(A post mostly for newbies, among others.)

Let me recommend a website designed to spotlight the topic of attendance: http://awareness.attendanceworks.org. This battle needs to be fought, and with the many details involved in starting the year, a few repeat absences can slip by teachers. In severely overcrowded classrooms, those absences may even seem welcome. My first year of teaching, I started with forty students in my Spanish 1 classes, and I will frankly confess that when the count fell into the low thirties I often felt relieved.

But that’s another problem — overcrowding — and another post.

Attendance problems frequently develop into a downward spiral. Studies show children with erratic attendance get lower grades and less positive reinforcement for the academic efforts they do make. Children with lower grades and less positive reinforcement become more likely to avoid school in the future when the opportunity arises. Attendance has become one of the invisible elephants hiding in the room with us, too often given only lip service when reformers push for rising test scores in traditionally academically-challenged districts.

I’d like to start with why the month September itself matters. When I did a google search on this topic, I came up with “Absences Add Up: How School Attendance Influences Student Success” By Alan Ginsburg, Phyllis Jordan and Hedy Chang, August 2014, an article on the some of the affects of absenteeism.

From the Ginsberg, Jordan and Chang article:

APPENDIX II:

A. Why September Matters: Improving Student Attendance
… poor attendance early in the school year can predict chronic absence. In Why September Matters: Improving Student Attendance, Linda S. Olson studies attendance in the Baltimore City Public Schools for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students in September and throughout the rest of the 2012-13 school year. She focused on students who missed 20 days of school in excused or unexcused absences…

 

The study found:
• Students who missed fewer than 2 days in September typically had good attendance rates for the entire year.
• Half the students who missed 2-4 days in September went on to miss a month or more of school, which is known as chronic absence. This group missed an average of 25 days.
• Nearly 9 out of 10 students who missed more than 4 days in September were chronically absent that year. These students missed an average of 70 days.

Let’s pause to focus on that last number: 70 days. Seventy days??!? That’s approaching half the school year. Maybe Stephen Hawking could have continued his academic progress with that little help from the educational system, but almost nobody else will be ready for the next year’s curriculum after a nuclear educational blow of that magnitude.

 

B. Chronic Absence and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes:
… August 2014 in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk … researcher Michael A. Gottfried at the University of California Santa Barbara used a U.S. Department of Education data base that tracks 10,740 students. That data base, known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, includes results for kindergarten tests measuring reading and math ability, as well as six social and emotional skills. … Gottfried divided the absentee students into two levels — those missing 11 to 19 days (what he calls “moderate”) and those missing 20 or more days (which he calls “strong”).
Gottfried’s findings include:
• About 13 percent of the students were chronically absent — 10 percent of them at the moderate level and 3 percent at the strong level.
• Chronically absent students at both levels performed below their better-attending peers on math and reading skills assessments. The differences were wider in math than reading, and more significant for those missing a month or more than for those at the moderate level.
• Chronic absence is associated with a lack of certain social skills, including a child’s ability to pay attention, work independently, adapt to change and persist in tasks. It also reflects a lack of eagerness to learn new things and a lack of engagement in school. Again, the differences are greater for the students who miss more school. Poor attendance did not correlate with a child’s ability to control emotions or make friends.

It’s tough to know where to go with these results. From Absences Add Up | Attendance Works, we learn the following:

• Those with worse attendance showed decreases in their engagement in school and eagerness to learn by the spring testing.
• Family circumstances mattered for chronic absence. Students from low-income families whose parents were not married were more likely to be chronically absent.
• Parent involvement mattered for chronic absence. Students with lower absences had parents who were more likely to take them to book stores, music lessons or tutoring, among other activities.

While I don’t normally venture into preschool and early childhood waters — I don’t know much about early childhood education since I always taught in middle and high schools — I left the last section of that block quote because the bullet points emphasize the importance of family involvement in attendance. Preschool attendees fare better in the absenteeism picture, but that strikes me as natural. Parents who go out of their way to get early education for their kids can be expected to value education more highly than parents who don’t seek out that education.

Most of the above references to data about absenteeism are intuitive. You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the test-scores blow with chronically absent students. Chronically absent students hardly ever succeed academically.

The question that faces teachers is this: Can I influence attendance enough to help at least some of my students? I am writing this post because my experience suggests that, yes, you can. Call home. Call home again. If your districts allows or encourages the practice, go to that home. You have to tackle that “one more day won’t matter” mantra. Some parents respond to their sense that the teacher cares, that the teacher will be disappointed in them if little Audrey does not make it to the bus. This issue should be a September priority, too, before bad habits set in.

