Tag Archives: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

School Attendance Has Become a Crisis. Technology Is Part of the Cause, and It Can Also Be Part of the Cure

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In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic we have seen a very disturbing increase in student absences in our K-12 schools. It would be comforting to believe this trend is just a lingering impact of the pandemic, and that attendance will get back to the old normal over time.

Except this won’t happen, at least not all on its own. The reason is that the pandemic accelerated forces that had already been in motion for some time. And these forces are if anything intensifying, especially the increased use of devices by students and the related “disengagement” of students and parents from the life of the school. Poor attendance is the biggest symptom of this larger problem of disengagement.

Remember how in the days of the pandemic we used the phrase “the new normal?” Well, disengagement and the related increase in absences is part of that new normal. And we are now stuck with this problem—unless we work proactively to fix it.

Except our focus here is technology. So, what does battling absences have to do with technology? Well, the powerful forces the pandemic accelerated were partly related to technology, such as our kids’ increasing attachment to devices. And, some of the solutions we need to apply to address this problem also make use of technology.

Let’s briefly consider how technology helped cause this problem, and then concentrate on how technology can begin to help to fix it.

Increased “disengagement” has brought about poor attendance.

There has been plenty of attention paid to the problem of attendance in a variety of media. Education-oriented media such as Education Week have been working for some time to draw attention to this problem. And on March 29 The New York Times had a great article on “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere.” [i]

Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times

The Times reported that since the 2019-20 school year the percentage of “chronically absent” students in K-12 school nationwide has doubled, from 13% to 26%. This problem is much worse in districts serving disadvantaged populations. In our Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the Times reported that between 2019 and 2023 the chronically absent rate went from 37% to 50%.

The Times noted that states use different definitions of chronically absent. For example, the State of Wisconsin defines students as being chronically absent “if they miss more than 10% of school days out of the total number of school days during which they were enrolled.” [ii]

In December, Alan Borsuk and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel featured an article on “What Are We Willing to Do about Low-Performing Schools in Milwaukee Public Schools and Beyond? Right Now, There’s No Real Plan for Change.” This article discussed the impact of disengagement and the related challenge of poor attendance. Alan used MPS’s Madison High School as a case study. [iii] 

Many kids have simply stopped going to school.

What did Alan find at Madison? He found the school was orderly, and the administrators and teachers were highly motivated. And there were attractive programs in vocational areas, something too few schools offer.

Except there were far too many students in the building. At that point in the school year (mid-December) the average daily attendance so far was 58.6%, which meant that on an average day more than four out of ten students were not in school. In recent years more than 80% of the students at Madison have been labeled chronically absent.

Mike De Sisti – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

He also reported that enrollment at Madison had fallen from 892 in 2014-15 to 625 in November of the 2023-24 school year.

There is also quite a bit of attrition as students get older:

  • 224 of the Madison students were ninth graders, including 94 repeating their ninth-grade year.
  • 180 were tenth graders.
  • 134 were eleventh graders.
  • 86 were twelfth graders.

What are the causes of this drop in attendance?

So, what is going wrong at Madison and at too many of our districts and schools across the nation? Part of the problem is families and students are often dealing with issues at home that become a barrier to school attendance, as we will discuss below in the case of the School District of Plano, Texas.

But a big part of our challenge is that many students and their parents have lost a basic force that success in school requires. This is the compulsion to simply make yourself physically come to school each day, as part of your larger daily—and lifelong—routine. Those on the education scene use the term “engagement” to describe a traditional connection to school, and the term “disengagement” to describe the loss of this connection.

As we noted above, this disengagement preceded the Covid-19 pandemic, although the pandemic intensified it in a variety of ways. Obviously, our kids can’t be successful in school if they aren’t in the building. We need to bring all our students and their families to once again be engaged in their school experience, and part of this effort is to bring about near-perfect attendance.

But this is a complex undertaking. Let’s focus on the challenge of addressing poor attendance.

Technology can address the problem of poor attendance in three ways.

Technology can help improve attendance in three major ways:

  • The use of data analytics to help school staff and parents identify attendance problems.
  • Top-down automated communication at the district and school level to alert parents of problems and encourage better attendance.
  • Bottom-up one-on-one communication by teachers and other school staff, to intervene with parents of students with attendance problems.

