Schools Won’t Admit a Big Driver in Absenteeism

This article first appeared in the Washington Post.

Listening to researchers discuss the reason for chronic absenteeism in our schools is like watching cigarette companies weigh in on the causes of lung cancer in the 1950s. Both institutions are laughably incapable of blaming themselves.

The Oct. 13 news article “Absenteeism plagues two-thirds of schools” considered many factors of absenteeism except the most obvious one that virtually all parents of school-age children know to be true. When schools closed their doors to in-person learning under misguided and self-aggrandizing advice from Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, and other teachers-union activists, they signaled to children and parents that school attendance is not necessary. Not acknowledging that school closures were a mistake only worsens the problem. Teachers unions can’t have it both ways. Chronic absenteeism is not a concern only when public funding becomes contingent on test scores and attendance.

Similarly, in Fairfax County, a “restorative justice” district in which suspensions raise concerns of a “school to prison pipeline,” my sons were suspended for 15 consecutive days for refusing to wear their masks after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 2 was implemented. Now, the schools display signs about missing more than nine days being a threat to literacy and academic achievement.

School district administrators and researchers lose their credibility when they raise alarms and acknowledge truths only when they are politically and financially expedient.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, Springfield