COVID Is Not the Reason Kids Are Still Refusing to Go to School

We now speak of COVID-19 shutdowns and school closures in the past tense. So why are there still record levels of chronic absenteeism in schools?

Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student who misses 10% of his or her classes. Some absentee rates across the country are almost unbelievable.

A study by Johns Hopkins University found that "66% of American students attended a school where at least one in five classmates missed four weeks of school."

With concerns over COVID fading, absences are still rising. What seems certain is that the stubborn refusal of teachers' unions to allow kids to come back to school for in-person education led to a disconnect between the child and education. Something has been lost that the educational system, such as it is, can't figure out how to find.

They can't even identify what it is that is missing.

“This fundamental thing has shifted and we can’t quite get it back,” said Liz Cohen, the policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. “It’s troubling.”

Wall Street Journal:

Around one in four students nationally was chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, according to an analysis of 24 states with available data compiled by FutureEd. Before the pandemic, the nationwide average was closer to one in seven students. 

Rates range from New Mexico, where 39.2% of students were chronically absent, to Idaho, with 17.1%.   

The school district in Victoria, Texas, is giving teachers financial motivation to improve attendance. If the district logs above a 94% attendance rate, the baseline to hit its budget, teachers and staff will share in the increased funds, superintendent Quintin Shepherd said. 

So far, the attendance in the district—which has 13,000 students—is at 92.7%, compared with 91.9% last year.

Bribing teachers and students is not the answer. The fundamental cause of absenteeism is a lack of motivation to learn. Part of that is incompetent teachers. But this is also a parental problem. A parent closely engaged in his or her child's education is far more likely to instill a love of learning in his or her children. 

But for many parents and school-age children, COVID school closures broke something precious, something that most of us thought was permanent and unbreakable: the connection between a school and the community. 

The left has often tried to nationalize schools and nationalize funding, curricula, and instruction. But schools are the creation of local government. Their mission is to educate children according to the lights of the parents and the community. 

Now, children seem unmoored from the community and adrift in an unfamiliar world. It's not so much the woke nonsense they're being forced to learn as it is the two years of being isolated from their friends that have placed them in unfamiliar territory. It would be interesting to see what these absent kids of doing with their time, and I'll be willing to bet they aren't doing it with other people.

The teachers will never admit their criminal negligence in this matter. It will be left to the scholars and others to bring out the true reasons for this disaster in education and who should take the blame.