High absenteeism in schools and how it affects academic achievement
by
Georgina Salas
Project Three: Literature Synthesis
In partial fulfillment of
EDCI 6300.62Introduction to Research Methods
The University of Texas at Brownsville, College of Education
Department of Teaching Learning and Innovation
Dr. A. J. Herrera
May 7, 2012
Teachers believe that students go to school to learn. There are students who strive for perfect attendance and want to learn. According to Sarah D. Peek (2009), “It is necessary to build a strong foundation during a child’s elementary years of education.” Then there are students who want to learn but they are constantly absent so their learning is hindered. “If a child misses school frequently, the foundation will more likely not be stable, says Peek (2009). The problem is the more absences a child has how will it affect them in their academic achievement as measured in their daily learning and STARR exams. When students are chronically absent they tend to gain the lowest knowledge in the important areas of reading and math (Peek, 2009). If students continue to have an absence problem by the time they get to fifth grade they will show signs of major struggling and the lowest scores in reading and math (Jacobson, 2008). High absenteeism needs to be studied because it has been shown that, “starting in first grade, school dropouts had more absences than did graduates” (Barrington and Hendricks, 1989). Teachers and researchers need to figure out why students starting in the lower grades have high absenteeism. The purpose of this review of literatureis to understand why students start missing school constantly starting in the early years of elementary education. The review of literature will focus on elementary education starting in the lower grades and moving up to the upper grades.
There is a need to understand how a student’s high absenteeism hinders their learning. What do we mean by “their learning?” Learning would be what information is presented to them and how much they can retain and use it on standardized tests once they get to the upper grades. Hooker and Weatherman (1990) state that students with high absenteeism scored “in the bottom 30th percentile than those who attended school regularly.” Teachers need to keep learning fun and interesting. Grannis (1994) states that “an effort must be made to put strategies in place to build students connections with an engagement in school and learning.” If the student finds school boring they will not want to attend. It does not matter at what grade level it is at. High absenteeism can start as early as kindergarten and continue the pattern all the way into high school (Oakland, 1992). Once a young child has started missing school a lot it is very hard to catch them up with worked missed and to get them back into wanting to learn. What can teachers do to reduce high absenteeism especially in the lower grades?
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) 25.085 (2008) states thatTexas was one of the last states to enact compulsory education laws which established attendance requirements in 1915. TEA also states the compulsory attendance applies to students who are at least 6 years old as of September 1st of the new school year. It also requires the student to attend school until the student’s 18thbirthday (Brown, 2011). In Texas each school district is required to be responsible for obtaining their daily attendance. Once the attendance information is gathered it is then submitted to TEA through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) (TEA 2009). As each district submits their attendance rates TEA, districts, and principles can observe the students who are chronically absent and try to understand why these students are chronically absent. Districts want 100% attendance because the more students are absent the more the districts funding are affected (Garry 1996).
According to Gottfried (2009) he states that being absent from school has been found to be detrimental to the student in their learning and academic achievement and an increase in absences may exacerbate academic and social risk factors in later years. Students who are chronically absent receive fewer hours of instruction and may consequently perform lower on state standardized tests (Chen & Stevenson, 1995). A study that was done in several Louisiana public schools shows that the relationship between attendance rates and test scores would either be positive or negative (Caldas, 1993). His results showed that the average daily attendance rate among the students would indicate the level of performance on any tests that were taken. Once a student shows chronic absences, starting in the lower grades, it has been proven to show that when they reach the upper grades and continue to middle school and high school there is a greater chance the students will score poorly and tests and potentially be dropouts (Williams 2001).
There are many factors as to why students tend to have high absenteeism. Some of those factors are chronic illness and family crisis (excused absences). But these absences are not the ones schools are worried about. The absences the schools are worried about are the ones that are unexcused absences. Why are these absences unexcused? Hess, et al., (1989) states that students have unexcused because of delinquency and a disengagement from school. Claudia Kozinets (1995) showed that one study was done in a large urban Texas public school system community. The data was derived from 158 elementary schools from grades one-five and accounted for 102,166 students. The data from this school large urban school community showed that students tend to have many absences because of poverty, poor health, and special classes that they might to have to attend (Kozinets 1995).
