I never really thought that state authorities had the ability to tell a person older16 that they HAD to go to school or effectively be under house arrest. Isn’t there some age of academic emancipation prior to 18?
The article doesn’t say which students will be made to wear the anklets.
I don’t know what Texas law is on mandatory attendance. In Tennessee, I think it may be required until the age of 17.
I don’t think they would have enough monitoring systems to go around where I used to teach. You can’t teach them unless they are there, yet these truants still count when considering a school’s success on the No Child Left Behind program.
Not in California. It’s 18.
So a 16 year old can’t say “school is not for me” and just begin working. Interesting.
What’s the problem here?
When you treat students like prisoners, they are going to act like prisoners. How many kids don’t go to school precisely because school has become a place where they are stripped of their basic human dignity? How can you expect people to act like responsible adults when you treat them with no respect?
Truants are truant for a reason. Something in school is not serving them well. Our resources would be better spent trying to figure out where things are going wrong than holding them as prisoners. A student that hates being at school THAT much is not going to get much out of it and is going to take away resources from students who truely want to learn.
Kids shouldn’t be slaves to the educational system.
They are not slaves. They have a right to due process and there are means for minors to leave school and carry on with life.
They just can’t simply throw their hands up in their one day, and say school’s not for them, and start workin’ somewhere.
Just sayin’.
You also can’t attend school half the time. Even if you are 18, if you are cutting class all the time, you can get hauled to truancy court. You have the option to withdraw from school, but if you chose to stay on the roll, you gotta accept the rules of the game.
It’s really not that simple. Most of the things that keep kids from attending school are not things the school is really set up to deal with: drug addiction is a huge cause, significant family obligations (i.e., working to help support their family, or providing child care for the people that are working) are another. Other kids skip school because they see no utility in a diploma: they are illegal anyway, don’t think they can ever be legal, so what’s the point? (This is not entirely without merit. I have a former student about to start her master’s in engineering because she came here at 8 illegally and can’t get a job). Other kids have such huge complicated things going on in their lives–death, illness, depression–that they are trying as hard as they can just to stay functional, and school seems like so much ballast that can be thrown off. Other kids simply see no virtue in school and there’s no one to tell them to go, and so when the benefit of school seems nil and the alternative is sleeping in, smoking out, and jacking off all day . . . we can’t compete with that. All our resources and all our efforts cannot fix these things. The best we can do is help alleviate some of them.
On the other hand, you can’t just make it not the school’s problem to worry about truancy. I teach teenagers. I love teenagers. I have dedicated my life to the idea that kids are capable of great things. But kids are not adults. They don’t evaluate cost/benefit or opportunity cost like adults. They often make bad choices–even the best and the brightest of them. At 17 they need more rope than at 12, but they aren’t ready to be cut free of artificial consequences. It’d be like handing a 12 year old a bag of heroin, calmly and quietly explaining the perils of addiction, and then when they started shooting up, waving your hands in the air and saying “what could I do? I explained! I can’t make them chose to do the right thing!” In fact, it’s worse than that, because if you remove the responsibility for fighting truancy from the schools–if you let the school off the hook for the dismal test performance of those kids that miss 60% of the days they are supposed to be there–then the school’s got a hell of an incentive to drive off kids that are low performing, to make the kids that are half-interested and very possibly going to under perform into kids that are not interested at all and who wander off before test day. So you can’t just let schools off the hook, but you’ve gotta have some pity when they fail.
It’s a mess.
In PA one can drop out at 16 with parental consent (15 if employed, 14 if Amish). Students over 16 who miss to many days of school are simply dropped from the rolls (or at least that’s how my district handled it).