Students and Teachers Are Ditching Public Schools in DrovesJust 26% of Americans have a 'great deal/fair amount' of confidence in public schools
By Larry Sand
August 23, 2023
In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report titled, “A Nation at Risk,” which was an important point in the history of American education. The document used dire language, asserting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
The report also stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
If this was a wake-up call, the powers that be shut the alarm off and went back to sleep.
In November 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress results were released for the test taken earlier in the year and showed that just 33% of the nation’s fourth graders are proficient in reading, and 36% are proficient in math. The eighth graders did even worse: 31% are proficient in reading, while 26% show proficiency in math.
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Hence, it should come as no surprise that a recent report issued by Stanford University finds that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, “the share of students chronically absent (missing 10% or greater of the total number of days enrolled during the school year) grew by 13.5 percentage points—a 91-percent increase that implies an additional 6.5 million students are now chronically absent.” The findings also note that chronic absenteeism has affected every state, varying from 4% to 22%.
Though most states have not released their chronic absenteeism numbers for the 2022-2023 school year, some states are reporting that the problem has not been alleviated, according to the AP. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, chronic absenteeism numbers remained double what they were prior to the pandemic.
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And it’s not only students who are who are ditching school. According to The New Teacher Project, even before the pandemic, nearly a third of teachers were considered “chronically absent,” missing more than ten days of work, and one in four students attended a school where more than 40% of teachers were chronic absentees.
Also, according to Heritage Foundation researchers Jay Greene and Jonathan Butcher, there is an “alarming rise in teacher absenteeism.” They report that 72% of public schools had higher teacher absenteeism rates than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, with kids and teachers abandoning school, what’s a parent to do?
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/23/students-and-teachers-are-ditching-public-schools-in-droves/
