A bombshell Manhattan Institute study on soaring absenteeism in New York schools proves yet again that the state’s education officials have utterly given up on educating children.
Chronic absenteeism (defined as absent 10% or more of the days in a school year) rose across the country in the wake of the COVID lockdowns, most acutely in urban public-school districts.
More than a third, 34.8%, of Big Apple public-school kids (about 300,000) missed at least 10% of the 180-day school year in 2024, vs. the pre-pandemic rate of 26.5% in 2019.
Worse: About six in 10 kids in Buffalo and Rochester are now chronically absent, up from about four in 10 in 2019.
The statewide average rose from 15.6% in the 2018-19 school year to 25.1% in 2023-24.
Kids who miss this much school aren’t learning, but instead losing ground — and the dysfunction is worst in the minority populations that state educrats claim to care about most.
But State Education Department officials, under the guidance of the flawlessly progressive Board of Regents, hasn’t brought the hammer down on the districts and schools that are tolerating this truancy.
Nope: They instead opted to change how they track absenteeism.
SED’s “broader” new attendance index totally obscures chronic truancy.
For instance, 39% of Schenectady students were chronically absent in the 2022-2023 school year, but the resulting “attendance index” of 152 doesn’t convey a hint of that info.
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More chutzpah: The educrats adopted the change as part of how they measure school quality in reporting mandated to qualify for billions in federal aid.
That worked fine in the Biden years, but the new cops in DC may well paint New York as engaged in outright theft of those taxpayer dollars.
Nor would they be wrong: These educrats (and the state legislators they answer to) are richly rewarded for ignoring the needs of the state’s schoolchildren as they keep the cash flowing to the special interests that feed off the public schools.
This is why New York spends far more per student than any other state, even as its public schools achieve middling-at-best academic outcomes.
A genuinely functional school will put the resources into slashing absenteeism, but New York’s “education” leaders don’t care about genuine function.
Real education reform — serious school choice and the fostering of competition among private, public, parochial and public-charter schools — will sideline the special interests and the bureaucrats who serve them, and so end this government-made education crisis.