Is there a solution to chronic absenteeism in schools?

I hated going to school so much as a kid that to this day, the sight of Back to School! signs printed in cutesy kiddy font on glowing school-bus yellow that fill stores every August strikes me with dread. I want to punch them.

My elementary school years were fine; I attended a teeny-tiny Catholic school where I think most of the dedicated teachers qualified for food stamps. I knew my classmates so well that they were essentially extended siblings (and a couple of them still are). I graduated first in my class (out of ten) and was star of the pathetic basketball team. High school was a Catholic school too, but insular and snooty. I was an outsider there, from “over the mountain.” I wasn’t bullied or anything, but no matter what, I always felt like I was imprisoned. School was way too early. Way too long. Way too full of busywork. Way too regulated. Just way too much of everything.

It appears things have only gotten worse, especially at government-run schools, and tons of kids are skipping class altogether. Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, published a study in January 2024 that found some alarming statistics about “chronic absenteeism,” defined as “the percentage of students missing at least 10 percent of a school year.” The trend “surged from 15 percent in 2018 to 28 percent in 2022.” Though absenteeism improved in 2023, Malkus reports it “still remained 75 percent higher than the pre-pandemic baseline.” Even among the most affluent school districts, chronic absentee- ism was nearly twice as high in 2023 as in 2019, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

A Google News search for “chronic absenteeism” reveals it’s a major problem in Illinois, northern Kentucky, Houston, Texas, Michigan… everywhere. And this is on top of the learning loss students suffered during the 2020 pandemic.

Chronic absenteeism “is projected to significantly impede any efforts to recover from problems incurred during the Covid era,” Larry Sand, former teacher and current president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, tells me. “The extended school closures mandated by teacher unions, which prevented in-person instruction, have led to unprecedented and long-lasting learning loss for students.”

What’s caused this not-gonna-go mentality? Sand says “the education establishment” is the prime factor.

“Several years ago,” he says, “schools abandoned their mission by hysterically shutting down as a response to Covid, thus alienating many families.”

Sand adds that the “whacked-out sexuality” curricula pushed by so many districts don’t help. He lists but a few examples: “the National Education Association Pronoun Guide, which uses silly terms like ‘ze, zim and zer.’ In Illinois, the Evanston-Skokie school district has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to ‘break the binary’ of gender. In Oregon, the State Department of Education’s health standards may soon require sixth-grade students to be able to define ‘sexual and romantic orientations’ and ‘vaginal, oral, and anal sex’ if implemented.”

“The drive to indoctrinate students with Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and other Marxist-driven drivel has also played a role in the public-school exit,” Sand concludes.

To stem the uneducated epidemic that’s engulfing our country, Los Angeles has decided to lure kids back to learning with a “student-inspired (lunch) menu that will be available at every school in the district.” Here, Sand notes, “the district also told parents that it’s OK to send their sick kids to school. While Covid is still a no-no, if a kid just has a bad cold — with a runny nose and a hacking cough? Come on in!”

Sand notes that in Ohio, “absence rates are ballooning,” lawmakers are desperate and have proposed paying children to attend school.

The parents who are paying attention to what their kids are being indoctrinated with — and that number, blessedly, went up during Covid too — must realize, as the students themselves do, that attending most public schools is largely a waste of time. What are their alternatives, though? And what about the kids who, like me, find even non-offensive conventional education methods dissatisfying?

“Get the gov out of the ed biz completely,” says Sand. “Let parents pay for their own kid’s education.”

But what about poor families who can’t afford to do that?

“If a family demonstrates it can’t afford to buy food, we give them a SNAP card with which they can purchase groceries,” Sand notes. “Similarly, we can assist impoverished families by helping to subsidize their child’s education. We have Pell Grants which enable poor young people to attend college. These federal dollars go to needy students, and can be used to attend private colleges, including religious schools like Notre Dame and Brigham Young. Why not extend Pell Grants to K-12?”

Why not, indeed? If I could do it over again and dictate my own educational needs, or if I ever have children of my own, I’d like to explore the concepts of micro-schooling, nature schooling, “worldschooling” — anything but the artificial, contrived structure that causes me instinctively to want to destroy store signs.

The good news is that, according to the organizers of School Choice Week, “In 2023, a record twenty states said yes to expanding school choice,” and “in a January 2024 parent survey, 72 percent of all parents considered a new school for their children in 2023 — a 35 percent increase over 2022.”

Who says there’s no hope for future generations?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.