Is school attendance down because grades are up?

Absenteeism in public schools has increased dramatically since covid. In 2022-23, 26% of students missed at least 10% of schooldays, up from 13 to 15% in the last years of the previous decade. The American Enterprise Institute reports:

Some of this is no doubt spillover from the Work From Home revolution. But some of it is due to a trend toward grading standards being lowered in the name of equity that were exacerbated in 2020 by covid and the Racial Reckoning.

In the first dozen years of this century, the Great and the Good (e.g., George W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) assured us that no child need be left behind: all we have to do is fix the schools. In 2002, Congress passed a law mandating that by 2014 all students, not just Lake Wobegon children, would score above average on state tests.

For some reason, that didn’t happen.

Eventually, during the Great Awokening, people got tired of the promises of Education Reform, which obviously weren’t coming true. They moved on to blaming The Gap on white people being bad and thus looked to solve racial disparities more directly through putting an even heavier thumb on the scale.

From Edutopia in 2018:

Do No-Zero Policies Help or Hurt Students?

No-zero policies spur serious—and productive—debate among teachers. We look at the big insights on both sides of the argument.

By Emelina Minero

July 3, 2018

With a no-zero grading policy, the glass is always half full.

The controversial grading policy—which is rising in popularity across the country—sets the lowest possible grade for any assignment or test at 50 percent, even when students turn in no work at all.

Schools systems like Fairfax County Public Schools and the Philadelphia School District have adopted similar approaches in recent years, arguing that they give all students a chance to succeed. These changes in grading policy are moving in tandem with national efforts to abolish letter grades and minimize the value placed on AP exams and SAT scores in favor of assessments focused on students’ skills, competencies, and work samples. …

For many in favor of a no-zero grading policy, it comes down to equity. Many educators argue that home-life factors create barriers to student learning, that low grades encourage struggling students to give up, and that teachers who can’t get their kids to comply use grades to punish rather than to assess knowledge.

There are a wide variety of home-life factors—like learning disabilities, learning English as a second language, or working a job to support their families—that impact students’ abilities to succeed academically, teachers noted. If a student misses a major assignment or assessment due to a home-life situation and receives a zero, that’s much more difficult to come back from academically than a 50. …

Several of the educators participating in the conversation had direct experience with no-zero policies, however, and felt that in practice they simply didn’t work well.

“[Our 50 policy] had unintended consequences that undermined instruction. Many students learned to subvert the system and would do nothing two quarters [of the] year, collect their 50s, and do well during the next two quarters and on the final,” said Rachel Kent of her school’s adoption of the policy. “In essence, they were smart kids who didn’t want to do the work (or didn’t want to come to school) and knew they could take half of a year off and still pass.”

Clearly, the covid Zoom era got people used to staying home.

But easy grading brought about by covid also accelerated absenteeism.

Consider a teacher with an extremely easy grading policy: You get one point for each day you show up for class (and not cause trouble). Assume nothing else is counted for the grade and there are 100 schooldays in a semester, so the maximum possible score is 100 points.

Under old-fashioned zero-based grading, you’d have to show up 60 out of 100 days to get a D (assuming 60% represents the minimum needed to pass). Under the new-fangled system where everybody starts off with a free 50%, then you only have to show up for 10 out of 100 days to pass the class.

You can imagine slightly more rigorous systems. Say your grade depends upon taking ten quizzes worth ten points apiece. If you average 7 points per quiz, then you’d better show up for 9 of the 10 quizzes to get a 63.

But if you start out with 50 points, you’ll only need to take a couple of quizzes to have your D.