Should your kid go to school?
Regardless of your answer, more and more of them don't go anyway. What's the story?
In an early scene in “The Godfather,” Sonny and Michael are sitting at the dinner table. It’s about 1941 and Michael is either in college or has recently graduated. He tells Sonny that he just enlisted in the Army (or was it the Marines?). Incredulous, since enlisting isn’t about to help the Corleone family business, Sonny demands of Michael, “What, did you go to college to get stupid?”
Many of us on the conservative side might say now that the question was spot on even if a few decades premature. With education increasingly in the hands of Leftist ideologues, we have no choice but to wonder about what gets dumped into our kids’ heads both at the university and in the school system that sent them there. Not a few of us would be happy, or at least not miserable, if the kid came away merely stupid, that being better than indoctrinated against the country with a bunch of half-truths and outright lies.
This entry, though, isn’t primarily about university-level education. It’s about what goes on before then. As this New York Times story highlights, we needn’t worry as much as we might have thought. Specifically, we don’t need to be preoccupied with what goes on in school because, increasingly and to an alarming level, kids aren’t bothering to go.
A few years ago, a troubling phenomenon began to spread in U.S. education: Students were not showing up to school.
This was not particularly surprising. Schools had shut down in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and some did not fully reopen until fall 2021. Quarantines for Covid symptoms and exposures were still common. It would take time, many thought, to re-establish daily routines.
What is surprising is how little the numbers have budged since….
Before the pandemic, about 15 percent of U.S. students were chronically absent, which typically means missing 18 days of the school year, for any reason. By the 2021-22 school year, that number had skyrocketed to 28 percent of students. Last school year, the most recent for which national estimates are available, it held stubbornly at 26 percent.
Translation: About a quarter of our kids do not regularly attend school. One might fairly wonder: Where are the parents?
Perhaps most strikingly, absenteeism has increased across demographic groups, according to research by Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Students are missing more school in districts rich and poor, big and small.
What’s behind this?
I spoke with school leaders, counselors, researchers and parents. They offered many reasons for the absences: illness…
Kids are sicker now than five years ago??? What’s the evidence for that?
…mental health…
Mental health is the Left’s all-purpose excuse for everything — crime in particular — but, understandably, there’s not even an effort to show that children’s mental health is any worse now than several years ago, and still less that it’s so much worse that they could go to school then but can’t make it now.
…transportation problems.
The search for excuses goes from the lame to the absurd. Cars and buses don’t work anymore?
Still, something more like the truth shows up by-and-by:
But underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic. “Our relationship with school became optional,” said Katie Rosanbalm, a psychologist and associate research professor at Duke University.
It’s one of those bourgeois, stuffed shirt, or (in present day lingo) white supremacist ideas that getting your backside to school is anything but optional and you better do your homework, too. My parents were for sure white supremacists on that score.
This was a tip-off, I thought (emphasis added):
Though school buildings are open, classes are in person and sports and other extracurricular activities are back in full, the stability of school seems to have shifted….Some schools have kept their pandemic policies around online class work, giving the illusion that in-person attendance is not necessary.
Although we now know (and many knew long before now) that school closures were both much more damaging and much less justified than we were told at the time (as the Times itself admitted last week), some districts are keeping COVID-era policies.
Q: Why?
A: Because the point was never to protect children. That was the cover. It was to exert control for control’s sake, with the secondary benefit — from this point of view — of damaging children’s educational and emotional growth. When the Left tells us that Amerika is due for a reckoning, we had best take them seriously. They do not have beneficent intentions toward our country and still less toward our children.
This cultural shift is not simply a hit to perfect attendance records.
The share of students missing many days of school helps explain why U.S. students, overall, are nowhere close to making up their learning losses from the pandemic. Students who are behind academically may resist going to school, but missing school also sets them further back. These effects are especially pernicious for low-income students, who lost more ground during the pandemic and who are more negatively affected by chronic absence.
There is hand-wringing in the press about why Trump is making so much headway with minority voters. Let me hazard a guess: It’s because blacks aren’t the fools the Left takes them to be, and more and more are coming to understand that the policies foisted off on them by “experts” and their masters in government and academia are not designed to serve them, and are designed instead to enhance the power and control of the people who create them.
Still, the question remains: What are we to make of the massive, by historical standards, amount of truancy? I confess I don’t know, and have only a hodge-podge of guesses. One is that kids don’t show up simply because there are few or no consequences for skipping. Enforcement of truancy laws has, so far as I can tell, essentially disappeared. Another is that parents are less insistent that kids be in class because they saw during the pandemic — when they could look over their kids’ shoulders at remote “learning” on the computer — that there was precious little actual learning going on.
On the admittedly questionable assumption that attending school is still, for the most part, a net plus, my last guess is that cratering school attendance is simply one more reflection of the rejection of discipline and the disinterest in standards that is corroding our entire culture. When we’re happy to release repeat criminals to do it again, let our defenses rot, borrow without limit, and ignore national sovereignty at the border, why fuss about a relatively little thing like whether your kid gets anything that might be mistaken for an education?