Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe?<p>In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness.<p>Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.
I think some parents and kids have realised that much of that slog is ever less about the education and more about using children as tools for buffing the school or district stats in the best case or it's just riot control in the worst case.<p>Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least.<p>I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something.<p>1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.
Perhaps it's because most schooling seems irrelevant to many of the students? I went to very good schools and actually enjoyed quite a lot of my schooldays but even while I was there I could see that a lot of it was a complete and utter waste of everyone's time.<p>I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one. I moved to Norway fifteen years later and spent a couple of hours a week in evening classes for a year and a few years of immersion in the language and now I am fluent with much almost no effort.<p>So why do schools all over the world persist in educational methods that don't work? Why do they never teach people how to handle money, how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house, how to drive a car.
Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what.<p>Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it.<p>They <i>know</i> they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary.<p>Why would they care about school?
> attendance has become optional<p>I recognize this with my own kids and my students. Two things: 1) since the pandemic the bar for a sick day has been lowered drastically. 2) Educational material can be found online in most of the cases, at least in my university. Students think they can handle it themselves from home.<p>These are not necessarily bad developments. What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.
> school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance<p>Because "school but with one funny twist" is still school with the same broken system. It's like the workplace memes about ping-pong tables and free food, you can't fix the problem without fixing it.
Talked to my niece about this, she's highschool age. She says that during covid, her school set up all of the infrastructure for remote learning, and they _still offer it_ -- that is, if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to go to class much at all, save for the school's attendance policy... which means that while she has a 4.0, she's also near truancy.<p>For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choice back then, would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?
In Israel a lot of the schools start with 20 minutes of body movement (at least near me).<p>The kids become active. It’s not as big a deal if they are a little late. And my daughter (but not my son) hates missing it.
Talking with our local school administrators, this does seem to be the biggest challenge they're facing. From their point of view, it's just caused by (typically poorer) parents who don't care about their kids' education and saw how it seemed to be optional during COVID and so just don't make their kids go if they don't feel like it. It's really sad, and it sounds incredibly hard for anyone else to do anything about.
A tangent thought - I may be out of touch but I am amazed of little the school system changed over time (at least in my country), while in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. Yet students are expected to show up every day at 8 AM to 5 PM in my country.<p>When I remember my classes in high school - 90+% of the time is just the teacher talking, us copying on notes, the teacher demonstrating something or letting us do assignments present in the school book, it might as well be a video or interactive content. Do we really still need children to learn in this way and structure nowadays? Or is it just to let parents work they 9 to 6? It all feels... very inefficient somehow.<p>(ps : I do not have children in school, as most readers probably guessed)
This and similar issues shouldn't be surprising at all after we effectively declared that in-person schooling isn't <i>really</i> necessary and that kids would be fine staying home learning on an iPad. What were people supposed to take away from our handling of schooling during the pandemic response?
Its world wide. In the UK the increase was analysed and its all due to increased sickness. Teachers and students are sick twice as much as they were before the pandemic begun and teachers are the second hardest hit group by Long Covid behind medical staff. The official count of UK children with Long Covid is 68,000 but its likely much higher than that since the NHS is mostly diagnosing Long haulers with anxiety (hence why the press has been big on all the increase in mental health diseases).<p>Its just Covid, this is what living with this disease looks like.
Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools.<p>In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.<p>Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.
Maybe they don't want to have bathroom breaks tracked<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413</a>
As I'm reading this, I'm also streaming the regional First Robotics regional championship in Georgia: <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2</a><p>I note without comment that those kids aren't in school right now.
I’ve been a classroom volunteer teacher for a computer science / programming course at a local high school. I can attest that this is accurate - I’d estimate 20-25% of the class is absent on any given day that I’m there. And of the students that are present, there’s a good number of them who are checked out mentally and really don’t participate.<p>It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.
For two years we said kids didn't need to be in school and many well off parents realized that what made their kids smart was their own involvement, not the schools.
My high school had a maximum of three absences per quarter or you would automatically fail your classes and have to appeal. As a perennially sick kid, this meant I just went to school super sick, all the time. I’m not sure that’s better for anyone.<p>Getting my tonsils removed as an adult was a literal life changer. I used to get strep 6 to 10 times a year. I have not had it since.
In unrelated news:<p><a href="https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-record-high-of-2-6-million-12959783" rel="nofollow">https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-rec...</a><p>The failure to prioritise rationality over economics is going to be seen as one of the biggest public health <i>and economic</i> failures in recent centuries.
i feel like this is just explained by sick days, flu season was crazy this year<p>post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.
My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't get the memo of "meh, school is optional".<p>Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them.<p>Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.<p>Weird times.
The ripple effect from our unhinged covid response continues to be felt in countless places, from school absenteeism to downtown office space values to public transportation and on and on. We created new habits that are hard to break and naturally none of the hysterics who tried to unwind society gave any thought to anything besides trying to temporarily feel “safe.” There’s always a tradeoff…
stigmatize the working class as boring while promoting alternative lifestyles as more attractive/worthy .. then tax their parents into the ground through run-away inflation.. strip them of any potential for home ownership or a stable life and then wonder why kids don't see any value in traditional education?
I hold views in both sides here. I teach computers at an elementary school on Thursdays, and my kids go to that school.<p>As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next.<p>When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind.<p>That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent.<p>On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school.<p>I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society.<p>During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing.<p>For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution).<p>It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.
Our kids were too young for school during the pandemic (thank god, it seems like it really messed up kids lives).<p>Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting!<p>We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?)<p>On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time.<p>I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!?<p>Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours.<p>Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all.<p>At the same time, private school costs are <i>huge</i> and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV).<p>So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education.<p>(Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)
> In a working-class pocket of Michigan, school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance.<p>Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange.<p>I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.
"because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track."<p>Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom.<p>I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.
Everyone treated it as optional. Even the teachers and school staff said zoom school is fine, it won’t be any worse or any different than in person school. Now we’re all shocked, <i>shocked</i>!
Put the # of days missed each year on the high school transcript and allow employers to filter job applicants on this basis. Make federal student aid for college conditional on having few high school absences. That would reward attendance.