Admittedly, absenteeism can sometimes prove impossible to manage. I have referred a number of students without success to truancy programs designed to manage the chronically absent. Sadly, if mom insists on keeping Hedy home to babysit her little sisters and brother when she cannot find a sitter, authorities may talk and talk to mom, but that talking may not get Hedy to school on babysitting days. If dad cannot drive Slater to school after he misses the bus and dad cannot get himself up in time to get Slater ready for the bus, Slater will miss school. You cannot fix all the dysfunctional family dynamics out in the world.

Still, I believe engaging parents in understanding the long-term effects of absenteeism can help. Helping will require preparing a speech. The above URL could be a good place to start. The internet is overflowing with helpful data about long-term effects from chronic absences — even if specifics can be extremely difficult to nail down.*

I approach absenteeism like I approach the latte effect, which I first heard explained by Ben Stein. One latte may only be $4.00, an inexpensive indulgence. Why not? The “why not” comes later. If I buy that latte every day, by year’s end I will have spent $1,460 on my coffee. In the same vein, a day here, a day there, and by the end of the school year a student may have missed more than 5 weeks of a 36 week school year. Few students can recover academically from that loss of time, even if the loss occurred in dribs and drabs. I then talk about math specifically because it’s easy for parents to see how missing math can make every future school year more miserable.

Eduhonesty: What can you do? Parent education has the potential to rescue a Hedy or Slater. Teach the attendance version of the latte effect to parents. Share the results from studies showing long-term academic damage from regular absences. Share tips that will help control the problem, such as scheduling doctor and dentist appointments after school or first thing in the morning. Emphasize that family vacations should not overlap the school year. Help parents figure out alternative transportation for when students miss busses. Can an aunt or uncle help? Make it gently clear that bad weather hardly ever justifies missing school. You might have parents send a change of clothes for students who are wet or cold. Heck, if all else fails, go to a resale shop and buy a few coats for needy students. If you explain your purpose, sometimes you can get phenomenal deals.

Parents respond to teacher concern. If they are shown the data that connects absenteeism to poor performance, some parents will shift that doctor appointment from 11:30 AM to 8 AM to minimize class hours lost. Some parents will decide to postpone the family visit to Puerto Rico until the start of school vacations.

This post falls into the category of “More work at the start of the year and I am already buried now!” As with other advice in this blog, many teachers can skip making these attendance calls. If you work in a school with excellent attendance, you may have nearly perfect attendance all year. But regardless of a school’s attendance patterns, I’d call on any student who missed three days in September and any who miss two without an obviously good reason, starting by expressing concern for the absent student. When you call, you may want to bundle up other useful information into the call. This is a perfect time for reminders about Open House or parent conferences. Those reminders help prevent parents from going on the defensive.

For those of you working in schools that suffer from chronic absenteeism, I’d suggest looking at last year’s absenteeism (if you can lay hands on that data) and calling the parents of all potential problem students. I’d call home at the first absence for any new students. I’d also present a version of my “absenteeism leads to poor academic performance” at conferences, with the understanding that the parents you most need to reach are ironically the most likely to miss conferences.

While teachers cannot control attendance, we can definitely make improvements in a classroom’s overall absenteeism rate. I put up shiny stars on my data board, tracking student attendance for the class. I wrote down student names on the left of a laminated poster and then gave a star for every week of good attendance. At the end of the month, students received awards for having no unexcused absences. Showing students you care can make a difference, day by day.

P. S. I know an almost surefire way to identify struggling Title 1 schools. Look for those attendance charts with the stars on them. In wealthier, academically successful schools, those attendance charts are not found on the walls.

*Historical note: I once spent some time looking up high school data in the Illinois state interactive report card. I went to annual yearly progress (AYP) data for 2013 to check attendance success, since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) tracked attendance. As far as I could tell, all high schools in Illinois had an attendance rate of 92% and a graduation rate of 85%. The state’s attendance data seemed genuinely wacky. I’d love to know that story, but that too is another post.

(Click on the pic to get the full effect of this alphabet soup.)