Analytics can identify problem students and trends.

Student information systems (e.g., Infinite Campus, PowerSchool) contain reporting capabilities that allow districts and schools to obtain reporting on different aspects of the attendance challenge.

Examples would include:

  • Students absent today at our school, both excused and unexcused.
  • Students absent today for a second day.
  • Students who are displaying more problematic patterns of attendance.

Districts and schools also need to develop data systems to track interventions that have been attempted with problem students and analyze the effectiveness of those interventions.

Top-down communication sends automated mass alerts to parents.

Top-down automated communication has been used for many years by districts to help manage attendance issues. This communication usually uses a combination of the district’s student information system and notification system software (e.g., BrightArrow, SwiftK12).

An example is that early each morning the notification system will extract data from the student information system on students with unexcused absences. The notification system will then send some combination of text, voice mail, and e-mail messages to the parents of these students. Note that these messages are generally sent in a single batch for the entire district.

Another example is to send alerts to the parents of high school students who initially were at school but have been marked absent in subsequent periods.

Additional types of alerts would include addressing multi-day absences. The chart below on “Possible Formats of Response” outlines some of these possibilities.

Bottom-up efforts make use of interpersonal communication.

But an effective solution to absences must go beyond alerting parents that their child is absent. The solution must also employ personal contacts with parents.

Such a contact may begin on the morning of the first absence, with a personal phone call from the school office in addition to the automated alerts. If attendance problems continue, calls from the child’s teacher would tend to be especially effective, due to the teacher’s personal relationship with the family. Families with persistent problems would benefit from a home visit.

Districts benefit from a comprehensive approach – Plano, Texas.

And districts would clearly benefit from a comprehensive approach to absenteeism and a unified overall management of the challenges. A good example would be the Plano Independent School District in Plano, Texas. Plano is a racially diverse district with almost 50,000 students. A recent Education Week article on “This Leader Takes a Compassionate Approach to Truancy. It’s Transforming Students’ Lives” profiled the district’s efforts to improve attendance. [iv]

Plano had been relying on the efforts of a truancy court to manage attendance. But sending families to such a court did little to address the problems underlying serious attendance issues. Sharon Bradley, a new Director of Family and Social Services, led the shift to the use of “tiered intervention strategies…to reengage students” and a shift to an attendance review board that would work with families to identify underlying causes for the absences and if needed develop a family support plan.

But there’s a larger problem, disengagement.

As the experience in Plano showed, there are often larger problems behind the attendance challenges of a family. As we noted above, part of the problem often includes a disengagement from the life of the school, and disengagement has gotten much worse in the aftermath of the pandemic.

In our next blog entry, we will try to tackle the challenge of disengagement. And as we work to maintain our technology focus, we will explore how technology contributes to disengagement, but how it may also help us in our efforts to reengage our students.

Have you had any success? What are your thoughts?

If you have any thoughts or contributions on the challenge of attendance, or on the upcoming topic of engagement, please hit “Leave a Reply” above to add a comment, or contact me at schulzj@jerryschulz.com.

And thanks to all for everything you do for our kids in these challenging times!

Jerry Schulz

[i]     Mervosh, S., and Paris, F., “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere,” The New York Times, March 29, 2024 – https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html

[ii]     https://dpi.wi.gov/wisedash/about-data/chronic-absenteeism#:~:text=Students%20are%20considered%20to%20be,through%20their%20Student%20Information%20Systems

[iii]    Borsuk, A., ““What Are We Willing to Do about Low-Performing Schools in Milwaukee Public Schools and Beyond? Right Now, There’s No Real Plan for Change,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 15, 2023 – https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2023/12/15/no-apparent-play-to-help-improve-low-performing-mps-schools/71569628007

[iv]    Will, Madeline, “This Leader Takes a Compassionate Approach to Truancy. It’s Transforming Students’ Lives,” Education Week, February 5, 2024 – https://www.edweek.org/leaders/leadership/this-leader-takes-a-compassionate-approach-to-truancy-its-transforming-students-lives/2024/02

Homeschooling and Virtual Learning – How Can They Help? Can They Hurt? What Should Districts Do?

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The COVID-19 pandemic brought about great advances in the use of technology to support virtual learning. And the pandemic also increased interest by parents in homeschooling. The pandemic is now easing, but many parents are for now continuing to choose homeschooling as an option for their children.

