Clocking in

Would you hire an employee who routinely missed the first hour and a half of their eight-hour shifts?

How about a surgeon who showed up on time for 85 percent of their surgeries?

Could you imagine missing the first 20 minutes of every movie you wanted to see? Or the first 30 minutes of every Warriors game?

Showing up on time and meeting your obligations is an essential part of successful functioning as an adult in our society, but SFUSD high school students seem to be missing out on this lesson. And as bad as things are now, if we don’t change our practices soon, our students’ learning loss is only going to get worse.

It’s a relief that chronic absenteeism in schools is finally starting to get the attention it deserves. The recent San Francisco Chronicle stories such as Emily Hoeven’s analysis of disappearing young people and the heroic attendance liaison at Ida B. Wells Continuation High School are a great start at raising public awareness, but we’re never going to make progress if we don’t start listening to what teachers on the front lines of this emergency are trying to tell us about the attendance crisis in SFUSD high schools.

Any high school teacher in America can tell you where those disappearances are starting. They’re starting in high school classrooms, where too many students are draining their futures away 15 minutes at a time.

Here’s how this is happening.

At the high school level, attendance occurs both at a “macro” and at a “micro” level. Schools and districts worship at the altar of daily attendance — the macro level — because that’s where the money is. Average Daily Attendance (ADA) is how states and the federal government apportion funding. As far as they’re concerned, students are either present at school or they are absent. That’s it. Schools check this status once a day, though it can be modified or corrected by administrators to account for illness or other excusable events.

For public policy purposes, chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10 percent or more of the days in the mandated school year, but the problem we’re encountering is that this is only half our reality in high schools.

Here is why.

In addition to their attendance status for the day, each student in a high school course gets marked present, absent, tardy, or seriously tardy six or seven times a day for each of their six or seven individual classes. In high school, each course is its own distinct academic world with its own state-mandated time and attendance requirements. 

In SFUSD, each high school course meets for roughly 240 instructional minutes per week every week for 36 weeks. That’s 6 hours a week and 144 total hours over course of the school year.

If a student misses one whole period, no big deal — as long as it’s no more than one day a month or so. That’s a 5 percent absence rate — well below the 10 percent threshold of chronic absenteeism. In the words of The Beatles, we can work it out.

But what happens when a student misses 10 or 15 minutes every day for a week? Or every day for the whole year?

There’s where the cracks and craters in learning begin to appear, and where the senseless scrambling begins.

Let’s say our imaginary student Ash shows up 12 minutes late on Monday, 12 minutes late on Tuesday, 12 minutes late on Wednesday, and 12 minutes late on Friday.

As far as the state is concerned, Ash has a problem with on-time arrival, but not a problem with absenteeism.

And that is a demonstrable mathematical mistake.

As Ash’s math teacher, I see that Ash has missed 48 minutes out of the 240 minutes of class for the week. That means Ash has missed 20 percent — or one-fifth — of an entire week’s worth of math instruction. 

That’s not only a lot of accumulated missed time, it’s also double the percentage of missed time that the state considers “chronic absenteeism.” But nobody looks at it this way, except for Ash’s classroom teacher. 

The school administration doesn’t treat it as a problem. The district doesn’t treat it as a problem. The state doesn’t treat it as a problem.

So it must not be an actual problem, right? This is just another instance of Ash’s math teacher freaking out over nothing … right?

Not exactly.

Let’s multiply this effect across 36 weeks. 

At the current rate, Ash will miss almost 29 hours of their required 144 hours for their math course. That’s 20 percent of the whole course, which is double the amount of missed time that would constitute a chronic absenteeism problem. Ash has missed — in miniature — 20 percent of an entire year’s worth of math instruction.

Twelve minutes a day of missed instruction adds up to a very big deal — a gaping absence that hides learning loss in plain sight. It’s a full year’s worth of absence, but only in one course.

Unless Ash is late for any other classes in their schedule.

When we calculate how much learning time Ash has actually missed in a given class period, it becomes clear that Ash has a chronic absenteeism problem that is snowballing into a predictable emergency. But we don’t have a common framework or language for coming together and intervening until the student starts to register failures of mastery.

Is it any wonder that parents are feeling blindsided by high failure rates? And are we certain these micro-absences aren’t a major factor in what we keep calling “learning loss”? 

The pandemic is four years in the rear-view mirror but we’re still blaming it for everything, from the teen mental health crisis to phone addiction to the catch-all category of “learning loss.” And yet, we seem unmotivated to take action until there’s a need for expensive and after-the-fact emergency tutoring and interventions.

So what can we do about this? 

The research shows that by the start of a student’s ninth-grade year, regular and high attendance is a stronger predictor of graduation rates than eighth-grade test scores. Other districts such as Long Beach Unified have used this research to turn around their chronic absenteeism emergencies to achieve model systems and impressive and enduring student outcomes. They’re helping their students and families partner to make good use of instructional minutes the first time around — and that’s freeing up budget and energy to help students thrive rather than just survive.

SFUSD could be benefiting from Long Beach’s learning and success. SFUSD’s profile is strikingly similar to that of Long Beach — so why can’t we just model our district-wide attendance program on theirs? Wouldn’t that free up energy for us to be more student-centered, fearless, united, socially just, and inclusive of diversity?

One thing is clear: If we don’t start addressing SFUSD’s attendance emergency right now at both the macro and micro levels, we’re going to keep sabotaging our progress on improving literacy and math results. Students need to be present — on time, every period, every day, every week, all year long — to benefit from the education we provide.

We need SFUSD’s Board of Education to make attendance metrics across the board one of the top metrics it tracks and oversees at every meeting, every month, all year long.

This may be our only hope for getting everybody onto the same page about attendance for every class period, every school, every day.

Stories like the Chronicle’s feel-good piece about the heroic attendance liaison at Ida B. Wells alternative school are inspiring but unrealistic for the majority of SFUSD high schools — and particularly the three largest high schools. In our current budget crisis, we cannot afford the same kinds of interventions that are succeeding at small and alternative schools such as Ida B. Wells. We need to launch the kind of community education that Long Beach and others have done to nip micro-absences in the bud.

Elizabeth Statmore is a teacher at Lowell High School.

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