(Click to enlarge. We will need to add a few categories for ESSA.)

The more I read about ESSA, the more I mutter under my breath. We SO needed a new law that adds MORE data requirements for districts and then throws the creation of new exact details of testing to the states. ESSA touts the idea that educational control has been returned to states. Yes, and when the kickstarter campaign for my new elevator to the moon launches, I hope everyone believing that ESSA fiction will toss a few thousand dollars my way.

Taking a quick tally, ESSA did not decrease the number of tests required in public schools, although a few potential substitutions are allowed. ESSA did not decrease reporting requirements; in fact, the law added new categories to separate out such as homeless students, students in foster care, and students whose parent(s) are active duty military members. Additional reporting requirements for English learners have been added, in apparent hope of forcing schools to adopt more demanding performance expectations for their EL populations. ESSA also requires new data to be reported about school “climate” and safety, including data on school suspensions, expulsions, violence, and chronic absenteeism. Various other snippets of addittional data will be required as well, such as preschool enrollment.

Students are still expected to test in mathematics and English/language arts in grades three through eight and then once in high school. National assessments such as ACT or SAT will be allowed for high school testing provided these tests can be shown to adequately measure the required state curriculum. This data-driven requirement should shut down most or all attempts to create alternative assessments. Science will still be tested once in elementary, middle and high school.  ESSA has kept the requirement for breaking down results by subgroups, as well as the requirement that 95 percent of students participate in state assessments, with student participation assessed as part of state report cards. Overall, the testing picture has changed little, a few brushstrokes at most.

Schools still must be identified for improvement. Specifically, schools where any student group* is consistently underperforming must be identified for targeted support and improvement. While states have allegedly been given flexibility in defining “consistently underperforming,” schools identified for support and improvement must create a plan to file with their local educational agencies (LEA). Schools can be identified for support and improvement if they 1) get Title I funds and score in the bottom 5 percent of a state’s schools, 2) Have a high school graduation rate below 67 percent, or  3) Despite lengthy time on a targeted improvement plan, still have one or more student group performing in the bottom 5 percent of a state’s test.

Would you like a cup of NCLB with your new law anyone? States are allowed to make changes to NCLB and NCLB-based provisions — but within a familiar test-centered agenda. Would you like more data with your endless data?

A few quick positives: Preschool funds have become more available. ESSA permits adaptive testing, such as the Smarter Balanced test, and will also accept out-of-level testing for high school mathematics in eighth grade. ESSA also makes changes to charter school policy designed to improve accountability in the authorization process.

Eduhonesty: More data = more lost time = greater opportunity costs. Data gathering is not teaching, but data gathering requires teachers’ time, time that cannot simultaneously be used to construct new lessons. Data gathering never planned a spirit assembly but data gathering has undoubtedly prevented many administrators from creating those assemblies or other student bonding activities. One fundamental problem with government educational initiatives has to be the stunning lack of concern for the time required to institute those inititatives, time that bleeds away, never to be recovered.

We might just close the achievement gap if we used the time we spend crunching numbers for spreadsheets to teach America’s children instead.

*In NCLB fashion, subgroups are broken down into major racial or ethnic groups, economically disadvantaged students, English learners, or students with disabilities.

Research has identified characteristics associated with dropping out of school^[1] such as a history of being held back in school, attendance difficulties, lack of family or peer support, becoming a parent, inability to balance employment with school responsibilities, low grades and test scores, Hispanic and African-American ancestry, and especially failed math and English classes. By middle school, we can do an excellent job of predicting whether or not a student will stay the academic course: Any one of the following traits suggests students have only a ten to twenty percent chance of graduating on time: ^[2] 1) Academic failures, especially in English or mathematics, 2) Missing more than one out of five school days and 3) Regular unsatisfactory behavior.

If the idea of missing more than one in five school days sounds improbable, let me point readers to an article on USATODAY.COM titled, “Study: 7.5 millions students miss a month of school each year” which can be retrieved here: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-05-17/study-chronic-school-absenteeism/55030638/1. I should add that we have fallen down the fuzzy number rabbit hole here. Other sources provide somewhat different numbers.

The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

As the article notes, chronic absenteeism is not the same as sometimes being absent. Chronic absenteeism means missing 10 percent of a school year — one in ten or more days when somehow a student never makes it into that school desk. We don’t have the data to break this down well, either. Only six states give us solid data on chronic absenteeism: Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island. These states don’t use identical algorithms so their data will not be exactly comparable, but we can get an idea of how large our problem may be in some locations. I’ll refer readers to the article for a more exact picture.

