This academic year there have been more absentees from school than a year earlier, with a decrease in attendance as the pandemic is reached, according to new research and data.
Students who attend school in person, as well as those who learn at a distance, have difficulty attending, although it is worse among the millions of students at home who still learn mainly through a screen.
Districts showed a 2.3% decline in average daily attendance nationwide from September to November last year, compared to the same period in 2019, according to data from PowerSchool, which tracks grades and school attendance. Attendance fell to 75% of districts as the year progressed, dropping 1.5% on average each month, according to the data. The data covers 2,700 districts that include more than 2.5 million students learning face-to-face and online.
The pandemic has increased the learning of many students at the school.
Photo:
Christopher Millette / Associated Press
Limited data from some states and districts show that students learning remotely (especially students of color, special needs, and elementary students) attended school less frequently than their classmates.
The data deepens concern that long school closures widen the gaps in pre-pandemic academic achievement between poor and other students.
About 56 percent of school districts were exclusively remote as of Dec. 18, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Washington focused on improving public education in the U.S. Barriers for students learning online, Internet connectivity and device access issues continue to be included.
In Providence public schools in Rhode Island, where 30% of the district’s 22,600 students chose to stay away in the fall, students who learn remotely attended class less frequently, especially younger ones. , and received a higher number of low marks for incomplete assignments. district superintendent Harrison Peters. About 85% of students in the district meet the requirements for free or reduced lunch.
Harrison Peters, Providence District Superintendent, said he was concerned that students would not be so engaged while learning at a distance.
Photo:
Providence Public Schools
The data support Mr. Peters ’initial concerns that students would not be so engaged while learning at a distance. The daily attendance of all students, both face-to-face and remote, is approximately 81%, 10 percentage points lower than last year.
According to Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, approximately 600 Providence elementary students, a mix of face-to-face and remote learners, missed more than half of the school days of the month before Thanksgiving.
The district has responded by expanding its communication with parents. Use Kinvo, a text messaging service that lets parents know when a student has not logged in to class. He sent 3.1 million texts between September and December, three times as many as during the same period in 2019.
Providence school officials have visited the families of students who did not show up for class to offer help, often arriving with supplies such as laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots.
“Our commitment was not to leave that front door, that living room, until we solved many of these challenges,” Peters said.
In California, where many districts remain virtual, analysis of attendance patterns in 33 districts covering 350,000 students this fall showed that the number of children who missed 10% or more of instructional days increased between students in grades two through six, school years during which student attendance is usually reliable, according to School Innovations & Achievement, a California-based company that tracks attendance.
“
Our commitment was not to leave that front door, that living room, until we solved many of these challenges.
”
The rate of chronic absence in the 33 districts analyzed doubled more than the sixth and seventh grades to 16.1% and 21.7%, respectively. In all grades, absenteeism rates jumped more among black and Latino students in December, rising to 30% and 21%, compared to 18.4% and 12.8% respectively, compared to the same time of previous year.
In Massachusetts, 41% of students who physically return to full-time school buildings strongly agree on learning a lot every day, compared to 16% of students who are exclusively remote, according to a Gallup survey of 1,000 high school students.
About a third of students learning completely remote or in hybrid arrangements say they are lagging behind this year, while 8% of students learning in person say the same. The survey also found that students in low-income households are more likely to learn full-time distance learning than students in higher-income stretches.
Assistance
Policies about attending a virtual environment vary, making it difficult to calculate how often students engage. Here is a sample of state guidelines.
- ALASKA: Remote students must log in to class at least once every two weeks to continue enrolling.
- CALIFORNIA: Attendance tracks daily participation in virtual tasks or live interaction with a teacher or school staff.
- CONNECTED: Remote students are considered present if the time spent on activities such as homework and virtual classes amounts to at least half of the school day.
- MISSISSIPPI: Schools are allowed to reduce the instructional day to 240 minutes, compared to 330. High school students do not have to log in for a specific number of minutes to be considered present.
- PENNSILVANIA: Students must log in, be active in class, and submit class assignments. The status does not specify how long students must log in.
During a series of virtual town halls in October, in an attempt to encourage children to improve their attendance, administrators at William L. Sayre High School in Philadelphia asked students what they wanted, Jada said. Warfield-Henry, the school’s liaison. Students, who qualify for free or reduced lunch, responded: food and sneakers.
The school began giving $ 20 gift cards to Wendy’s, Foot Locker or iTunes to students who got perfect attendance at all of their classes for a month. The school has spent about $ 3,000 on incentives so far this year. About 38.1% of Sayre’s students attended school on 95% of instructional days in December, compared to 29.7% the previous December.
Remote learning has been a challenge to measure attendance.
What was once a fairly uniform process now varies widely across states, making it difficult to know how much children are academically engaged. In Alaska, distance learning students only need to work with their school at least once every two weeks to maintain enrollment status. Students in California must show some kind of daily participation, while those in Connecticut must spend enough time in class or do homework equivalent to at least half of the school day.
Peters, the superintendent of Providence, believes that returning students to face-to-face learning is the only real solution to falling attendance rates. The district began random testing of Covid-19 in January, its latest effort to make parents more comfortable with sending their children to school.
As Covid-19 changed their lives, students shared unexpected benefits with WSJ’s Julie Jargon. Photographic illustration: Adele Morgan
Write to Yoree Koh to [email protected]
Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8