America in decline, Part Two

In May, I wrote a post called “America in decline.” It’s too easy for someone as old as I am to believe, subjectively, that the country is in decline. Therefore, I tried to focus on objective indicators that strongly suggest decline to any reasonable person.

Here are the ones I cited:

Homicides have skyrocketed in recent years. On average, adjusted for age, the annual U.S. suicide rate increased by 30 percent between 2000 and 2020.

There’s an epidemic of drug abuse, such that approximately one million Americans have died from overdoses of fentanyl since 1999. A provisional count from the CDC found that more than 105,000 Americans died due to drug overdoses in 2022.

According to Gallup, 29 percent of U.S. adults report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015. The percentage of Americans who currently have, or are being treated for, depression has also increased, to 17.8 percent, up about seven points over the same period.

Meanwhile, in what has been described as a mental health crisis, many students reportedly are refusing to attend school. And student test scores have plummeted to levels not seen in decades.

The U.S. fertility rate is now 1,784 births per woman. In 2007, the rate was 2.052.

The bit about students refusing to attend school was the only indicator I didn’t support with numbers. I will now provide them.

Students who miss 10 percent or more of the school year — typically 18 days or more — are considered “chronically absent.” In Washington, D.C., 43 percent of students were chronically absent during the last school year. At the high school level, the number was 47 percent.

D.C. is a wasteland these days. But chronic student absenteeism is a problem throughout America.

Nationally, more than 25 percent of students are chronically absent. I interpret this to mean that more than one-fourth of the nation’s students are forfeiting the possibility of receiving an adequate education. That’s a lot of minds to waste.

In the previous decade, chronic absenteeism was much less of problem than it is today. The pandemic, of course, contributed mightily to the dip. However, in 2022-23 the numbers improved only slightly from the previous school year. This indicator of national decline seems here to stay.

Across the river from D.C., Virginia has one of the very lowest rates of chronic absenteeism reported by any state last school year — 19 percent. That rate, alarming enough, was higher among certain minority populations.

For example, Hispanic students were chronically absent at a rate of 25 percent. And because Virginia’s absenteeism numbers are among the lowest in the nation, we can reasonably estimate that, nationally, about one-third of Hispanic students — the fastest growing cohort of students in America — are denying themselves the possibility of an adequate education. Indeed, New Mexico, with its large Hispanic and Indian populations, has the highest reported absenteeism rate of any state in America — 39 percent.

Chronic absenteeism isn’t just a barrier to learning among the chronically absent. When many students frequently miss class, teachers struggle to move through the curriculum at their usual pace. This hurts the academic progress of students who are attending regularly (although, as noted below, the absence of some students can promote overall learning in a classroom).

School attendance seems like an excellent indicator of future national destiny. How can America expect to flourish when approximately one-fourth of its students (1) don’t care enough about learning to attend school regularly and (2) as a result, aren’t learning the basics?

Future destiny aside, chronic absenteeism is associated with current indicators of decline — not just low test scores, but also high crime rates (including the rash of carjacking by teenagers) and drug abuse.

Underlying all of this, is poor parenting. As John Sexton points out, although the Washington Post story about chronic absenteeism in D.C. ignores the issue of parenting, many of the paper’s readers flagged it in their comments.

The Post quotes a student who says he (or she) leaves school early because classes are so noisy he/she doesn’t learn anything. So, in addition to putting some blame on parents, we can put some on the left-liberals (especially those in the Obama and Biden administrations) who discourage schools from disciplining minority students (it’s racist to discipline them, don’t you know).

The left-liberal outcry against disciplining troublemakers who happen to be black was based, in part, on the desire to keep unruly minority students in class so they can further their education. But now we know (and suspected all along) that these troublemakers aren’t attending class regularly, anyway. And when they do attend, they prevent conscientious students from learning much.

It’s difficult to be optimistic about the future of America.