Homeschooling is beneficial for some students, but it is not the best form of schooling for most kids. Districts need to support parents who choose homeschooling. But they also must work now to get most students back into their school buildings, because most students simply learn better in in-person settings.

The quick shift to virtual learning during the pandemic is an example of what is called “the disruptive impact of technology.” Often disruption is necessary, as it was for the need to use virtual learning in the pandemic. And we expect it to have a positive impact, as much of our use of virtual learning did.

But technology-driven change can often also be disruptive to a world that previously existed. A good example was how the universal adoption of word processing put typewriter companies out of business. This couldn’t have been helped.

But sometimes these disruptions create unintended impacts we would like to avoid or at least mitigate. For example, the near-universal adoption of smartphones benefits us in many ways. Except the power of our phones has also brought about disruptive negative impacts, such as device addiction.

Of course, homeschooling predates the pandemic. Homeschooling was once rare, but interest in homeschooling has increased since the 1970s, partly driven by a national homeschooling movement. A U.S. Census Bureau study found that for the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling across the U.S. “remained steady at around 3.3%” of students.” But by the fall of 2020, 11.1% of households surveyed by the Census Bureau reported that they were homeschooling their children. The Census Bureau worded the survey carefully “to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.” [i] And of course, most students have experienced virtual learning in that way during the pandemic.

A related trend that predates the pandemic is an increase in students attending virtual schools. Students may attend virtual schools sponsored by their own districts, or even those sponsored by other districts if their states allow this. Again, this type of virtual school is something different that the virtual schooling that was used during the pandemic.

Most virtual schools offer “asynchronous” classes in which students do not need to be continually interacting online with their teachers and fellow students. These are unlike the “synchronous” online classes most districts used during the pandemic.

Parents considering homeschooling for their child have tough decisions to make. Two big questions regarding homeschooling are:

  • Why should students participate in homeschooling?
  • How can parents provide their homeschooled children with the needed curriculum and oversight?

As for why parents and students would prefer homeschooling, some reasons are:

  • Students are struggling with the overall school environment, due to problems such as bullying.
  • Students have health issues, especially being immunocompromised during the pandemic.
  • Parents prefer homeschooling for religious reasons.
  • Parents are unhappy with the school alternatives in their district.

And how can and/or should parents provide their homeschooled children with the needed curriculum and oversight? One alternative is to participate in a virtual school program. For many families seeking to provide homeschooling this would be a good idea. Yet during the pandemic one more reason some parents chose to homeschool was they felt the daylong virtual learning programs that districts has shifted to involved too much screentime and/or were unable to provide enough content.

An interesting case study of one family’s experience with homeschooling over the course of the pandemic was recently published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. [ii] The author, Amy Schwabe, is a reporter for the paper on family issues. She told of the experience of her own middle school-aged daughter, Wendy. Prior to the pandemic, Wendy “begged to stay home from school. She cried nearly every morning, and she seemed to have constant stomachaches and nausea.” Her parents sought medical help, but to no avail.

Artwork by Dani Cherchio, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Yet when the pandemic struck and Wendy began attending school virtually, these symptoms went away. When in-person schooling resumed Wendy was eager to see her friends again, but the old symptoms returned.

Her parents considered their options, and they decided to homeschool Amy for her eighth-grade year.

We should note two things about how Wendy’s story provides an example of how parents address the two big questions on homeschooling. As to why should a student seek homeschooling, Wendy’s story is an example of how parents may choose homeschooling because their student is struggling with the school environment, for reasons that are not easily fixed.

And as for how to provide for the student’s instruction, it’s interesting that in the middle of our boom in virtual learning Wendy’s parents decided not to take advantage of a virtual learning program. Instead, Amy reports that, “Reading and writing are my strengths, so I’ve become Wendy’s history and English teacher. My engineer husband excels at math and science, so he’s taken on those subjects.” So, Wendy found herself in a very beneficial situation.

Here is a link to this article – https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/wisconsin-family/2022/01/28/wisconsin-mom-homeschools-child-during-covid-pandemic/6559691001. And here is a link to a follow-up article, with an emphasis on children’s mental health – https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/wisconsin-family/2022/02/23/childrens-mental-health-suffering-during-pandemic/6872425001.

