The Simplest Explanation for Chronic Absenteeism: Parents Aren't Making Their Kids Go to School
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that the most straightforward explanation for chronic absenteeism is the correct one — and it's not a school problem.
Key Takeaways
- Parents control attendance - Children don't decide to skip school; parents decide whether to send them
- Overcomplicating the issue avoids the solution - Looking for complex systemic explanations when the answer is simple delays action
- Enforcement works - When attendance has real consequences for families, chronic absenteeism drops
Transcript
What's behind the rise in chronic absenteeism?
There is a simple answer that we need to not reject just because it's simple.
We need to not ignore the elephant in the room, and it's this.
Parents are no longer making their kids come to school.
That has been the factor all along that made the difference.
Parents have to make their kids come to school.
Schools have to hold parents accountable for getting their kids to school because nothing we do on the school side can make up for that.
No amount of making the curriculum interesting, of caring about kids, like we can do all those things right at school.
And at the end of the day, if the parents are not making their kids come to school, none of that makes any difference.
So I really reject this idea that this is so complicated and we need to keep digging for the root causes and find out why each kid is not coming to school.
No, like the thing that has changed is parenting the solution to getting kids to school is for parents to make their kids come to school and that's not to say that there aren't individual health issues you know we've always had illness kids get the flu kids get cancer there are lots of reasons that kids can't come to school for health reasons but that's not what's behind the increase the increase is in failure to parent it is in failure to make kids come to school and parents will say well my kid suffers from school refusal Do they, or is this a case of parent refusal, refusing to parent?
I think we have got to hold parents accountable for getting their kids to school.
Not when they're sick, not when there's a legitimate reason for them not to come, but that's not what's behind this epidemic of chronic absenteeism.
We've got to get kids to school in order to learn, and we can't do it as educators.
Parents have to get kids to school.
We can teach them when they're here, but we cannot do any more than that.
And if you look at all of the school-based factors, people like to blame schools, people like to look at school-based factors and say, well, that's why my kid's not coming to school.
Everything's better in schools.
Schools now are better than they have ever been.
The curriculum is more engaging.
The teachers are more caring.
Bullying is far, far lower than it was when we were kids.
We have made school so much better, so much more appealing as an environment that it is absurd to claim that it's the school's fault.
that the kid doesn't wanna come to school.
Kids have always not wanted to come to school.
The solution to that is for their parents to make them come to school.
Let me know what you think.