Chang and Jordan (20011) state that in cities like Baltimore, New York City, and all across the country, including Texas, the leaders of those cities are trying to establish some strategies to help reduce high absenteeism in their schools. The leaders are finally recognizing the power of attendance in school and how it affects them when they take their state mandated tests. Once the scores come back they can see which schools have fallen off the “academic track” according to the numbers the students produced (Chang, Jordan 2011). People believe that high absences start happening in high school. Little do they know that high absenteeism starts as low as kindergarten. The absent rate for kindergarten is nearly as high as it is in the ninth grade (Chang, Jordan 2011). Chang and Jordan (2011) go on to state that early absences take a toll on the youngest students. They fall behind in their learning and find it hard to catch up to their fellow peers. Chronic absences can also leave the students ill prepared to read by the time they get to the third grade, which is the first state mandated testing grade. Chronic absences to the school districts are students missing 10 percent of the academic school year or about 18-19 days of the school year.
A study that was done in the San Mateo and the Santa Clara Counties in the state of California examined 640 school children. It compared their school readiness scores in kindergarten with their third grade reading scores on standardized tests (Chang, Jordan 2011). The results showed a strong correlation from their kindergarten year and third grade year. It also showed that those students who went to school ready to learn but missed about 10 percent of their kindergarten and first grade year scored on average 60 points below similar students who had good attendance in those first few years of school (Chang and Jordan 2011). There were only 17 percent of students who were chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade that showed they were proficient readers by the end of third grade. This is compared to two-thirds of their peers who attended school regularly during those first few years of school. This goes to show that having high absences in the early grades does have some kind affect on the students learning and especially their proficient reading (Chang and Jordan 2011). They both went on to state that the problem only gets worse when the students enter sixth grade and move on up to high school. They say this is where the dropout rates start rising because the students with high absences have not been able to catch up to their peers and consistently score low on their tests.
Chronic absences can be fixed according to Chang and Jordan (2011). They stated that the leaders in the California communities have devised strategies to help curb high absenteeism in the schools. One strategy is to get, share, and monitor chronic absence data. In this strategy the city leaders encourage the school districts to analyze their data or offer city tech support to crunch the data. Second, make attendance a community priority. To make this work city agencies and volunteer organizations and even parents can help the schools improve attendance. A third strategy is partner with school and city-funded agencies to nurture a “culture of attendance.” This strategy lets city leaders come up with ways in the community to boost attendance in schools. They can create public awareness about the importance of attendance. They can also create attendance incentives to engage students to get to school every day. One last thing is to create a community-based organization to mentor at-risk students. A fourth strategy is to identify and address barriers to attendance. City resources can help city leader’s help break down the barriers that are keeping students from school. Meaning creating safe walking routes to school, health clinics, providing housing authorities and homeless shelters providing coordinators to endure children living in the shelters get to school every day. The last strategythe city leaders provide is to advocate for stronger policies and public investments. This means local officials will consider a charge for policies that define what chronic absence is. It will require districts to report and calculate data from attendance teams to target at-risk students. It will also allow the districts and the schools to address their attendance achievement plan (Chang and Jordan 2011). To implement these strategies ever day is a lot of work but in the end if the strategies are implemented correctly the school districts should see an increase in their attendance rates and less chronic absences from students especially in the lower grades.
Volkmann and Bye (2206) conducted a study of elementary students who were paired with adult volunteer reading partners to test whether the student’s attendance improved the year the reading program was implemented. A pre- and post research design using attendance data was used to compare the total attendance of all the students in the school over two years (2006). The student’s individual daily attendance was also examined to see if the students were more likely to attend school on the days they met with their adult reading volunteer. Volkmann and Bye (2006) stated that the findings from the study showed no difference in the average number of days the students were absent from school. The study also showed that the students would more likely attend school on the days they were scheduled to meet with their adult reading partner. Volkmann and Bye (2006) went on to state that the elementary school programs that develop reading proficiency early can help the academic achievement of the students and possibly reduce the high absenteeism. It has been proven that reading skills are crucial to school success starting at a very young age because all subjects and subsequent learning are dependent on the ability to read (Jones, 2003). Those students who fall behind in their reading will fall behind their classmates and do not catch up for the rest of their education (Allington and McGill-Franzen, 2000). In this study Foorman and colleagues (1998) stated that students in the third grade who were identified as poor readers were unable to attain the same proficiency in reading as their peers. Those same poor readers in the third grade who then tested again in the ninth grade were still poor readers and still did not do well on state mandated tests. Kuo, Franke, Regalado, and Halfon, 2004) stated that failure to read during elementary school years has also been linked to adult illiteracy, high school dropout rates, and criminal involvement. It is very important, especially in the lower grades, to make sure the students are reading and attending school consistently. Once schools set up reading programs that partner up at-risk students with an adult reading partner they provide support, guidance, understanding, and role models, which then would increase self-esteem (Bien,1999) and develop life-long skills the students will take with them their entire educational career and hopefully in their life as well. The goals of the program is to increase academic reading scores, improve school attendance, and promote a lifetime love of reading (Volkmaa and Bye 2006).
