No students wants to attend high school with a lot of students who do not want to be there. No one can be forced to learn something that they do not want to learn. Why not design schools for those who want to learn and let the teen rebellion occur somewhere else.
Speaking mostly of middle and high schoolers, the biggest pandemic era shift has been the number of assignments available to the students online, even in an otherwise in-person class. A decade ago, a parent would see their kid at home and know something was wrong. In 2026 the parent says, "why aren't you at first period?" and the child can plausibly say "the work's posted and I did it". Teachers know that, in a well run classroom, this can only be partially true at best. The teacher should be designing lessons that benefit from or require being in the classroom, but the parents' expectation has shifted and it will take effort to correct.
We could return to more analogue assignments and add more penalties for absenteeism, sure. My point is just that parents and students have come to expect, if not prefer, that every course can be treated as de facto "hybrid". I think this is a bigger change policy-makers appreciate.
This could really use a longer write up about some of the dilemmas schools face, where policymakers can contribute solutions, and what role other kinds of services could play. As I was reading the post, I kept wondering about transportation. Fewer than half of kids take the bus to school these days with most of the burden shifted onto parents. Busing systems have been stressed, too, with positions for drivers being hard to fill. Some famous failures in Kentucky, if I’m remembering correctly, even became an issue in their last gubernatorial election.
I completely agree! In the Bronx, high school students receive free transit passes, but some students take multiple unreliable buses to my school, resulting in an hour-plus commute. For a student already struggling with attendance, that’s a major barrier, and there seem to be few to no legitimate pathways to providing more direct transportation for them. We’ll see a student’s attendance surge when their parent starts driving them, then the parent’s schedule changes so they can’t drive anymore, and the student drops off the map. This seems to be the case even when a student enjoys their classes, has friends and good staff relationships, participates in activities, and has a future plan post high school. It’s just not enough to offset a miserable commute.
The other issue is that some older students get jobs that pay well enough that it’s hard to justify prioritizing school, especially if they have real, immediate financial need, since the future gains of education are not concrete enough.
I’d like to see more focus on helping schools provide direct transportation and school-based jobs, or just paying students to attend high school. It’s an investment in our society since we all do better when our young people are educated! (This is not to mention other specific, concrete solutions that also cost money, like daycare for siblings or students’ babies, school meals that students are actually willing to eat, etc…)
When I worked in a middle school in Jackson Heights, one of our big attendance challenges was that in several of the communities we served elder daughters were expected to care for the young kids in their families once the daughters were 10-12 years old. It’s not that the parents expected them to do it full time but that once a week or so the kid would be absent to cover for mom’s work schedule. (They’d also never get homework done because they did a lot of childcare!) We spent a lot of time connecting parents with community groups and daycares but those often weren’t flexible enough to match the demanding work schedules these moms sometimes had.
No students wants to attend high school with a lot of students who do not want to be there. No one can be forced to learn something that they do not want to learn. Why not design schools for those who want to learn and let the teen rebellion occur somewhere else.
Speaking mostly of middle and high schoolers, the biggest pandemic era shift has been the number of assignments available to the students online, even in an otherwise in-person class. A decade ago, a parent would see their kid at home and know something was wrong. In 2026 the parent says, "why aren't you at first period?" and the child can plausibly say "the work's posted and I did it". Teachers know that, in a well run classroom, this can only be partially true at best. The teacher should be designing lessons that benefit from or require being in the classroom, but the parents' expectation has shifted and it will take effort to correct.
We could return to more analogue assignments and add more penalties for absenteeism, sure. My point is just that parents and students have come to expect, if not prefer, that every course can be treated as de facto "hybrid". I think this is a bigger change policy-makers appreciate.
This could really use a longer write up about some of the dilemmas schools face, where policymakers can contribute solutions, and what role other kinds of services could play. As I was reading the post, I kept wondering about transportation. Fewer than half of kids take the bus to school these days with most of the burden shifted onto parents. Busing systems have been stressed, too, with positions for drivers being hard to fill. Some famous failures in Kentucky, if I’m remembering correctly, even became an issue in their last gubernatorial election.
I completely agree! In the Bronx, high school students receive free transit passes, but some students take multiple unreliable buses to my school, resulting in an hour-plus commute. For a student already struggling with attendance, that’s a major barrier, and there seem to be few to no legitimate pathways to providing more direct transportation for them. We’ll see a student’s attendance surge when their parent starts driving them, then the parent’s schedule changes so they can’t drive anymore, and the student drops off the map. This seems to be the case even when a student enjoys their classes, has friends and good staff relationships, participates in activities, and has a future plan post high school. It’s just not enough to offset a miserable commute.
The other issue is that some older students get jobs that pay well enough that it’s hard to justify prioritizing school, especially if they have real, immediate financial need, since the future gains of education are not concrete enough.
I’d like to see more focus on helping schools provide direct transportation and school-based jobs, or just paying students to attend high school. It’s an investment in our society since we all do better when our young people are educated! (This is not to mention other specific, concrete solutions that also cost money, like daycare for siblings or students’ babies, school meals that students are actually willing to eat, etc…)
When I worked in a middle school in Jackson Heights, one of our big attendance challenges was that in several of the communities we served elder daughters were expected to care for the young kids in their families once the daughters were 10-12 years old. It’s not that the parents expected them to do it full time but that once a week or so the kid would be absent to cover for mom’s work schedule. (They’d also never get homework done because they did a lot of childcare!) We spent a lot of time connecting parents with community groups and daycares but those often weren’t flexible enough to match the demanding work schedules these moms sometimes had.