Where have all the students gone?

Attendance in my classes is bad, as usual.  In first and last periods, attendance is under 50%.  Attendance is best in my tenth grade class where it’s averaging about 90%   This is not unusual; attendance seems to worsen as students advance through high school. While freshman classes have the best attendance, even there, attendance does not come close to an objectively reasonable rate. 

According to the DOE, citywide attendance is 89.9%.  I find that hard to believe.   But even assuming this figure’s accuracy, it means that students are absent on average once every 10 days.  With each semester being about 18 weeks, or 90 school days, the average student is missing 9 days a semester or 18 days—three and a half weeks—per school year. At my school, where the attendance rate is closer to 80%, students are missing on average about a month and a half of every school year.

The 89.9% figure has to be taken with a grain of salt because it is based on attendance taken during the official attendance period (third period in high schools).  If students cut before and/or after that period, they are officially present for the school day. Attendance in individual classes is well below this figure.

I’d estimate that about a third of all absences are “LTAs” (long term absences).  LTAs are students who are enrolled at the school but never show up. Some of these students are not even in the country.  Since they never attend class, they obviously cannot legitimately earn credits and so are counted against the school’s graduation rates.

About another third of absences consist of students who show up maybe two or three times a week.  Where are they when they’re not in school?  I assume either at home or on the streets. Do their parents actually know where they are?  I once had a parent show up for parent-teacher conferences whose child had never once attended class.  She expressed dismay and admitted that her child was beyond her command. 

Who is accountable for these missing students?  Unfortunately, it’s the schools, more specifically, the teachers.  The problem is that while poor attendance is probably the main reason why students fail courses and are unprepared for exams, it is one variable beyond a teacher’s control.  Very few students miss school because they don’t like their teachers or find them boring.  Last year when teachers were shown how their students did on regents exams, one of my colleagues objected that he could not be held responsible for the 20% pass rate of his students when about half of his students who took the exam had missed at least half of his classes. 

Perhaps we need to hold parents more accountable for their absent children?  That’s what they apparently do at Charter schools.  If students don’t show up, the parents are warned and then, if the problem is not resolved, the student is removed from the school where they wind up—of course—in regular public schools, yet another reason why the performance gap between charter and noncharter schools is misleading.

Poor attendance: yet another systematic issue in the thicket of urban educational issues.  I ask: how can teachers be held accountable for failing to properly educate children who rarely come to class?