This article helps to show how homeschooling and virtual learning are related but different concepts—homeschooling does not necessarily require virtual learning technology. And although during the pandemic most students have at some time studied at home, they mostly have done this as part of their school’s program rather than at their parents’ direction—so this would probably not be considered to be true “homeschooling.”

Where homeschooling and virtual learning intersect is when parents determine that they will have their children learn at home, but they also will seek the help of a virtual learning program, possibly through their own school district, another district, a charter school, or a commercial provider. Should this be classified as homeschooling? Clarifying this fuzzy boundary is a one of the challenges school districts must address.

Homeschooling and Virtual Learning Intersect When Homeschool Parents Enroll in Virtual Learning Programs

In a previous blog post on June 27, 2021, we discussed several ways to provide virtual learning.  (“To Be Synchronous, or to Be Asynchronous—or, Maybe, to Be Neither. That Is the Question.” – https://managingtechnologyink12.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/to-be-synchronous-or-to-be-asynchronous-or-maybe-to-be-neither-that-is-the-question.)

We discussed how districts seem to have at least four alternative ways to support homeschooling using virtual learning technology:

  • Continue to offer a synchronous concurrent option, in which online students can attend in-person classes along with the students who are at school and in the classroom. Synchronous means the class is live. Concurrent means online and in-person students both attend at the same time.
  • Offer special synchronous classes for virtual learners only, grouping together online learners from across the district. So, everyone in the class is virtual.
  • Offer an “asynchronous” virtual option, in which students use technology to access learning materials but don’t necessarily join together at the same time with fellow students in an online class.
  • Decline to offer any virtual option, either synchronous or asynchronous.

Except we’re arguing that in-person schooling is better for most students. Why is this? In-person schooling:

  • Provides normal in-person social interaction with fellow students and caring adults.
  • Structures the student’s school day and provides oversight of their activity.
  • Controls and limits device time, while also hopefully ensuring an optimal use of the most effective current and emerging technology.

Our school districts have been experiencing the impact of technology-driven disruption. This was happening anyway, but it was expedited and was made more pronounced by the impact of the pandemic.

So, life has become more challenging for our districts and schools. But what should they be doing to manage virtual learning and address the increased demand for homeschooling?

  • Work energetically to bring students back into in-person classroom settings, and diplomatically discourage homeschooling for most students.
  • But address the demand for homeschooling by providing either or both of two options: synchronous classes for virtual learners only and/or an asynchronous virtual program. These programs could serve only the district’s students, they could be offered through a partnership with other districts, or they could be contracted out to providers.
  • And, to the extent that the district sponsors homeschool and virtual learning programs, work to ensure that these programs are high quality and are comparable to the programs for in-person learning.
  • Work to include homeschool students within the larger student population. For example, welcome homeschool students to participate on sports teams and in other school activities.
  • Possibly provide a synchronous concurrent option so students who must temporarily attend from home can continue with their regular teacher and in-person classmates, but…
  • For the most part, avoid using synchronous concurrent classes that mix full-time homeschool and in-person students.
  • Provide homeschool parents with virtual and in-person services, and energetically monitor homeschool students to ensure that they are enjoying success.
  • Monitor all students in the district to ensure that all are successfully attending in some way.

It’s hard to tell where the homeschool and virtual learning world is going, other than it is someplace very different than the past. Districts and schools will be wise to adopt flexible plans and work to provide an excellent experience for all their students.

Technology-driven disruption has complicated our world in other ways. Although we have put beneficial technology to work to improve the learning of our children, this has created situations in which students arguably spend too much of their school days working with computer devices. And so they spend too little of their time interacting with their fellow human beings and being involved in ways to learn that are more hands-on, such as simply using traditional paper books.

How do we cope this disruption? What are some ways to balance virtual and traditional learning? We’ll discuss this in our next blog posting. Until then, let me know if you have any thoughts on this, or post a comment below.

[i] Eggleson, C., and Fields, J., “Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey Shows Significant Increase in Homeschooling Rates in Fall 2020,” United States Census Bureau, 2021.

[ii] Schwabe, A., “My husband and I have been homeschooling our eighth grader this school year. She’s taught us some important lessons.,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2022