The public school system has a lot of problems.

• The goal, in this era of “No Child Left Behind”, is for students to do well on tests. That’s about it. Schools, teachers and administrators can back and fill all they want, but at the end of the day they are all just “teaching the test” – on pain of running afoul of NCLB’s “Accountability” rules. NCLB has been ta disaster.
• The biggest disaster, of course, was way public education got into the mess in the first place. The teachers’ unions take a lot of blame – justifiably – for the “dumbing down” of education. The unions, being unions, have done their best to turn education into a blue-collar factory job with white-collar accessories and workload. Detractors call the system the “Factory Model of Education”, and justly so; the system resembles an assembly line. Procedures must be followed. Parts that don’t fit the specs are removed from the production line. Speed and efficiency are essential.
• The basic model for education – sit in a desk in an airless building for six to eight hours at a shot, eat lousy food, get water only when given (infrequent) permission, learning things when someone else, a curriculum designer or teacher, deems fit – is one that works, objectively, for maybe a tenth of the population. For the rest, it’s a matter of gritting one’s teeth and toughing it out, or…not. Remember – most of what kids learn in six years of elementary school can be taught to average kids of average intelligence in a matter of weeks.
• Above all, students have to show up and sit in those damn desks. Schools are paid on a per-student, per-day basis; if Johnny doesn’t have his butt in that desk at 8:40, the school doesn’t get paid for the days that the student is absent, or even late without an excuse.

It’s hard to figure which is less of wonder – that kids see the whole charade as a waste of time, or that the schools are failing to teach more and more kids the basics every single year.

The Strib addresses the truancy “crisis” in an editorial this morning:

At North High School, almost 50 percent of the 1,300 students skipped enough school last year to be considered habitual truants. That’s the highest truancy rate in Minneapolis — not coincidentally in one of the highest crime areas in the city. Those numbers speak volumes about how important is it to intervene with early-stage truants.

Only if you presume that:

• …school figures on “truancy” are accurate. They are not. Schools consider a student who is late without a “valid excuse” three times in a semester to be “truant”. They don’t, for the record, care why the student is late without an excuse; absentminded parents forgetting to write notes, kid missed the bus, car wouldn’t start, kid not feeling well? Who cares! The kid is “truant!” Why? We’ll get to that.
• …wanting to leave the madhouse of the modern inner city school is inherently irrational. Yet in a school where the majority of students do not learn what they need in the adult world (to say nothing of things like critical thinking and the love of learning), where they go through metal detectors and practice “locking down” and are subject to a routine more in line with prison than with school, truly – what’s irrational about wanting out?

The districts respond, of course, like any bureaucracy:

Recent city and county efforts are not the first or only antitruancy programs. Both Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys’ offices have addressed the issue with some success.

Really?

Have they?

Ramsey County’s “Truancy Intervention Program” employs a group of lawyers to chase after “truant” kids – county prosecutors who should be prosecuting crimes against citizens. They spend their highly paid days chasing after kids and parents who, for whatever reason, don’t get to class (or just don’t get there on time often enough), threatening dire consequences for non-compliance.

Have they had “some success”? The program’s website explains the “success” in terms that make perfect sense to bureaucrats; butts were indeed jammed back into seats. So why does a school district need to have the full weight of the County Attorney’s office to corral kids back into their seats? Could they do it less expensively – or is the TIP basically a make-work program for less-talented county lawyers?

This isn’t rocket science: Teens who like school and feel successful there are much less likely to skip. Young people who regularly participate in activities through community, church or school are too busy to look for trouble.

But the first thing school districts cut when the budgets are cut fail to rise as fast as the union wants are the very programs that help give so many kids a reason to stay current – indeed, where so many kids learn vastly more than they do in school, if they’re at all like I was.  And – biggest madness of all – “good” schools are now demanding a positively insane amount of homework, a bit of collective lunacy that deserves its own post.

As fond as the left is of seeking “root causes” for things, you’d think they’d be interested in the “root cause” of truancy.  But I suspect the “root result” is the biggest issue to them.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 8:27 am and is filed under Education, Minneapolis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.