20% of NYC Students Chronically Absent From Class

20% of students in New York City public schools are chronically absent from classes. By chronically absent, I mean missing more than a month of school. It gets even worse for those in high schools.

Examining detailed attendance reports for the city’s nearly 1,500 public schools, the report found that in 124 elementary schools, 98 middle schools and 41 schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade, at least 30 percent of the students were chronically absent, defined as missing 20 days of the 185-day school year. (The report did not provide the number of high schools with such absentee rates.)

The report is a one-year snapshot and does not include comparable historical data. But City Education Department officials said that attendance had improved under the Bloomberg administration. Using a different standard for chronic absences — 10 consecutive days or 20 days over four months — the rate has declined, to 9 percent in 2007-8 from 11 percent in 2004-5, according to the department.

The city also employs attendance monitors, but the report said they were stretched thin — 392 people tracking nearly 200,000 students with serious attendance problems — and struggled to cover broad swaths of the city from centralized offices. Elayna Konstan, head of the Education Department’s Office of School and Youth Development, which includes attendance, said that the city had readjusted the monitors’ portfolios this year to give them narrower geographic turf.

This is a staggering number and speaks volumes to the accountability of parents and the responsibility to their children for their education. How exactly can you expect these students to be prepared for the real world if they're missing classes early and often?

The school system fails its students by not preparing them for the real world, and parents are failing their children by not ensuring that they go to school. The Times report provides all kinds of excuses as to why children miss school on a chronic basis, but none of them are compelling.

You've got high schoolers cutting school on Mondays and Fridays. You've got kids who miss class because it's raining (and one principal's solution is to provide umbrellas). It's one thing to miss class because you're ill, but the staggering large absentee rate is due to other reasons besides illness.

The laugher is that the City considers that this to be an improvement over prior years.

That's just sad.