Anti Social Promotion
With that, I went and taught class to 18 seniors, though 36 are on roll – just like everyday.
The biggest frustration I have as a city school teacher in this low-income area is sporadic attendance and truancy. I can prepare lessons day after day, but there’s no continuity for students who miss three out of five days or eight out of ten days or who show up four times per semester. When I first started in the system I was baffled by the number of days even the most ‘with it’ kids were missing.
How do you build the body of knowledge necessary to learn and dream of better things when the mere act of going to school on time is of seeming secondary importance? With respect for the challenging situations of children of poverty, seeing the apathy towards education of these kids whom I love is nothing short of infuriating. And I never hesitate to tell them.
In this overwhelmed district, there is no recourse for students or their parents when it comes to attendance - - I don’t know who is responsible for this or what we can do to fix it. In order to put an F on the report card of a student with sporadic or infrequent attendance, I must document to show that I have called the student, their parent, sent out a letter, set up a conference with them and even visited their house. This is the work of a social worker, not an already overwhelmed teacher. This is the work of a parent.
After a young man cut my class three out of five days last week, I called his mother and talked her ear off for 20 minutes. “YOUR SON WILL NOT PASS MY CLASS IF THIS CONTINUES. TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY AND MAKE SURE HE’S HERE.” I couldn’t have repeated it enough. This week, he cut my class four times out of five. He did the same garbage last year and I failed him as an 11th grader. Still, he manages to be in my 12th grade class this year.
Many teachers find it much easier to simply pass the student than go through the hassle of documenting poor attendance or making dozens of phone calls or even home visits. In my school, I don’t need to prove I’ve taught kids anything during a given year in my school because my grade level is not given mandatory state tests. It’s much easier to put the “P” on the report card and let them become someone else’s problem, but I have a huge problem with this feeling of mediocrity and pressure to move kids along.
I’m fed up with this and frankly am embarrassed to see up front how little we expect in terms of academic performance from urban children and parents. Poverty experts and social theorists will talk your ear off and tell you that the childhood of a child in poverty is shortened dramatically, and I do agree with much of it. In many cases it’s the sole choice of the students to be here on time each day. Many of them raise themselves or are responsible for all the little things that must happen to get up, fed and transported to school. These are definitely things I took for granted growing up. I wonder if I would have made it to school on time if it were completely up to me and my parents hadn’t shown me all my life the right way to do it. For too many kids, this is the case; school years are something they must “get through,” not excel in.
I hear this often from a young woman when I demand better attendance if she wants to pass: “I’m grown. You can’t tell me how to live my life.” Her mother died two years ago and she lives by herself. Can you blame her for being late or not wanting to push herself in English class?
What can we do to help these kids? We aren’t doing well right now because this happens all across the city.
I tell my students often that I’m done with the excuses and I’m tired of listening to experts and administrators explain away life’s challenges as another excuse to “pass” or “graduate.” I ask students who try to run games on me or tell me that they’ll pass no matter what I say, “What do you think you are passing or graduating out of? What has this experience taught you?”
It’s taught me why “social problems” and “urban problems” will be topics of endless discussion in every left wing sociology, American Studies and history class for the next 200 years. It’s taught me why liberal policy will continue to thrive in urban schools and why conservatives will be driven to work in other more seemingly realistic areas.