High absenteeism is not just a problem here in the United States. It happens all over the world. An example is high absences in Australia with Indigenous children. The factors for these children to be absent so many times is the children’s remote communities, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and criminal behavior (ACER 2004). Just like in the United States chronic absenteeism affects the students learning and the affects can be shown on their standardized testing. Taylor (2009) showed in this study that the patterns of absenteeism vary with location, age and stage and to some extent gender. In this study Taylor (2009) states that the schools make efforts to encourage attendance but they do not pressure the parents to make sure their children attend class regularly or have to deal effectively at the classroom level with the day to day outcomes of intermittent attendance. She goes on to state that pressure has been placed on state education authorities to improve and standardize attendance data collection as a basis for policy development. Just like in the United States a child in Australia who misses 10 percent of school is also considered at-risk. The schools management of absences really didn’t help those students who needed it. Taylor (2009) states that the teachers in the schools did not have any method to address those students who were chronically absent and returned to class. Once the students returned to class they tried to take part in class activities but failed because they did not know what was going on especially if they missed many days of school. Although the students would “practice” over the next few days their basic skill work was usually taught in the morning. If they missed this work it would not be re-taught. If a teacher would see a student struggling either she or a teacher’s assistant would attempt a one-on-one explanation. They would not teach they would just explain what needed to be done. If teachers didn’t help the students a competent peer would be asked to help the student. So in reality no re-teaching was being given to the student. They expected the student to either get by a quick explanation or by osmosis. Now because there was not re-teaching being done these students would have academic struggles that some teachers would mistake them as evidence of a development lag or lack of ability or motivation.
Now back here in the United States in 1996 J. Ford and R.D. Sutphen studied a program that was being implemented in an elementary school setting. The pilot program was to include both a school wide attendance promotion and a focus program that developed individual intervention plans for at-risk students that were identified as having excessive absences. The one program we want to concentrate on is the latter of the programs. The focus program was to establish and encourage positive relationships between at-risk students and the school system (Ford and Sutphen 1996). Three certified social workers were assigned to this elementary school to look over this pilot program. One worker was given the whole school attendance promotion and the other two workers were given the focus program. Once the workers were implanting both projects it gave them a better understanding of the issues related to early school nonattendance and the need to include family based interventions in addressing students’ problems in school (Ford and Sutphen , 1996). In the end of the program the attendance in the focus group improved significantly during an intensive interventions phase. According to Ford and Sutphen (1996) the findings suggest that daily interventions and positive feedback were effective in reducing absences among at-risk students.
In all the studies that were researched they all had the same thing in common. In 2002 Sheldon and Epstein did a study on how to get kids to school and how to get the family and community involved to help reduce chronic absenteeism. Just like all other studies that have been researched Sheldon and Epstein (2002) also say that the students who are chronically absent from school are more likely than other students to drop out of school. Sheldon and Epstein (2002) went on to state that there are few studies that focused on whether or how family and community involvement help reduce the rates of chronic absenteeism. In their study they collected data from 39 schools whose rates of chronic absenteeism, specific family, and community involvement activities were implemented to help reduce chronic absences among the students. In 1998 the U.S. Department of Education said that 15 percent of the public school teachers report that student’s absenteeism is a “serious problem.” This statistic was about 13 years ago so we can imagine whether or not that statistic has gone up dramatically, has it stayed the same, or has it decreased. The schools have used many efforts to get the students to school. One example has been ice cream reward. But the schools have even gone as far as to threat imprisonment for the parents or guardians whose kids are chronically absent (Sheldon and Epstein 2002). The latter of the consequence seems very harsh but Sheldon and Epstein (2002) say that this method is employed due to the fact that little research has been done on school program and practices to improve student attendance.