Forcing attendance rarely works. In fact those that require coercion are often truant anyway. Truancy rates in inner city schools are often comically high. Plus, when compelled to attend, those compelled typically disrupt rather than learn. They're the kids "graduating" from high school who still can barely read.
Is compelling kids to go to school a mistake? This essential question remains oddly largely unaddressed. This lack of interest is curious, given the serious school problems that unmotivated, often disruptive, sometimes openly hostile, kids create when compelled to attend. Besides, they learn little anyway. To learn, ya gotta wanna. And those who must be actually compelled to attend, generally don't wanna.
Wouldn't it be far better if these "students" weren't there? Better for whom, you ask? Better for those who want to learn, certainly. And better for their teachers as well. But there seems to be little concern about motivated kids,or their teachers, paying an unacceptably high price for the disruptive presence of these others. Instead, the worry is about the disrupters. Those whose behavior causes serious problems for everyone around them that want to learn.
We waste enormous amounts of tax money in the process. As of the latest 2022-2023 data, the average cost of "educating" a youngster in a U.S. public school totals some $163,000.00. So let's imagine giving a child a gift that's worth about $13,600 per year and having them refuse to open or possibly ruin it. Not just their own gift either. They ruin other's gifts as well. That is what we've been doing, year after year, decade after decade, for well-over a century. Isn't it time to reconsider?
When "students" are compelled to go to school, educators must try to force-feed knowledge to unmotivated, uncooperative, often hostile youngsters. Sure, some of these unwilling kids can be painstakingly coaxed to learn. But this is so time consuming and costly that it is entirely impractical. After all our public schools are, for cost control purposes, run like factories. Plus factories run very poorly when the raw material is uncooperative, even hostile. Painstaking and typically failed efforts to seduce uncooperative learners disrupts the production process and consumes vast quantities of scarce resources far better used educating the willing. Despite this, we still pretend that compulsory education works — or at least should be working. So we go on forcing kids to attend, then pretending they learn.
Meanwhile legislators, safely cozened in their capital offices, have stripped teachers of any ability to impose meaningful sanctions for misbehavior. Now they can't even coerce a semblance of civilized behavior from the disruptive. Worse, a similarly emasculated school administration typically offers besieged teachers little or no help. Some of them, out of self-regard, even side with the malefactors. And so it goes, with turmoil and wastage rolling on generation after generation.
Folks worry that if we abandon compulsory education, dangerous kids will be roaming the streets threatening the peace. That has some validity. Although a lot of disruptive, potentially dangerous kids aren't in school to begin with — especially when the weather is nice. But here's the central question: is it the school's proper businesses to conduct part-time incarceration? Isn't the school's distinctive function to educate, not incarcerate? Isn't it way past time to face up to the fact that when educators try to do both, they often to do either?
In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017) ruled that schools must provide educational services that are reasonably designed to enable students to make progress appropriate in light of their circumstances. But what counts as "reasonable design?" Suppose, for instance, a student is failing to make educational progress because his mother is a crack whore who is abusively neglectful and the absent father's identity is a multiple choice question? There are tens of thousands of kids facing similar situations in what passes for their home. And, of course, they are often among the kids who reject and disrupt the educational process. Is there any "reasonable design" possible for them, given available resources and a factory style setting?
Let's take a fresh look at this and ask why we continue to spend billions upon billions of dollars every year trying to force-feed knowledge to kids who not only resist and resent it, but often also prevent their classmates from learning. Isn't it time to consider public education to be a privilege rather than a right? After all, the public is providing these youngsters and their parent(s) with free expensivn services.
Of course day care is another largely unacknowledged function of public schooling. Teachers spend an average of 7 hours a day providing that service. Given a class of, say, 25, that means an elementary school teacher is providing day care 175 hours a day or 875 hours per week. That's 31,500 total hours of day care per school year. If the teacher were paid $15 an hour per child, he or she would have earned $472,500.00!
Ignoring the difficulties created by compelling attendance, school districts adopt truancy prevention programs. They are, in effect, encouraging the attendance of potential troublemakers. A major justification of these programs is that truancy breeds broader social problems. It's asserted, for instance, that 95% of juvenile offenders started as truants. We're told that truants are more likely to:
- join a gang running the risk of disease, injury or death;
- use marijuana, alcohol and hard drugs;
- become pregnant and drop out of school;
- have low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure;
- be illiterate or have serious trouble reading;
- engage in violent and criminal activities.
But every one of these assertions suffers from the same fatal flaw. Just because these things correlate, does NOT mean the one causes the other. All juvenile offenders start out as babies, for instance. But does starting life as a baby cause a youngster to become a juvenile offender? Of course not. Correlation is NOT causation.
Why assume, for instance, that gang membership begins with truancy? Isn't it more likely that gang membership encourages truancy? The same applies to marijuana, alcohol and hard drug use. Sure, truants are more likely to engage in these behaviors. But why assume that it is truancy that causes them to do so? Are truants more likely to become pregnant and drop out of school? Sure they are; but is truancy the cause?
As for low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure, isn't it more likely that these things provoke truancy, rather than cause it? The same applies to serious reading difficulties. And as for kids that engage in violence and criminal activities, don't blame truancy, blame lousy parenting, dysfunctional families, broken homes, poverty, violent neighborhoods, the illicit economic opportunities created by making certain intoxicants illegal, ad infinitum.
Truancy prevention stops being a problem if we quit compelling school attendance to begin with. We've grown used to kids rejecting, even actively destroying, the extremely expensive educational opportunities taxpayers provide. In fact, this sort of behavior is so commonplace in some schools that the educational process is largely a pretense. Teachers pretend to teach and administrators pretend to running a school. Meanwhile standardized testing proves that the whole thing has become a farce. Isn't it time to ask if this very expensive endeavor has failed and, instead, concentrate on effectively teaching those youngsters who are willing to try to learn?
