Lamenting Earl — and other chronically absent students

Nearly 30 years ago (ouch), the unforgettable Earl Widley (not his real name) slumped over a too-small desk in my freshman English class as I muddled through that equally unforgettable first year of teaching. Earl sat waayyyy back in the corner of my musty trailer, last seat on the right. It was his third attempt at freshman English and, at the age of 16, he towered over the younger, scrawnier boys in class who tended to keep their distance. Husky and with fast-growing facial hair, Earl would have made a stellar defensive lineman for our struggling varsity team. That is, if he had come to school more than once or twice a week.

You see, formal education was never Earl’s thing — he was itching to make some fast money working construction. When I confronted him with his laissez-faire approach to my class, he told me that his dad, who in my imagination shared his son’s burly physique, told him he could quit school when he turned 17. So Earl was simply killing time until his next birthday.

This kid gave new meaning to the term chronic absenteeism. Thinking about him got me wondering whether any of today’s research-based interventions that aim to deter absences might have worked with Earl. Are we to assume that an English 9 three-peater is too far gone for an attendance intervention? Or might some of today’s recommended strategies pass the Earl Widley litmus test?

Show me the evidence

I consulted the latest “evidence brief” called District Strategies to Reduce Student Absenteeism published by EdResearch for Recovery (Gottfried, Page, & Edwards, 2022). These useful summaries are “aimed at providing K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students during and following the novel coronavirus pandemic.” I pulled from the longer summary a handful of tier 1 interventions, intended to reach all students with “broad-based and preventative supports,” and tier 2 interventions, which “target students with signs of risk.” Let’s see which strategies pass my Earl litmus test.

The simple fact that Earl was in his third year of English 9 tells us that he was allowed to fall through the cracks.

First up is a tier 1 strategy that recommends providing parents with detailed and timely information about their child’s absences and positive messages about the value of attending school. For instance, studies show that personalized mail and text messages reduce chronic absenteeism (Rogers & Feller, 2018; Smythe-Leistico & Page, 2018). Another tier 1 strategy recommends home visits by school staff, which studies show can be effective for students whose families lack a strong relationship with the school (Sheldon & Jung, 2018).

Nope. I find both of these strategies wanting for students like Earl. The issue is that so much around attendance comes down to a parent’s attitude toward a child missing school (Robinson et al., 2018; Sheldon & Epstein, 2004). Mr. Widley, like it or not, didn’t see the point of his teenage son sticking it out for a diploma. Other staff had tried to get him to see it differently, yet this hardworking single parent had decided that his strong-willed truant but otherwise well-behaved adolescent son could make his own decisions at age 17. Visits and mailers from school staff hadn’t changed Mr. Widley’s mind. (Texts weren’t invented yet, but I’m doubtful!)

Another tier 1 strategy holds “that students are more engaged — and more likely to attend school — when their schoolwork connects to their own identity and when they feel a sense of belonging at school.” For instance, some studies find merit in culturally relevant pedagogy (Dee & Penner, 2016). It’s not much of a stretch to observe that Earl’s schoolwork failed to connect to his identity. He was much more interested in working with his hands and earning wages to buy a motorcycle — he worked on dad’s Harley — than in discussing the integrity of Atticus Finch. Had our district offered a high-quality career and technical education program, perhaps one that led to an industry-recognized credential in manufacturing, architecture and construction, or auto mechanics, Earl likely would have been much more interested in coming to school. So this approach passes muster for me.

A couple of tier 2 strategies also make it through the Earl litmus test. They pertain to early detection and mentorship. The first, based on evidence from urban middle schools, calls for “data systems that identify students for increased support based on attendance, behavior, and academic metrics [to] facilitate targeted efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism” (Balfanz, Herzog, & Mac Iver, 2007). The second strategy finds that peer mentors and other school-based mentoring programs can improve attendance and academic outcomes (Center for Supportive Schools, 2018; Institute for Education Sciences, 2015).

I think we all agree that interventions need to start before absenteeism gets out of hand. The simple fact that Earl was in his third year of English 9 tells us that he was allowed to fall through the cracks. Had a data system (or human system!) identified him during elementary or early middle school as needing increased supports, perhaps he would have not been doodling images of bikini-clad women behind his Romeo and Juliet paperback.

I’m also optimistic that, had Earl had a mentor early on who shared his interests in the mechanical and building trades, he would have been much less likely to drop out. That individual could have steered this young man into a promising pathway.

So that’s three strategies out of five that passed the litmus test.

A fairer measure of attendance?

Besides the evidence brief, we at Fordham recently published a study by the University of Maryland’s Jing Liu (2022) examining the concept of “attendance value-added.” Liu found that conventional measures of student absenteeism, including chronic absenteeism rates, tell us little about a high school’s impact on students’ attendance. Looking instead at “attendance value-added” isolates the school’s contributions to attendance, and therefore doesn’t reward or penalize schools based on the particular students they enroll.

Perhaps knowing that our efforts mattered not only to students like Earl but also to the education leaders who professed to care about them would have helped my school embrace attendance-boosting changes. I’ll never know. But today’s attendance crisis, fueled by the pandemic, makes it even more critical that we energetically pursue interventions that work.

Earl dropped out about halfway through his year with me. I like to think he went on to learn a valuable trade, built up his skills, and clawed his way into the middle class. That he was able to provide for a family. But that’s my own guilt talking. Sadly, the evidence (Rumberger, 2013) tells a different story.

References

Balfanz, R., Herzog, L., & Mac Iver, D.J. (2007). Preventing student disengagement and keeping students on the graduation path in urban middle-grades schools: Early identification and effective interventions. Educational Psychologist, 42 (4), 223-235.

Center for Supportive Schools. (2018). In school and on-track to graduate: Key findings from the AT&T Aspire-funded evaluation of the peer group connection cross-age peer mentoring and high school transition program. Author.

Dee, T. & Penner, E. (2016). The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gottfried, M., Page, L., & Edwards, D. (2022). District strategies to reduce student absenteeism. EdResearch for Recovery.

Institute of Education Sciences. (2015, May). WWC intervention report: Check and connect. U.S. Department of Education.

Liu, J. (2022). Imperfect attendance: Toward a fairer measure of student absenteeism. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Robinson, C.D., Lee, M.G., Dearing, E., & Rogers, T. (2018). Reducing student absenteeism in the early grades by targeting parental beliefs. American Educational Research Journal, 55 (6).

Rogers, T. & Feller, A. (2018). Reducing student absences at scale by targeting parents’ misbeliefs. Nature Human Behavior, 2, 335-342.

Rumberger, R.W. (2013, May). Poverty and high school dropouts: The impact of family and community poverty on high school dropouts. American Psychological Association.

Sheldon, S.B. & Epstein, J.L. (2004). Getting students to school: Using family and community involvement to reduce chronic absenteeism. School Community Journal, 14 (2), 39-56.

Sheldon, S.B. & Jung, S.B. (2018). Student outcomes and teacher home visits. Johns Hopkins School of Education.

Smythe-Leistico, K. & Page, L.C. (2018). Connect-text: Leveraging text-message communication to mitigate chronic absenteeism and improve parental engagement in the earliest years of schooling. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 23 (1-2), 139-152.

---

This article appears in the November 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 54-55.