We are steeped in a stew of initials, living in a time of ultimate contractions. Where did the term “POTUS” come from? Maybe we are seeing a collective reaction to the bewildering quantity of information coming at us. Maybe it’s a simple sense that “LOL” saves time, and “LMAO” gets the point across without any need for superfluous adjectives. IDK where this sea of letters originated. I do know that the letters serve sometimes to help people find their tribe. VCDA and VSF (“Vaya con Dios, Amigo” and “Very Sad Face”) are going fly right past many of us while granting inclusivity to those exchanging these letters.

The habit of shortening concepts to sets of capital letters has been invading business and education as well. This post is to ask writers to please, please write out the full phrase before resorting to the acronym. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a shared language, but problems arise when nonspeakers enter the picture. Problems arise even if nonspeakers don’t enter the picture. Some people have natural facility with acronyms, but others don’t easily think in abbreviations. Those abbreviations can slow the very communication they are intended to accelerate. While ADHD is pretty safe, CDB and CDS are not. ACT, AYP and AP will be immediately understood by many, but SAFE and UBD not so much so.

Eduhonesty: Being a bit petty here, but I am tired of having to refer back to earlier paragraphs to figure out what I am reading. And I pick up acronyms easily. Some professional communications I have seen recently simply have too many capital letters sitting side-by-side. I believe any parent should be able to read our communiques about their children’s educations without referring to the internet as a reference source; when we create cheat sheets like the one above, we should pause to wonder why that cheat sheet seems necessary. As they say (or don’t say since I am making this up) — WRCEA: We are confused enough already.

(Readers, I suggest clicking on the photo so you can fully appreciate the fine details.)

Cleaning out my little black bag, I stopped. My train ticket was colorful. My train ticket had a useful message and drew my eye. The cracks in the window especially caught my attention. My ticket would make a fine cover for a zombie novel.

“Look, listen, live.” The threat of death seems to be everywhere: Category 5 storms, news reports of increasingly random shootings, coverage of car crashes, fires, floods, overdoses, domestic violence, flesh-eating bacteria, sharks, and now even week-end train rides. I think of my students, the many middle-school students who passed through my doors. How many of them can evaluate the odds of a shark attack?

Our scheduled and unscheduled active shooter drills seem necessary. We have to have a strategy, an escape plan. The threat is real. I tried to sequester my kids in out-of-sight areas of the gym once because security knew a kid with a gun was on his way. Eventually, I got through to them that THIS ONE was not a drill. Caring adults talked that kid down from the ledge and nothing happened. Nothing was reported to the news to my knowledge either. How many “almosts” never hit the news? I personally know another one, a gun that made it into a highly respected high school. A teacher talked that kid into giving up the gun.

The barrage of frightening information goes on and on and on. I am an adult and I can sort the information, so I am not worried about the train, the shark, or most of the other possibilities in my list. I cheerfully get into my car and carry my backpack onto many planes. But I remember being thirteen. Thirteen’s a twixt age, and children prone to anxiety can get lost in fear. Our students are beginning to make escape plans when they visit county fairs. They evaluate each classroom — sensibly, I’m afraid — to figure out how to escape a shooter. They ask how to identify a flesh-eating bacteria. What about this spot? Do I need to see a doctor?

Today’s post has been percolating for awhile. I haven’t known how to write it because the world may need scared kids today. We can’t keep telling them, “It’s O.K.!” when it’s not O.K. Those adolescents going out to do war with climate change, suicide and bullying? Their passion may be our last, best hope.

Eduhonesty: Still, the open information spigot should not be allowed to run full-force and non-stop. My classroom recommendation is to mostly leave the gloom, doom and darkness to internet and television commentators. Twist the handle of the faucet, allowing for trickles of storm and other news, but remember the kids probably don’t require much help to see what a mess the news is showing on any given day. By phone, television, tablet or laptop, U.S. children have become steeped in menacing messages. Kids are getting hammered by harsh truths. Even a train ride into the city for a festival, beach day or air show carries with it the anti-selfie message threat of the shattered train window.

I don’t intend to add extra blows to that barrage. Instead, I will be looking for better news to offer balance to the overall picture. The neighbors who banded together to help the newly arrived Eritrean family get started? Similar stories can be a place to start. For a quick good-news cheat, why not google “happy news”?

