I don’t want to hear any more complaining about absenteeism in schools.
You can find stories from the New York Times, Vox, NPR, and elsewhere about the huge increase in chronic absenteeism in schools since Covid. Before Covid, 13 to 15 percent of U.S. students were chronically absent, defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year (18 or more school days in a typical 180-day school calendar). Now that number is over 25 percent. The 13 to 15 percent was troubling enough; 25 percent is terrible.
But why should students go to class when educators don’t really care whether they go to class?
We’ve seen this apathy from educators in three different ways in the past few years:
- Covid. For varying periods of time, depending on the state or region, students were forbidden from attending class in person. After the first week or two at the start of the pandemic, when everyone was making adjustments to routines, there was never a good public-health rationale for total school closures, as even the New York Times will now permit to be said. Retail stores, restaurants, and other “essential” businesses found ways to stay open. Education was considered “nonessential” and replaced with less effective, ad hoc, online learning.
- Strikes. Despite overall increases in education spending and massive aid from the federal government to school districts on top of that, teachers have been walking out of classrooms across the country. In Portland, Ore., they closed the city’s school district for nearly a month. Teacher strikes are illegal in most states (and should be illegal in all states), but that doesn’t stop them because state governments rarely enforce those laws. And expect them to continue: Education Week, one of the most widely read education publications, has reported on a study that claims that teacher strikes lead to higher education spending not only in the district struck against but in the entire state. One of the study’s authors said, “I wanted to think about strikes as this broader political signal that was intended to attract attention and convince people that something is very wrong about what happens in schools.”
- Activism. Separate from the strikes by teachers on education issues, educators have prioritized activism over education. One example was during Covid, when educators echoed the hypocrisy of public-health officials by encouraging participation in protests against racial injustice while saying Covid was too dangerous to open schools. Another example is right now, as educators at Columbia move to virtual classes for the rest of the semester because activists have taken over part of the campus.
An education-first approach from Columbia might look something like this: “We condemn violence, and we support the ability of our students to exercise their First Amendment rights. But Columbia is, first and foremost, an educational institution, and attending classes is vital to the success of our mission. Any activism that hinders students’ class attendance will be punished through appropriate disciplinary channels under university policy.” But there’s about as much chance of that happening as there is of Columbia admitting that it is a bastion of sexism for not admitting female students until the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and eighty-three.
If educators really thought education and attendance mattered, they would commit to showing up every school day, even when their union is whining about their benefits packages. State governments would enforce the laws against public-sector strikes and pass new ones where they don’t yet exist to prevent the dereliction of duty to the taxpayers who fund the education system. But that won’t happen because unions and many state governments view the education system as a jobs program for teachers that happens to educate a few students on the side.
We’ve heard a lot about “reckonings” in the past several years, but apparently there won’t be one for the educators who advocated Covid-era school closures against the best medical evidence and without adequately considering the predictable (and predicted) negative consequences for students. No apologies, no promises to make up the learning lost. Just keep plugging along but with more virtual-class days — and please approve another bond issue or we’ll cut band and theater.
The message from educators is abundantly clear: Education isn’t that important. Attendance doesn’t matter that much.
Don’t blame students for listening to their teachers.