Is compelling kids to go to school a colossal mistake? That essential question remains largely unaddressed. This is odd, given the serious school problems that unmotivated, disruptive, sometimes openly hostile, kids create when compelled to attend. Besides, they learn little while wasting prodigious amounts of taxpayer's money. After all, to learn, ya gotta wanna. And those who must be compelled to attend, generally don't wanna. They're the kids "graduating" from high school who still can barely read. Moreover, those requiring coercion are frequently truant. In fact truancy rates in many, perhaps most, inner-city schools, are comically high.
Wouldn't it be far better if these "students" weren't there? Better for whom? Better for those who want to learn, certainly. And better for their teachers as well. But there seems to be little concern about the fate of the motivated kids, or their teachers,; both of whom pay an unacceptably high price for the disruptive presence of these others. The worry is typically about the disrupters. Those whose behavior causes serious problems, sometimes physical danger, for everyone around them.
We waste enormous amounts of tax money continuing this process. The latest 2022-2023 data shows the average cost of "educating" a youngster in a U.S. public school is some $163,000.00. Now, imagine giving a child a gift worth about $13,600 per year for twelve or more years and have them refuse to open it, or possibly destroy it. Not just their own gift, mind you. They often ruin other's gifts as well by making it impossible for them to learn. This is what we've been doing, year after year, decade after decade, for well-over a century.
When "students" are compelled, educators must at least try to force-feed them. Sure, some of unwilling kids can be coaxed to learn. But this coaxing is so time consuming and costly that it is impractical in a typical classroom. After all, our public schools are, for cost control purposes, run like factories. And factories run very poorly when the raw material is uncooperative, even hostile. Painstaking efforts to seduce uncooperative learners disrupts the production process and consumes vast quantities of scarce resources better used educating the willing. Nevertheless, we pretend that compulsory education is working — or at least should be working. So we go on forcing kids to attend, then pretending they are learning.
Meanwhile legislators, safe in their capital offices, have stripped teachers of any ability to impose meaningful sanctions for misbehavior. So they can't even coerce a semblance of civilized behavior from the disruptive. Worse, a similarly emasculated school administration offers besieged teachers little or no help. Some of these administrators, out of self-regard, even side with the malefactors. So it goes, with turmoil and wastage rolling on and on.
Folks worry that if we abandon compulsory education, menacing 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 it is NOT the school's proper businesses to conduct part-time incarceration. The school's distinctive function is to educate, not incarcerate. And it is way past time to face up to the fact that when educators try to do both, they oftenn do neither?
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 at least try to learn?