Hi, readers. Past tips for new teachers have sparked a fair amount of enthusiasm. Here’s Tip #1 for the 2019-2020 school year, a tip you have probably seen before. The first two words of the above advice form the central pillar of all good classroom management, so I thought I’d start here:

KEEP CALM

Five administrators just walked in unexpectedly? Breathe. Breathe. Joey’s having a screaming fit in the corner? Smile and give the other students a science wordsearch while you manage Joey. Your homework handouts have disappeared? Cram some useful book under the document camera. Tell students to write down the (new) homework questions. Just keep going. If you are fortunate enough to have strong classroom technology, begin amassing a list of websites that reinforce your curriculum while buying you time in an emergency. Because emergencies will happen, no matter how well you plan. Colleagues will walk off with your day’s materials for no reason they can ever explain. Cups of coffee will cascade across your desk.. Sometimes I think miniature black holes just suck in a day’s materials, transporting papers to entirely different dimensions. Be sure to have actual paper materials on hand, too, for when the power goes out. 

But try not to let anyone see you sweat. You are the adult in charge of your classroom. You may have to kowtow sometimes to administrators, but stand tall in front of your students. Lead your students. They will follow you if you show them where and how to go.

Believe in yourself.

P.S. If emergencies are happening regularly, however, I suggest asking a friend to help you organize and revamp your system. 

(Adapted from an earlier post because this theme cannot be revisited too often.)

Government officials measure. They measure their measurements against past measurements. Then they reward school districts by leaving them alone or they step in with penalties. Today’s data-based approach always had more in common with tax accounting than education. NCLB led to test scores as THE measure of school quality. However. test scores taken out of context never begin to adequately tell the story of any school population.

In the meantime, educational administrators in “underscoring” districts do not and frequently cannot take a long-term view of the educational process because of those scores. These administrators and sometimes teachers may be anxiously trying to hold onto jobs that depend on elevating test scores. Our understandable, but too-often frantic, efforts to push up math and English scores take struggling districts for rides into the Twilight Zone, as administrators and teachers try to force inappropriate learning at students because “that’s what’s on the test.”

The faces behind the test numbers go unseen and unrecognized. Has a district doubled its English-language learner population? Have funding losses led to increased class sizes as teachers and paraprofessionals were laid off? Especially in poor districts, paraprofessionals are often too thin on the ground before lay-offs occur. Has a district been forced to cut back on tutoring? Are other interventions disappearing because of funding or staff losses? Is district technology breaking but only slowly receiving repairs?  Are planning periods disappearing, supplanted by meetings designed to push up test scores? While crucial to understanding what is happening in schools today, no systematic accounting tracks the effect of learning loss from these pieces.

Too often, only final test scores are counted by state and federal government educational accountants, and that counting can easily skew instruction in suboptimal or even wrong directions. “It’s on the test” should not drive instruction. Our student’s background knowledge should drive  instruction. I feel almost silly writing down such obvious truths.

Eduhonesty: U.S. students honestly might be better off if the NCLB legacy of high stakes annual testing disappeared.

Talk of strikes often centers on salaries for teachers, but strikes are not all about money. They are about preparation time, classroom size, and supplies. They are about creating schools where all students can learn, schools with adequate security and support services.

When planning periods keep disappearing as class sizes balloon, and teachers must buy their own supplies for even basic activities, classroom learning suffers. When aides are laid off or simply not rehired and one counselor is expected to help 1,000 students, classroom learning suffers. When no dean has time to track down the chronically absent, and kids skip class with no fear of being effectively disciplined, learning suffers — or does not occur at all.

Those kids getting high in friends’ basements while playing video games need interventions desperately, but understaffed districts can reach the point where teachers simply mark “A” for absent and get on with their day. Once a class reaches forty students, the teacher may even be relieved that “Jude” and his friends walked away from school to an empty house nearby to play Grand Theft Auto #19. This is the dark side of the Serenity Prayer line “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” 

But striking teachers can try to find the courage and fortitude required to get those kids back into the classroom. They can protest those missing deans and truant officers. If teachers don’t pick up the torch and publicly protest missing aides, engorged classes, and overworked support staff, then school districts have little or no incentive to fix the problems their choices have created.

The people who enter teaching? Almost all of them care more about the individual kids in their classroom than the size of their paycheck. If that were not true, those people would never have chosen to teach in the first place.

I am asking my nonteacher readers to support their local, striking teachers — and ask others to support striking teachers. Issues on the table often don’t make the news, such as shortages of classroom aides. One aide can make all the difference in an early elementary school classroom with 29 students. Without an aide, instruction grinds to a halt as the latest extreme bathroom emergency steals minutes away from kids who do not have extra educational minutes to spare. Without an aide, winter instruction in colder climates must regularly halt an extra 10 or more minutes early before recess and at the end of the day to sort outerwear, then get all those little gloves onto confused fingers before finding lost hats and scarves, putting those hats securely on heads and finally zipping up coats.

