some of their parents grew up that way. I think some of them work night jobs and are not awake to get the kids up. I think that many of the households are in such termoil that getting a kid off to school just isn’t a priority.
There may be things that schools can do. Maybe we have to somehow be perceieved by the parents as part of a community that can help them rather than just one more hastle. Right now, it seems to me, anything we do at the upper levels to fix attendance is sort of putting a bandaid on gangrene
Uncle Beer, I think this is what lead FlyingRamenMonster to believe it is “a shithouse education system”. My sister & her husband are both educators & that kind of truancy & lack of headway for one student is cause for being held back. If most of their students do not read at grade level… that is a sign of a much larger problem with the entire system.
If truancy is the root cause of a single student, failing to become literate, then why can’t it be the cause for several students? How is the school supposed to force students to attend? Or in the case of younger students, force the parents to bring their kids to the doorstep? If education isn’t valued enough by the student or the home, that elective participation in the system isn’t seen to be a desireable enough benefit, then it matter not the tiniest of whits what qualities the curriculum has, or has not. If you refuse to be a willing participant, then obviously the system has no effect on you. I’d even say that if the assertion of the OP is true - that “Because of truancy, most of our students do not read at grade level, and almost none of them write at grade level” - then there’s insufficient data on which to judge the qualities of the school system.
Hmm. You probably have a valid point, Diana. That is something I hadn’t considered previously. I’ll concede that is a decent measure of a school system which is failing its mission.
The thing is once I get over my defensivenes about it ()It is not my fault, It is not my fault… sorry, to continue. **FlyingRamenMonster/b] is right. For whatever the reason, large parts of this, and almost every other inner city school district, Suck. 50% of minority children do not graduate from high school within four years of starting. Many of those kids in failing schools who do, are flat out not prepared for college.
It has become politicaly expedient to blame teachers and their unions, but it doesn’t address the problems. Even truency is maybe only a symptom. A fatal symptom, but a symptom none the less.
My daughter’s school system only allows five absences per semester. Any more than that (unless you have a medical exemption), and you fail, regardless of your actual GPA.
Now, I happen to think that’s *also * a bullshit system. After all, no more good is done by holding back competent kids than by promoting incompetent ones. But at least it’s a little more ambitious. After all, the last time I checked, school attendance is federally mandated.
fulibusea, where are you? Because while numbers 3 and 4 are probably accurate, I’m pretty sure that numbers 1 and 2 are steaming piles of untruth. Where is that information coming from?
1 I got from principals in my district. #2 is supposedly true of a large district to the south of me. I am from a largish midwestern district. I am not trying to be coy, but have said some stuff about some of my students that could be traceable.
Nope, gotta back up the OP here. This very much varies from district to district. In my district, you can’t hold a kid back nor force him to attend summer school without the parent’s permission, though the whole thing is cloaked in mystery and it’s hard to get a straight answer out of anyone about the retention issue. Sometimes there are several criteria that have to be met in order to hold a kid back. I have never heard of a kid being held back more than twice before high school, regardless of the kid’s ability. Districts don’t like to retain kids because it greatly increases the kids’ chance of dropping out of HS. It’s also not as helpful to a kid as you’d think. I’ll provide cites if I have to, but the decision to retain a kid is NOT in the hands of a teacher, that’s 100% for sure.
As for truancy, well… there are laws about it if the kid is a minor, which an 18 year old is not. If attendance falls below a certain point, the school district can ask for a PINS order (persons in need of supervision). The kid is then effectively on probation, had a probation officer, hearings, etc. The officer can physically take a kid to school and home, for instance. This kind of monitoring usually pulls the kids and the parents back into line.
As a teacher, there is really very little I can do about truant students besides alert the guidance office that the kid is missing a lot of school. Usually work is sent home, or a tutor, or both, if the kid has a valid reason for missing lots of school at a time. I tutored/home schooled a girl who was pregnant and then had a baby, so she could graduate high school. It is possible to save these kids.