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NPR Ed
School Attendance In The COVID Era: What Counts As 'Present'?
September 24, 2020
Anya Kamanetz
From shiny red pencils reading "My Attendance Rocks!" to countless
plaques and ribbons and trophies and certificates and gold stars: For
as long as anyone can remember, taking attendance — and rewarding kids
for simply showing up — is a time-honored school ritual.
For good reason: Just being there, day in, day out, happens to be one
of the most important factors that determines a child's success in
school. And average daily head count forms the basis of school funding
decisions at the federal, state and local level.
Yet now, like so many other aspects of education, that simple measure —
"here" or "absent" — is not so simple anymore. States are having to
update their attendance policies to cover the realities of virtual
learning. And where school is being held in-person, strict coronavirus
health protocols mean students must now stay home at the slightest sign
of illness, or to quarantine in case of a potential exposure.
So the emerging questions for educators and parents are: What is the
best way to measure whether students are participating in learning? And
who will be held responsible for a student who doesn't participate? The
student? Their caregiver? The school?
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It all adds up to "a paradigm shift," says Hedy Chang,who directs
Attendance Works, a national and state level initiative that treats
attendance as a key lever to student success. It was Chang's research
in the mid-2000s that helped lay the groundwork for the current policy
focus on chronic absenteeism. She found that missing more than 10% of
school days in a year was an "early warning signal" for students
earning low grades and eventually dropping out, and that it affected
low-income students disproportionately.
Responding in part to this research, the federal Every Student Succeeds
Act, signed into law in 2015, raised the stakes on attendance. It
required states to add at least one nonacademic measure of success into
their state accountability systems. Thirty-six states and Washington,
D.C., chose chronic absenteeism. Not just student success, but school
success, would be defined in part by this metric: How many kids missed
more than 10 percent of days in a school year.
The carrot and the stick
Mariajose Romero, a Pace University sociologist who has researched
attendance for decades, calls it "a piece of information that has
tremendous political currency," which only intensified when it became a
measure of school accountability. Not only students, but also schools,
succeed or fail based on the students who show up every day. And so,
"it's important to count people properly."
School systems responded to the new pressure of the federal law by
trying to improve attendance using both the carrot and the stick. The
positive side: celebrity public awareness campaigns, like this
partnership, called "Stay in the Game!" which features the Cleveland
Browns. Plus, all those shiny red pencils.
The negative side included legal action. U.S. Senator Kamala Harris,
now the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has been criticized for
an anti-truancy program she introduced as San Francisco district
attorney that threatened some parents of chronically absent children
with jail. Another weapon wielded against parents: charges of
"educational neglect." In New York City this spring, some school staff
reportedly called child welfare officers when students didn't sign in
for online learning — an action that could potentially result in
children being removed from their families.
Chang says schools need to shift away from punitive means, especially now. She counsels "a positive, problem-solving approach."
A positive approach is exactly what Misha Karigaca says his California
district, Oakland Unified, is taking these days. His title —
coordinator of attendance & discipline — suggests that attendance
has historically come under the category of a student behavior to be
rewarded or punished.
These days, it's different. There's a "heightened awareness to our
work," Karigaca says. Educators, he explains, are "understanding the
fragility of students having a high chance of missing out on learning
opportunities."
He points to "Oakland Undivided," a public-private partnership that has
raised $13 million to provide 25,000 laptops and Internet hot spots to
Oakland families. Karigaca says it's part of a recognition that keeping
kids connected to school is "a community effort ... the whole city is
behind it."
Does answering a text message "count"?
One tricky matter that schools have to decide in this era is how
exactly they're going to credit "attendance" when online learning
doesn't always mean showing up on a video conference. Districts such as
Los Angeles Unified have been criticized for setting the bar too low by
decreeing that any interaction — even a single text between a parent
and a teacher — counts as "participation" for a given day.
Paolo DeMaria, the superintendent of public instruction for the state
of Ohio, says he's trying to shift districts toward recognizing whether
students are making academic progress. "If they're participating and
engaging, that counts. And that's important," he says. The flexibility
provided by remote instruction is a good thing, he says.
He adds that he's had many conversations with parents of teenagers who
don't start schoolwork until noon. And that's perfectly fine, he says,
if they're making progress in their studies:
"I think the long-term goal is to actually be creative and
understanding," DeMaria explains. "We're so used to testing and just
taking attendance as kind of anchors of measurement. And we need to
take our thinking to the next level."
Of course, this raises the question of who is extended this kind of
"creative" leniency. Romero, at Pace University, worries that
high-income schools may be more likely than those in poor neighborhoods
to provide excused absences for, say, a mid-year vacation. Meanwhile,
she adds, "sometimes I'm concerned that the issue of chronic absence is
used to demonise families in need."
With funding hanging in the balance, in a year when schools already
face deep cost-cutting and huge additional burdens, another big
question is whether too-loose attendance policies can let schools off
the hook by misrepresenting how many students they are actually
serving, and how well.
The school leaders interviewed for this story talked a lot about
keeping lines of communication open as a way to remove barriers to
online learning, or to reassure parents of safety measures for
in-person learning.
DeMaria, in Ohio, says that despite all the challenges, promoting
attendance these days, whether in-person or hybrid, means "making sure
you've got communication channels that can reach every family in every
state."
Sometimes, though, that communication includes reminding parents of
compulsory attendance laws. In Mississippi, where some schools are
opening in-person and others are online, Carey Wright, the state
Superintendent of Education, has just put out a notice reminding
parents, "if you want to keep your child at home and not in school,
you've got to give us some kind of home schooling program."
Chang would like to see family communication be a big part of part of a
"positive, problem-solving approach." Getting devices and Internet
connections into homes is a basic need that hasn't yet been met, it's
estimated, for millions of students.
Beyond that, schools need to focus on updating contact information for
all students, she says. And schools should take advantage of the large
amounts of data provided by learning management software systems:
"Notice each time kids show up and notice when they don't show up and
look for patterns on whether there could be particular types of
learning opportunities that they miss."
But what may be most important, Chang says, is a new type of data
collection: Call it the friends list. The key question: "Do kids and
families feel there is someone that they can talk to if they have a
challenge?"
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