Eduhonesty: Please, nonteacher readers, trust the teachers. They are not walking the streets carrying signs because they are greedy. I have worked with multiple young colleagues who regularly headed to their restaurant or movie theater jobs after the school day ended. Anyone who has to carry trays of margaritas to pay the bills should be making a higher wage for his or her classroom work. Most importantly, those contracts the unions negotiate cover many aspects of daily teaching life, all of them relevant to learning for students.

P.S. Regarding anti-union bias: When did we reach the stage where the idea of safe working conditions, sick leave, insurance, a retirement pension, and the right to bargain for higher wages somehow became resented luxuries, rather than rights? As Americans across this country work 29 hours per week, sometimes at two jobs for a total of 58 hours, with their hours carefully held below the line where they might receive benefits, we should be supporting workers. State minimums vary and mostly exceed the federal minimum wage but it’s worth pausing to reflect upon the fact that the federal minimum for 2019 remains $7.25 per hour and only $2.13 for tipped employees. TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS? The government is going to tax tipped employees on the assumption that they received at least 12% in tips, too. I have taught many children whose parents had two and even three jobs, all while receiving no benefits at all. That’s part of working in a poor district in the United States and it carries its own challenges; it’s tough to convince Johnny to do his homework when both parents work odd hours during evenings and weekends, while leaving thirteen-year-old Johnny in charge of his younger siblings, who may not be doing their own homework either.

The United States of America can do better. The United States of America should do better. But honestly, unions may be the last and only resort for the working poor. The anti-unionism that has infected this country? That anti-unionism benefits corporations and school boards, not teachers and other workers. It most emphatically does not benefit U.S. students.

Um… No progress that I see on regressive school funding. No significant progress on affordable housing. In fact, even as I write this, I am in a series of tweets with a friend about how the artists in Seattle need to move to Hoquiam or Westport on Washington’s coast. Seattle’s homes became unaffordable years ago, a fact that makes the news, but making the news seems singularly useless today.

The news appears to be suffering from a worsening case of ADHD. News anchors catapult from story to story. Alleging you were raped by the President may get you a week or two of media time, but I predict this latest allegation will be dropped in favor of the next big something — and there’s always another something.

A little focus might help us here. Could we keep the school segregation story in the news? The story about all those ethnicities crammed into one zip code together, and crammed consequently into one underfunded and/or overcrowded school district together? Right now, the story surfaces like a tired whale with no choice except to come up for air, while having no intention of staying above the waterline for longer than it takes to inhale. Then the story falls back below the surface, vanishing into the depths.

Eduhonesty: Today’s update on fairer school funding: No progress on the Western Front, the Eastern Front or anywhere else.

We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease.
– Sargent Shriver

I was the only white kid in my neighborhood for most of my youth even in high school, so reverse racism was just as apparent as racism.
– Shia LaBeouf

I’d like to flag an absence, a topic that too often falls off the news feed lately — segregation. De facto segregation appears to be thriving in the United States. Zip codes remain a staggeringly strong force in predicting educational excellence. Zip codes also remain a great predictor of neighborhood demographics. 

The United States continues to have a school funding system heavily based in local property values, a system that is inherently discriminatory. The rich get more, the poor get less, and if government grants provide some redress under this system, their effect is spotty and unpredictable. Forget national curricula and national tests. We need fair school funding.

Many U.S. neighborhoods are effectively segregated, with school populations over 90% African-American, Hispanic or white. What happens as a result? If a segregated neighborhood is wealthy, the schools benefit. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Disadvantaged kids who need more help to catch up academically to luckier peers end up with fewer resources, no more time, and less help instead.

Readers, please share this with busy colleagues who have expressed interest in alternative teaching positions.

Is it time to put on your interview shoes? Spring can be crazy, between meetings, more meetings, tests, more tests, assignments to grade, grades to share or complete, conversations with parents, etc. In the meantime, maybe you took the kids to Wisconsin or Florida for spring break. Teachers often keep going like crazy and don’t look back until it’s over.

But hiring for next year’s open positions is well underway now. Were you thinking of looking closer to home? Or finding a better-paying district? Moving to a district that has a Spanish opening? Whatever your reasons, this post is just a reminder to spiff that resume and get online if you have not done so already.