This is a repost from my old blog, QUIET MINDS, in May 4, 2014. Issues with attendance have blown up recently, according to friends still in the classroom.

My elementary school friend Ann could not play with me when her father was home because he was a merchant seaman and gone for months at a time. On the day he came home, the family stayed together. I don’t recall Ann skipping school to extend this togetherness. I just recall that she wouldn’t come to my house and I couldn’t come play at her house when he first got home.

While my peers learned the alphabet song in First Grade I was sick at home. Was it in Fourth Grade that I had the flu for a week and missed learning how to count in Spanish? I eventually learned my ABCs, but I’m embarrassed to admit that of all the children at Echo Lake Elementary, I might be the only one who finally learned uno dos tres…  in college. 

I remember how hard it was to catch back up when I’d been absent. In retrospect, I realize I was lucky. My mother made me go to school. I was bullied and teased and sometimes lazy and prone to tonsillitis and chest colds and procrastination, but my mother never allowed me to make a habit of being absent. Too many missed days meant I would have no idea what was going on when I got back to school. A day here or there, a week when I was really sick were allowed, but she ignored my fake illnesses. My mother would look at me as I whined about not feeling well. “Do you have a temperature?” Usually I was shoved off to school.

As a teacher I get a different sort of question, and often from students who should know better. 

It’s one of any teacher’s least favorite questions: “Are we doing anything important in class today?” 

Usually this is a precursor to the student announcing they are leaving early because they are ill, or they have a doctor/dental/chiropractic appointment, or they must to drive to Portland, or can’t they please go to another class to finish an assignment? 

I know what’s coming when the question begins, and they should know what I’m going to tell them: We are always doing something important in class. Every day. Sometimes I can trust them to soldier on alone, but often I can’t do a thing when they make a habit of missing school. They are just avoiding the work. They haven’t been doing it and they aren’t going to do it on their own. They have the habit of missing school and have developed the habit of not knowing what’s going on. Missing too much class is a disaster.

A troubling trend we’re seeing is students who have been allowed or encouraged to miss school from the age of five. For an increasing number of students, missing school becomes normal, habitual. A teacher in my building looked at attendance records and discovered a shocking fact: By the time they are Juniors in high school, some students have missed enough days of school to amount to 2-3 years of absences. In ten years of school, in other words, they have missed about 25%. No wonder they aren’t doing well in class! There is really nothing wrong with them only they missed too much to keep up. 

This isn’t just a local trend. Statewide, educators are alarmed at what happens to students who frequently miss class. Attendance problems have drawn attention on a national level, too. Beginning as early as Kindergarten, missing school predicts a poor future in education and in life.

“The impact of chronic absence is significant. Research has shown, for example, that chronic absence in kindergarten is associated with lower academic performance in first grade; students who were chronically absent in Pre-K and kindergarten in Baltimore were more often absent in later grades and more likely to repeat a grade; and in Georgia, a 3 percent improvement in attendance, or five more days, would have led more than 55,000 students to pass standardized tests.”—USA Today

By the time they arrive in my classroom in their late teens they have decided they have learning disabilities or emotional problems, diagnosed or undiagnosed issues of all sorts. And sometimes they do. But other times what’s gone wrong is simple: They missed key instruction and can’t keep up; they have never learned how to work at classwork because someone always helped them avoid it; or they think they are stupid because their skills are so low—and the main reason for all of this is that they just have not been in school enough to keep up with their peers. 

The Oregonian reports: “In Oregon, a shocking 24 percent of kindergartners missed 17 or more days of school during 2009-10, the study found. Among first-graders, 18 percent were chronically absent.” That’s nearly 10% absence. Some of my students are absent for a day or two every week, or they vanish for several days and come back wanting to know “what I missed” while ignoring the work they already know we are doing. 

I have students with a dozen “excused” absences in a single term. The parent wants my help because their student is so “confused” by what we’re doing. 

At this point, I have to wonder if we are all playing on the same team?

It starts in Kindergarten. Students miss a lot of school and this becomes a pattern. They find the work, when they return to it, too hard. They don’t understand. They are confused. They look for an answer, an excuse. Mom or Dad write them an excuse when they don’t want to go to school, they fall further behind, and pretty soon they are seniors and not on track for graduation. 

