It’s frustrating and down-right annoying to listen to political experts talk about improving schools: As soon as they begin expressing their ideas, it becomes clear that they don’t get it! They do not understand that a student’s achievement is always the result of a number of variables. It is the sum total of a number of positive factors adding-up to produce a desired outcome. The quality of classroom instructions, which political experts consider to be the only thing standing between a student’s success and failure, is simply one of several important factors that determine a student acquisition of knowledge and skills. Classroom attendance, readiness to learn, classroom disciplinary problems, parental support and involvement, and school funding are some of the other factors that are equally important in determining a student’s outcome. Each is so significantly unique in its contribution to the whole that it is best to discuss them separately.
Classroom attendance is perhaps the best factor to discuss first, because it is the most underappreciated and misunderstood of all the factors. First, it is often confused with school attendance, which is the number of days a student reports to the school campus. Classroom attendance looks at the attendance records of a child during the periods of instructions in the content areas (math, reading, language arts, social studies, and science). The goal, in the most successful schools in the nation, is to reduce the number of missing classes for each child to zero in all content areas.
Of course, the main reason successful schools take a zero tolerance approach to students missing classes should be apparent: They believe the more often students are present to learn, the more they learn! However, successful schools take a zero tolerance approach for several other reasons that are very important, but less apparent. They include the understanding that the establishment of a mandatory classroom attendance policy sends a very strong message to everyone (teachers, parents, and students) that achievement in these content areas by all students is important and expected ― anything less is unacceptable! Yet, there is another reason, one which relates to the idea of improving classroom instructions. Successful schools understand that while it is true that the students present in the classrooms of the best and brightest teachers gain knowledge and skills at a faster rate, it is equally true that their classmates, who are missing classes, are losing knowledge and skills at a faster rate. When schools hire the Albert Einstein’s of the world, students learn so much on a daily basis that it makes it virtually impossible for those students who miss large numbers of classes to catch-up. (Students that are most likely to miss classes are the ones that were socially promoted.)
Political experts who argue for better classroom instructions, while at the same time, ignoring the high rate of absenteeism ― external to the control of classroom teachers ― and, in many cases, external to the control to schools and their districts, are shooting themselves in the foot!
By
James A. Porter
