Let’s treat every day like the first day of school
Show up. Step up.
Last spring, the Milwaukee College Prep charter schools celebrated their 20th anniversary. One part of that was an assembly one morning in Sherman Park for the 2,000 students in the four central city schools that MCP operates. The featured speaker was Liz Dozier, nationally known for her role in turning around one of the lowest-success high schools in Chicago and now head of a nonprofit called Chicago Beyond.
Dozier led the students in a chant in which half called out, “Show up,” and responded, “Step up.”
This may seem so obvious that it hardly needs to be said, but showing up is the first step to doing well in school.
However, chronic school absence is a large-scale problem nationwide that is getting increased attention. It’s an issue in schools of every kind and in every community, although poor attendance is a bigger problem in schools serving low-income children.
Friday was, in some ways, the most important day of the year in every school in Wisconsin that gets any form of public funding. Why? Because, by state law, the third Friday in September is the day for setting enrollment figures for schools, and enrollment numbers drive a lot about how much money a school receives.
(Permit me a brief digression about the claim that some private schools keep a lot of special ed kids and kids who cause trouble until after third Friday and then kick them out, keeping the money that those kids generate. I’ve looked into this a bunch of times over the years and have never found any data to support this claim.)
One of the somewhat hilarious aspects of third Friday is that all across the state, thousands of children had the best school breakfast of the year that day. Pancakes, donuts, who knows what. At many schools, there were prizes or rewards for being in school.
Roll out the welcome mat every day
What if every day was treated like a day to roll out the welcome mat for students?
At some schools, that is the case. Principals and teachers greet students every day at the door. Some experts suggest it is a good way to build a positive atmosphere.
One of the things City Year brings to a dozen-plus Milwaukee schools is a rousing welcome every day — red-jacketed City Year workers line up on both sides of a school entrance, cheering as the students arrive. The private nonprofit City Year program, generally staffed by young adults, aims to provide the relationship building that helps kids feel more positive about school.
Nonetheless, attendance is a big problem overall, and the start of the school year sets a tone for the rest of the year. A recent report from two national nonprofits, Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center, encouraged dealing with attendance issues in September to try to stem year-long problems.
MPS, which has launched a new campaign around attendance called Attend Today, Achieve Tomorrow, says on its website, “Half of the students who miss two to four days in September will go on to miss nearly the equivalent of a month of school by the end of the year.”
MPS also says that one in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students is absent 10 days a year or more. And by sixth grade, “chronic absence becomes the leading indicator that a student will drop out of high school.”
Just about every kind of attendance campaign you might think of has been tried in Milwaukee. A crackdown by the district attorney’s office on parents of truants. Parent coordinators at schools. Automated phone systems for calling home. Increased social work and counseling for kids and the adults in their lives.
Most haven’t had a significant impact and there is a history of many schools not really taking a strong stand on attendance.
By the numbers
The most recent attendance data on the state Department of Public Instruction website is for the 2016-'17 school year. It gives these overall figures for MPS: 90.3 percent attendance for elementary grade students, 88.9 percent for middle schoolers, and 80.9 percent for high schoolers. One way of rephrasing that: At the high school level, close to one kid in five is missing without an excuse on a typical day.
The new national report includes data on chronic absence from 2015-'16 for every state. For Wisconsin, 278 of the state’s 2,151 schools have “extreme chronic absence problems,” and 16.6 percent of the state’s students are chronically absent, the report says. (Chronic absence is defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days. “Extreme problems” means at least 30 percent of students in a school are chronically absent.)
Almost as obvious as saying that attendance is necessary to learning is saying this: The problem primarily starts outside of school. There are a lot of kids leading difficult lives and that shows up in attendance. It’s hard to impact a child’s life outside of school, but it’s sure worth it for schools and social service agencies to do all they can to get home life more on track.
But remember the second part of the chant from the Milwaukee College Prep rally: Step up.
That applies to both students and staff. Students need to care about how they’re doing in school and they need to put in their own effort. But schools can help make that happen by making students feel they are supported and part of a team effort to give them a real shot at a good future.
A good school culture can be a huge plus. Milwaukee College Prep is known for having such cultures and in the 2016-'17 year, the attendance figures for its four schools, all serving low-income kindergarten through eighth-graders, were: 95.1 percent, 96.2 percent, 95.7 percent and 95.6 percent.
Third Friday plays a big role in shaping the lives of schools in Wisconsin. But the most successful schools are ones where every day is a day for kids to show up and for an entire school community to step up.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.