Our six states have reported chronic absenteeism rates from 6 percent to 23 percent, with urban, high-poverty areas unsurprisingly reporting that as much as one-third of their students regularly choose to stay home or hang with friends rather than enter the classroom. The problem is not exclusive to urban schools. In some rural areas, one in four students skip a month or more of the school year. Chronic absenteeism tends to be a pattern, repeating across the years. Over five years, a student may manage to miss more than a complete year of school. There’s almost no way back from an academic morass that deep.

Interactions between our drop-out predictors remain underexplored. All those missing school days lead directly to a number of those failed math and English courses. In turn, those failed courses provide one more justification for letting the bus go by while watching Hansel and Gretel Get Baked. Depending upon the student, effects on behavior from missing school may be considerable. Many “students” who regularly miss large percentages of the school year naturally fall into sustained misbehavior. They can’t read their texts. Sometimes they can barely read at all.  Academics come at them like blows to be deflected. Our chronic absentees may lack social resources for support. They usually end up on the periphery of a school’s social life.[3] When they are not ignored, they may be bullied because they are outsiders.

Eduhonesty: I’d like to raise a large flag here. What happens when a kid cannot see any benefit from learning the latest day’s material, when “Daniel” believes education itself may be nearly pointless? Misbehavior happens, for one thing. Sometimes the best piece of luck for the classroom will Daniel’s absence. Adolescents seldom sit still for an hour when forced to work on tasks that do not interest them — or worse, tasks they cannot do even when and if they try.

I have taught these absentee students. I have sent our versions of truancy officers out after them. But sometimes I knew I was locked in a losing battle. After too many lost years, students no longer expect remediation to provide benefit. They probably received a great deal of remediation as they fell behind, and that remediation did not catch them up. It’s quite possible it made them feel stupid instead.

If we are going to push, push, push to make kids stay in school, we have to make school seem worth their time. Our students do not need to see pots of gold at the end of the educational rainbow, but when they do not believe they might be able to buy a better car as a result of their efforts, we are all in trouble. That’s why the Dreamers need a path to citizenship. That’s why inner-city kids have to believe they will be able to find a decent job in return for their efforts. That’s why we have to take time to try to walk a few miles in our students’ shoes.

Eduhonesty: I’d like to lay out the problem in three words and ask readers to reflect on those words.

Children without hope.

How are we to teach these children? How are we to manage these children? They are often frankly disruptive as all hell on a bad day, and even as I manage behaviors, I feel profoundly sorry for them.

I also wish to guarantee readers that the problems that led to our children without hope mostly have nothing to do with classroom teachers, pedagogical skills, tests, or faulty academic standards. We will not be able to attack these problems with “improved” teachers and “more rigorous” standards.  In and of themselves, more rigorous standards will likely make the problem worse. The best teachers with the most carefully constructed standards can’t make up for missing 50 out of 180 school days. They can’t fix the hopelessness that eventually results from those missed days.

This would normally be the paragraph where I exhort readers or schools to take some course of action to fix our problem. But I don’t know what to do. What can you do when a child refuses to get out of bed and no one steps in to make that child get up and get dressed? Which domino causes the other dominos to fall? Where can we intervene? How can we intervene?

I know teachers make a difference. Phone call after phone call, and sometimes attendance and work slowly get better. Positive reinforcement gets many children to stand shivering at the bus stop more often. But I also know chronic, extreme absenteeism is like cancer, and teachers dealing with this absenteeism are their own versions of oncologists. You win some.

But we still lose far too many.

[1] See http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Keeping-kids-in-school-At-a-glance/Keeping-kids-in-school-Preventing-dropouts.html for a quick snapshot. Last retrieved March 21, 2017.

[2] Edutopia. “Middle School’s Role in Dropout Prevention.” August 21, 2012 http://www.edutopia.org/blog/dropout-prevention-middle-school-resources-anne-obrien

[3] Kids are quirky, though. The right kid can miss weeks for years and still be popular. Good-looking, witty and well-dressed compensates for many academic deficiencies. That dashing boy who failed two grades may be one of the most popular kids in the group when he bothers to arrive — which is a fat packet of trouble in and of itself.

P.S. Because of the number of big issues in this post, threads have necessarily gone unexplored. I picked one thread and ran with it. This post reminds me why I sometimes call this blog “The Secret Blog of Gloom and Doom.” I’ll try for a happier post shortly. I have amassed a fair amount of information lately on the ubiquitous spinner fidget toys. If those toys were aliens, neither Jeff Goldblum nor Will Smith would be able to save us now.