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Woody Allen once said 80% of success in life is just showing up.
Although 80% seems high, showing up is certainly the bare minimum for success, and even by that low standard our educational system is failing.
Recently, a new report from the Manhattan Institute revealed that over 30% of New York City’s public-school students were considered chronically absent last year, indicating they were missing more than 10% of school days.
And more than 39% of low-income and minority students and English language learners were chronically absent.
In other words, those students who most need to attend school regularly are attending it the least.
Sadly, the pandemic contributed greatly to this problem.
Despite the low risk of COVID-19 to children, stringent regulations were imposed on schools due to pressure from the teachers union, leading to widespread closures.
Parents got the message that regular attendance wasn’t important.
Although parents bear some blame for failing to get their kids to school, so do the schools these children attend.
The report notes there are many schools that have low rates of absenteeism despite serving primarily minority and low-income students.
As an illustration, Pathways College Preparatory School, serving a predominantly low-income and black student population, managed to maintain a relatively low chronic absenteeism rate of 14%.
Medgar Evers, where the student body is 91% low-income and 83% black, has a 13% rate of chronic absenteeism.
Schools can do something about chronic absenteeism.
At Success Academy Charter Schools, which I lead, we invest a huge amount of effort in getting children to attend school regularly.
We insist that our educators model good attendance by rarely being absent themselves.
We celebrate “Zero Heroes” — students with perfect attendance — as well as classrooms that achieve 100% attendance on any given day.
We communicate with parents every time a scholar is late or absent with a phone call or text.
If a student’s attendance is poor, we’ll have an “upstairs dismissal” in which we require the parent to come into the building when they pick up their child to discuss the attendance issue.
The key to all of this is holding educators accountable.
We track attendance rates at each of our schools daily.
If attendance is lagging, we’ll work with the principal of that school to improve it.
We refuse to accept chronic absenteeism as an inevitable reality — because it isn’t.
It’s also important to remember that some children stay home because they feel school is unsafe or that it’s a waste of time because instruction is constantly interrupted by disruptive students.
We need to provide students with schools that they want to attend.
If we allow COVID to permanently reset expectations for school attendance, it will be one of the saddest legacies of this terrible episode in our nation’s history.
We mustn’t let this happen.
Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.