Progress on truancy

The Chron recently published an article, Pressuring parents helps S.F. slash truancy 23% and an editorial, Fighting truancy yields big dividends with news of progress of efforts to combat truancy at SFUSD. From the editorial:

Nearly three years into her battle against school truancy, District Attorney Kamala Harris has something to celebrate: There was a 23 percent drop in the number of elementary school truants at San Francisco schools this year. On the simplest level, that drop means more money for the city: The school district received an additional $372,862 in funds tied to attendance. Any additional money for education is something to be celebrated in these tough times. And on the grandest level, everyone in the city benefits when children go to school.

We've been following this story from the begining so it is nice to see this follow up and to note the successes. As the reporting makes clear, progress has so far been limited to the lower grades. A nice start, but the harder problem of truancy in the upper grades, remains more or less unchanged. Hopefully the sustained attention on the problem will help officials find new answers. Prosecuting parents is not likely to work for older kids. Garcia speaks of making school "more joyful" for these truants, which may be noble, but in the context of reaching the dropouts most at risk here, the increasingly hackneyed "joyful learning" term comes off as risible. The success so far comes more from sticks than carrots. Garcia is probably right that the district needs to find ways to engage those older truants that are on the dropout path, programs like the Center for Academic Re-entry and Empowerment, (CARE) that we've noted before. But the success of those programs also relies on enforcement — paying attention to the problem, intervening, and letting these kids know that they can't just slip through the cracks.

Also, note that there are question marks surrounding some of the data provided by the district to back up this story. Caroline takes a look at some of the anomolies over on her Examiner blog in: SF schools' supposed truancy numbers make no sense. What's going on? Hopefully we'll get answers from the district, and improved data and reporting from the schools.