They don’t want to work hard, they want me to magically fix it. Someone taught them that magically making work go away was possible. It wasn’t me. 

Maybe we need some help from the courts on this one. Someone needs to explain to parents that allowing a five year old to miss too much school may literally mean she won’t graduate a dozen years later. Everything points to this becoming a habitual problem early in a child’s life. Parents need to ensure they set boundaries for absences early in life. Waiting to try to set these boundaries later on can be painful for all. There’s not much a permissive parent can impose on a seventeen year old. 

There are plenty of reasonable and practical reasons for missing school, but students sometimes miss school because they take vacation in the middle of the school year, or to care for younger siblings or an ill parent. Some stay home because the family is moving or has some other emergency. Absences don’t have to ruin their education. For example, I’ve have had students who miss a week in the fall to hunt, but who made sure they were caught up before they left on the trip. 

It’s a problem when missing school becomes a habit of missing out on education. Sometimes students stay home only because, for whatever reason, their parents don’t insist they go. 

These students don’t learn to become capable readers because it’s “hard,” and perhaps their parents do not insist they read because the parents never read when they can help it. Their children don’t do well in math because their parents didn’t like math either, or because it’s “hard,” or because they are required to take years of math beyond what their parents needed to graduate from high school and so there is no one at home to help them with assignments. They don’t pay attention in class because they would rather have one-on-one attention. But teachers are not parents, and every teacher has dozens or perhaps a hundred students to look after. The student has to make an effort. It is not the job of the teacher to cater in every case to every reluctant learner. 

If you want to become a better reader (mathematician, runner, football player…) you have to practice. You have to direct your entire attention, even if for short periods of time, to doing it better. Listening to books on tape will provide some understanding of a story, but it won’t make anyone a better reader. Only struggling to read better will accomplish that. It’s not easy. A severely dyslexic student of mine was pushed and pushed and pushed to read. It was so very hard, but the student was not allowed to stop trying and that student eventually, painfully, found a way. And that was a student with an actual disability diagnosed in childhood who is succeeding in college. 

Always using a prop to get through the need to read—listening to a tape or someone read the text aloud, skimming a summary, or faking the act of reading in some other manner is like training for a 5K by having someone drive you through the route. 

An inability to read is a handicap, and like most skills, reading is gained through struggle and persistence. 
Some students fail to develop skill because it’s “too hard.” There is nothing wrong with struggle. We all struggle.

Some parents fail to teach their children and some students fail to accept a necessary truth: Education can be fun and exciting, but it’s not easy. Lying on the couch is easy. Not paying attention and then complaining that school is boring is code for: “I don’t know how to try.”

Even students who understand how to work hard at meaningless jobs for pay may have completely missed the boat when it comes to showing up every day at school prepared to learn. 
Failing to show up is absolute failure.

This is another example of why does this surprise anyone?I try to repeat directions orally several times. I diagram on the board. I explain why we do things and why we do them the way we do. I provide models and I model assignments by doing them myself. I hand my students a schedule for the entire term—twelve weeks at a glance—with the major deadlines. I have every project broken down into steps, a little bit at a time. I have handouts explaining most everything I teach in class—created mostly for the sake of students who have been absent or who fail to listen in class. 

These are all best practices and provided to ensure that my students will get the message in multiple ways. 

And then a student does not listen in class, finds the written directions “confusing,” argues with details of the assignment because someone else said it was something else, has not completed the work due that day, but can’t hand it in Monday because he will be gone all the next week. He’s not stupid, disabled, or mean. There’s not a thing wrong with him, except he’s frequently absent. And someone has allowed him to have all these “excused” absences and then also allowed him to believe that his absences are not his problem but mine. 

School is work. Work is good; it makes us stronger. It doesn’t just happen, we have to do it. 

I will be hearing from the parent, no doubt, wanting me to help that student. The student blames me for his trouble and so will the parent. I will do my best, but the reality is: If the student came to class every day, ready to work, we wouldn’t be having these conversations.