Insight
What it’s going to take
Nov 20, 2008 1:17 PM
As President-elect Barack Obama is schooling us, solutions to tough problems take work, thought and persistence.
For example, teachers can teach only the students in front of them.
Yet many teachers have children on their rosters that are chronically absent. The teacher follows procedures, makes the proper reports and talks with the student when she or he does show up. But beyond these steps, teachers often face a locked door. The child is slipping from their hands, and there is little they can do.
Under No Child Left Behind’s stunted accountability, this reality has been pushed aside. All children can learn and there should be “no excuses” for low test scores, the mantra goes. The fact that a child is absent for a month, or ill or hungry when the test is given? Not an education issue.
But don’t all these other things affect education?
The truth is absenteeism is rampant. Most attention has been paid to older students, for whom chronic absenteeism is considered a harbinger of dropping out. But according to “Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families,” a new report by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, 20 percent of K-5 students, or more than 90,000 children, missed at least a month of school last year. In 96 of the city’s 366 middle schools, more than 30 percent of students were chronically absent. By looking at chronic absence, the report uncovered a far higher absentee rate than the 92 percent daily attendance figure that the Department of Education trumpets in its accountability statistics.
Not a simple problem
The solution is going to require more than mantras.
Absenteeism has many causes: illness, homelessness, court appointments, immigration problems, family instability, extended visits to relatives, fear of failure and plain old truancy.
“There are the three students I have who haven’t been in school for over a week because they can’t come back until they get caught up on their vaccinations, and the new student who just joined my class last Friday, and the student who is in school every day but spends most of her time in the AP’s office instead of class because of behavior issues … I am still not doing an adequate job,” a Bronx science teacher fretted aloud on her blog (quoted in Gotham Schools.com) recently.
People close to children’s lives easily understand the need for schools to address the complex causes of absenteeism. But historically there has been little effort to do this systemwide.
Models in pockets
In fact, there are several models of “full service schools,” as they are sometimes called, or “community schools,” that integrate social services to help students stay in school. The Children’s Aid Society of New York runs 21 community schools in the city that situate health and dental clinics right in the school building. The Beacon Schools program partners with community-based organizations to offer extensive after-school programs for students as well as legal clinics, English language courses and job programs for their families. The Harlem Children’s Zone began in 1970 as a truancy-prevention program but now offers a web of services to children and families including mental health and after-school programs, parenting classes and extended day programs. Good Shepherd Services partners with schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx to support families in crisis.
Yet these are special partnerships, supported with external funding. They have been shunted to the sidelines by NCLB-era reformers who feel such programs are outside the mission of public schools and take the focus off achievement. Still today, the New York City School Progress Reports weight attendance as 5 percent of a school’s grade and test scores as 85 percent. Community schools sound like a no-brainer, but they exist only in pockets, not throughout the system.
Not a simple solution
The reason may be that what seem like obvious solutions at a distance do not prove so easy in the trenches.
“To run a successful community school you need a lot of space, and schools need a very strong community partner,” says Kim Nauer, co-author of the “Strengthening Schools” report and a long-time writer and researcher on the city’s schools.
Even more, the system needs a “paradigm shift” according to Katherine Eckstein, policy analyst for the Children’s Aid Society, to pull together the city’s many child-welfare resources into effective partnerships with schools.
“Historically schools have worked on their own, in isolation from the community,” Eckstein says. Meanwhile, “Health, Education, Parks and Recreation — each has their own funding source, their own vocabulary and own way of doing things.”
Add to her list the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Administration for Children’s Services and of course the giant state bureaucracy of Medicaid, and the coordination problems quickly multiply.
“To bring all those services under one roof, or at least a single coordinator,” she says, “requires all the agencies to rethink their roles and orient toward partnership.”
That is not the culture of the system now.
Under the current school leadership model, each school is an autonomous unit, and the principal acts as “chief executive” of his or her school. The school support organizations do not focus on health or child well-being. Principals are heavily burdened under the model, with little time to build relationships with community organizations.
There has been no effort to add guidance counselors (currently about one for every 400 to 600 students and none full-time in elementary schools) or attendance teachers (just 394 in the entire system). Parent coordinators are not trained to help families apply for food stamps, enroll a student in a GED program, or refer parents to job programs, legal aid or a mental health worker.
Getting started
Tough as it seems, however, the city is in a good position to change these circumstances, precisely because of the current school leadership model. Mayoral control of the schools, ushered in at Mayor Bloomberg’s behest in 2002, gives the mayor a direct hand in running schools. He can, but he hasn’t orchestrated the delivery of health and welfare services to the schools, leaning on the various city agencies to coordinate their planning.
It may not even require more money so much as a rethinking of how the city delivers services. And schools and service agency leaders must give up some autonomy for a more collaborative approach.
“We’re used to operating in a silo,” Eckstein says, but “there’s a huge opportunity with the mayor — or any mayor frankly. Any leader who is responsible for leading in New York City and especially in these really tough times has a huge opportunity to do this work.”
Mayors can “leverage civic capacity” to bring resources into the schools, according to Kenneth Wong, a Brown University professor of education policy who has written extensively on mayoral control. “They can call on a city’s libraries, cultural institutions, universities, corporate leaders and hospitals to deliver services.
“Schools need support networks, not just accountability systems,” Wong said at a recent forum. “Mayoral control is not a silver bullet, but it is a set of conditions.”
Building on that set of conditions, AFT/UFT President Randi Weingarten and other education advocates have launched the Community Agenda for America’s Public Schools to develop ways to link child development services to schools. The national agenda calls for coordination among agencies and a broader approach to accountability. Such an initiative could help all teachers reach their students. “If we don’t make this happen, we won’t close the achievement gap,” Weingarten said. “Teachers can do alot — but they cannot do it all.”
