https://projects.apnews.com/features/2023/missing-students-chronic-absenteeism/index.html
School attendance has hit record lows since the pandemic. More than a quarter of kids were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year.
Kids just want to experience all the natural disasters outside. No time for school right now.
I don't blame them. FOMO of having your house destroyed in a hurricane or wildfire is big.
They started treating schools like prisons after columbine. Taking away bookbags. Treating students like criminals. Having rent-a-cop harass kids. Not to mention shooter training and underpaid teachers. And also this war on woke BS with book bans and continual changes to the educational material so kids are learning about atrocities from one source while their history book glosses over it.
So yeah schools aren't in a good place right now.
That is 100% what it is.
Republicans don't get elected when the constituents are educated. So instead of changing their platform to align with educated opinions, they decided to dumb down the population.
They've been doing it for decades and it's finally all coming to a head.
I'm a teacher and don't see public schooling lasting more than 5 years.
There's a new rule at my daughter's middle school this year that children are not allowed to go to extracurricular activities (aside from sports for some reason) unless accompanied by a parent. What the fuck?
There's a "rest of the fucking owl" feeling throughout this whole article. The statistics are straightforward, but all of the reasons proposed by the writer are anecdotal.
Absence rates can rise for any number of reasons, but the one giant glaring one that is not given consideration is that covid still exists. The pandemic is not "over", the world is just beyond caring.
Just think for a moment about what happens when you get a notification that your child's classroom has active spread of covid. How seriously does your kids school take covid? How effective is the current vaccine with the current variant that is prevalent in your area? Would you send your kid to school knowing they would get sick? Would you want your kid to get sick and infect the rest of your family? How many sick days do you have left for the year? Can you afford to be sick? Is them missing school for a few days worth the risk of losing your job? Will repeated covid infection affect you, your kids, or the rest of your family in the future to a greater detriment than missing a few more days of school? Do you have immune compromised family that you also have to take care of? Did you already lose part of your family from covid? How close are you to adequate health facilities that could take care of you and your family if you are sick? Do you have anybody that's willing to take care of your family knowing you are sick? Can you afford it?
Have you noticed that many of the states that have a far higher rate increase of absenteeism are also those that have either very large or very small classroom sizes? Have you noticed that they also seem to correlate with poverty rates? Have you noticed that covid rates are not tracked at all anymore in many states?
All of what I just said is hypothetical, just like the article, but those are all very real thoughts for many Americans. I have kids and if I found that covid was actively spreading through the classroom or school, I would much rather keep them home. If they get sick, we will most likely all get sick. If we all get sick we set in motion cycle of viruses that sets us back months, and possibly hurts our community. We risk our health, careers, and livelihood for a couple days at school. We weigh the risks as we see fit.
We can't keep pretending that covid isn't still an issue. We can't act like it only existed for those 2 years. We definitely can't be ignorantly watering down issues by attributing their cause to targeted talking ponts.
Agree. I've read other articles on this phenomenon recently and none have offered any actual research on the causes.
Whats going on in Minnesota? You'd think they'd have it figured out, but they're some of the worst.
according to that map graph in the article, MT has one of the lowest increases in truancy so idk what you mean
Montana, Wyoming, and New Hampshire use a different definition of chronic truancy, so they are not included, while Minnesota wasn't included due to inconclusive data
Kids figured out that school is just older baby daycare, and that college is a life debt trap, so they're choosing another option
Do tell us how that other option of not even going to grade school is going to work out for them in the future when they want to do things like move out of their parents' house.
I'm not talking about college, just normal grade school. Because without a HS diploma, good luck getting much more than a minimum wage job.
As a subscriber of antischool and a promoter of self-guided learning, I'm for people freeing themselves from school so long as they're not hurting anybody to do it.
This is some libertarian 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' bullshit that I also never hear from anyone who actually has a child. Children do not have fully-developed brains. That alone should be enough to realize that they can't be trusted to teach themselves things properly. They need guidance.
Also, letting a six-year-old decide for themselves whether or not they want to learn to read and know what 1+1 equals is just fucking stupid.
On one hand, yeah, but on the other, to really achieve, you must stand on the shoulders of giants. Else, you will be reinventing the wheel, sometimes literally. One of our great advantages as a species is language, allowing us to communicate complex concepts.
They're hurting people by being tomorrow's idiots ruining the world.
There, that encompasses all of them, now you're pro school, right?
I do think when people eventually decide what they want to do, they will apply themselves and learn. Kids (correctly) believe school is wasting their time. If we offered vocational training instead, I think it would be a win-win.