The Unlearning of School Attendance: Ideas for Change

Abstract

This Research Topic on Unlearning Attendance champions a serious look at school attendance and absenteeism. It examines all forms of school attendance problems ranging from school refusal, truancy, school withdrawal, to school avoidance and its correlates of criminal, socio-emotional, developmental, psychological, academic, fiscal, technological, and societal impact. The issue gives a synopsis on the known problems and challenges but also those exacerbated by the pandemic and ideas for improvement. The issue takes a bold step to call out antiquated practices which have continued to fail students through teaching and learning, policy, laws and statutes, transportation, practice, program, funding, tracking, evaluation, and outcomes.

Stop punishing our children for attending. Resilient students who overcome the odds to show up 170 days of the annual 180 required days are often marked truant. In some cases they are suspended, expelled, or reported by law to juvenile courts. Before COVID, and now more than ever, children's attendance and participation in education have been important. Yet since the establishment of required education, our laws, policies, school practices, data tracking, intervention response, and outcome measures have not been updated. These antiquated processes fail current students. Despite a focus on positive behavior interventions, tiered approaches, and socio-emotional learning in the last few decades we still only track absence and not presence. There is need for emerging and new ways of valuing participation in education from pre-school to high school. We must evaluate our governing policies of what constitutes presence (physical vs virtual). We must use more engagement versus discipline methods to foster success; update punitive laws requiring mandatory reporting to juvenile probation courts rather than development resources; change what we track, who we track, and how we report. We must unlearn the old way of attendance. Unlearning attendance speaks to the idea that policies, practices, and procedures in place for students in K-12 (primary) and high schools have consistently been punitive, ineffective in use of data, and non-progressive. As a result there is need for new research, new ways to evaluate, and emerging and best practice efforts to engage students.

Unlearning Attendance: Ideas for Change is a call for action that features emerging practices from practitioners, educators, researchers, policy makers, and organizations from around the globe who have been toiling at solutions for problems faced everyday in and out of the classroom and with parents and partners to support student engagement in their education.