Graduation rates don’t tell real story

Does it matter how much my students are in class?

The Washington Post recently reported that in Maryland’s largest school district, seniors routinely miss weeks of classroom learning and yet still receive course credit and graduate. How did we get to the point where a student in Montgomery County can miss more than 50 classes in just one semester and still get a diploma?

Or, in Los Angeles where I teach, students can fail a somewhat rigorous academic class and make it up with a weaker online class? Or, countrywide, we see graduation rates rise while academic achievement stagnates or falls?

Mostly, this is the result of people who work in offices ordering people who work in schools to raise graduation rates. Meanwhile, they fail to provide schools with adequate resources or fail to consult with those of us who actually work in the classroom.

As a rookie teacher in 1992 Los Angeles, I was forbidden from considering student attendance in calculating grades. I understood. Partly it was expediency, but there was a logic and even some humanity to that rule. Many kids have complicated lives. They get sick. They get shot. They get pregnant. They go to work to help keep their families off the street, or they stay home to take care of siblings while their parents work three jobs, go to jail or get deported. If a student is willing to work hard to overcome missing so much class, we ought to commend that student, not sanction him or her for daring to minimize our involvement.

So does it matter how much a student attends school?

It matters financially in states that fund schools based on average student attendance. I used to like to think of myself as a salesman — hawking the beauty of language and the power of written expression, but the product most important to my school and district is student in-seat attendance.

Of course, it ought to matter whether students come to class. But if students can learn as much without being in school, then how valuable are we?

The son of a friend told me that during a teachers’ strike, he stayed home and read books and learned more than he had before or after the strike, but I’m not sure how many students spend much time in self-directed reading during teacher strikes or any other time. Still, it does seem a bit self-serving for us to assert our value by offering contempt to the students who can’t or don’t wish to attend our classes regularly.

At the least, we want students to not become a burden (or menace) to society. It doesn’t hurt if they become freethinking and informed citizens who can participate in self-government. Ideally, we are preparing students to be responsible adults, knowledgeable and skilled enough to be able to matriculate into college, disciplined enough to finish college and then hold a job.

Regular attendance demonstrates one of the most employable attributes: an ability to endure hours of tedium and a lot of annoying people. Perhaps we can find a way to make school less tedious and make ourselves and the student experience less annoying.

I could name a dozen or more graduating seniors who mostly wasted the last year of high school. I’m not referring to illiterate or unskilled kids the system has failed. These young men and women have plenty left to learn, but they are tired of school and have no interest in being students anymore.

Just as many of our graduating seniors aren’t ready to leave us yet. Not only because they have more to learn, but also because they have come to rely on us for emotional and psychological support rather than their unsupportive or nonexistent families.

Our society quite rudely dispatches lost children. We fuss over them (or at least their academic records) until we can check off the right boxes and scoot them aside.

It’s an assembly line that works fine for some kids but, as usual, the onesize-fits-all approach is failing a lot of our most vulnerable students. So far, we’ve lacked the collective imagination to do better by them.

It is time to stop being infatuated with numbers. Data can be a useful tool, but accountability cannot be graphed or charted; it can only be achieved inside the minds and souls of our students.

Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and the author of “Students First and Other Lies” and, on audio, “Now’s the Time” (narrated by Kim Fields).