The first step to college- and career-readiness is showing up at
school. But did you know that as many as 7.5 million U.S.
students miss a full month of school each year, maybe more?
The State Office of Education is sounding the statistic, and an
accompanying alarm, in hopes of changing that tune.September is Utah’s premiere Attendance Awareness Month.
The Utah State Office of Education is hosting the month with organizations including Voices for Utah Children and WestEd
in hopes of stemming student absences, which can lead to
academic trouble, increased dropout rates and a profound
impact on the socio-economic vitality of our communities.
Suggested activities are listed on the Attendance Works
website. The state also plans to host the Every Day Counts
Policy Forum on Sept. 18. There, educators, policymakers, and
community leaders will discuss attendance issues, and, they
hope, craft recommendations to support school attendance and
student success.
1 comment:
I appreciate the good intentions of those pushing an effort to reduce all absences, but the whole movement is misguided, and there are two major problems with the studies used to promote this approach.
1. The studies' validity is highly questionable. The studies do NOT distinguish between excused and unexcused absences. We all know from experience that there is a big difference between the two, yet they are being treated the same and lumped together. We truly have no idea whether having many excused absences has a negative effect on academic achievement because no study has distinguished those absences from the other kind - the unexcused absences, which certainly DO have a negative effect.
2. This whole movement is operating on the amateur statistician's blunder: confusing correlation with causation. There is plenty of evidence that lower attendance correlates with trouble in school, but there hasn't been any research done to eliminate other possible causes for that trouble and prove that lower attendance actually CAUSES trouble in school. Trying to reduce all absences based on this blunder - when there are many kinds of absences which are beneficial for a child's development - is bad public policy.
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