Every platform or news source you turn to these days is carrying a story about chronic absenteeism. Students are absent. Teachers are absent. Bus drivers are absent (or non-existent). I assume that administrators and other key staff members who keep a school up and running are absent, too, but you don’t hear as much about them. While all of those absences are certainly troubling, I am at least as concerned about the absence of data – good, solid data about student absences.
Four years into pandemic-caused absenteeism and at least a decade since chronic absenteeism was identified as a significant problem in PK-12 education, we are just beginning to get reports with two-way crosstabs examining absences by factors such as race and SES. (Is SES even a thing, anymore?) Even the New York Times, the Picasso of Pictographs, the Dali of Data Visualization is limited to displaying basic bar charts. It’s surreal.
Always the Last To Know
When my daughter flew home from LA to Boston last week (via Seattle), I could see where her flights were for every one of the 3,000+ miles. And when she calls for a ride-share, she can see where each car is and how long it will take to get to her.
On a macro level, there are several apps that will show me where every Amtrak train in the country is and how fast it is moving in real-time. Sometimes, I’ll order small things with free shipping on ebay, just to watch as they progress across the country day by day.
On a micro level, when I go to pick up my drive-up order at Target, the young woman bringing it out to the car knows how far away I am and when I will get there and is often waiting there by the designated parking spaces when I arrive. (Yes, 9 out of 10 times it’s young women.)
Why is it so difficult to get good data on who is in and out of school, and when, and why, and how those absences affecting them? Anecdotes are nice, but enough is enough.
Are chronically absent who are missing 1-2 days per month different than/from kids absent for a couple of big chunks of time during the year?
Are kids or their teachers taking long weekends?
Are they skipping early-release and late-arrival days because those days are already “reduced” in importance in some way? Another unintended consequence perhaps.
Are they avoiding certain lunches?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I am reminded of my last big data project before stepping down from full-time employment in the fall of 2019. Two chaotic weeks where Rachel from Rhode Island was the last person I talked to each night and the first person I talked to the next morning as we tried to connect the student attendance database with the teacher attendance database with the student schedule database in an attempt to determine just how many days students and teachers were in their assigned classes together – and whether that differed by race, SES, grade level, content area, etc.
If a student is absent 10 days in a semester and a teacher is out for 5 sick or personal days, the pair could be absent from each other from as little as two weeks or as much as three. What if it’s 20 days and 4 weeks?
A big part of solving a problem is understanding the problem.
It shouldn’t be so difficult.
The Tip of the Iceberg
Let’s not forget that data like student and teacher attendance is the low-hanging fruit in the sea of educational data. (Sorry but sitting here without power listening to the wind in the midst of an April snowstorm, it’s a mixed metaphor kind of day.)
We are just counting people, people.
About the only piece of data easier to snatch off the vine is the state test score – and oh my, have we wrung all of the possible juice out of that pineapple. We put Dole to shame with all that we are able to get out of a single on-demand test score – although I’m fascinated by the idea of vegan leather made from pineapple leaves.
Good Production with Less Waste: We strive to use all parts of a pineapple and repurpose those that we can’t make into our delicious bites into organic fertilizers.
More Delicious Bites, Less Fertilizer
We start with scaled scores, achievement levels, and percentile ranks. We dig deep to root out subscores and item-level scores. We process up for vertical scaled scores, growth scores, effect sizes, and now time-based reporting (e.g., “Kids are two years and six months behind.”). We rank and rate and grade schools based on wild, but federally-approved, composites of various indices, almost all based on that simple, single, state test score. Recently, seeking deeper understanding, some in our field have attempted to mine response time and other process data collected as students work to produce that single test score. We even tried to use that test score to evaluate teachers. That didn’t work out so well, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Rarely, in the course of educational history has so much been asked of so little.
It’s not that some of those scores do not provide very useful information. I’ll take a good achievement level and growth score any day.
But there is so much more to PK-12 education that annual test scores in reading and mathematics – or even quarterly test scores in those content areas.
Learning is so complex, and our data is so simplistic. We have barely looked at learning from one side now. We really don’t know learning at all.
The Data Are There
The good news is that the data are out there, in schools and in all of the other places where learning occurs on a regular basis. And the tools to collect data unobtrusively and in real-time are getting better every day – not to mention the collection of tools at our disposal to process the data, convert it to useful information, and communicate that information to critical stakeholders.
Imagine a time in the not too distant future when we are collecting as much relevant data about learning from teachers and students in a semester as they provide now in a single day on social media about just about everything else in their lives. Trust me. That time is coming and it’s closer than you think. Tick tock.
Of course, even with good data in hand, there will still be the need to actually solve some real problems in PK-12 education, and in society, at large. Problems like chronic absenteeism. But we will be one step closer than we are today.
That’s enough to brighten a snowy April afternoon.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 