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tv   Discussion on Chronic Absenteeism in School  CSPAN  January 9, 2025 2:34pm-3:41pm EST

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post to the wall street journal editorial boat -- board is what size of american military do we need to do that? america made a series of commitments during the cold war undergirded by defense spending between 6% and 12% depending. it made additional commitments during the war on terror. what size military do we need if we are going to have basis in syria and robust presence in europe and basis and military forces and africa to fight terrorists there and a force that can fight iran in the middle east and -- >> we are here today to talk about two big fixing topics in education right now, one being student disengagement and the other being chronic absenteeism. they are related in a lot of ways but they are not perfectly
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overlapping. student disengagement is a lot of problems beyond kids missing school and they miss school for a lot of reasons other than being disengaged. part of why we are here today is to talk about what that relationship is and isn't. how do we think about getting students more engaged. when we talk about disengagement, we will be anchored by a new report from my colleague where they have identified interesting differences among other things between what tim greater say about how engaged they are and what the parents think the 10th graders believe about being engaged in education. we will have a panel that will join me in a second. i will do quick introductions so they can jump right in. we will have jenny anderson moderating the discussion, she is a journalist and the
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co-author of a new book, "the disengaged teen." her co-author rebecca winthrop, she is a senior fellow here at brookings. then we have sonia, who has been the ceo of baltimore city public schools for almost a decade at this point. we have the chief earning officer at transcend and the author herself of a recent book on how communities can design thriving learning environments. and then we have net malka's. he's been doing yeoman's work in collecting data on student absences and analyzing the data. i think we will see some of the data in a few minutes. some quick housekeeping notes before handed off.
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first, after we hear from panelists, i think we will have a good 15 to 20 minutes of audience q&a. if you are here we will have microphones around, and if you are not here, feel free to email your questions and we will check the email account or on x. if you are here, you can also tweet us. if we have introverts in the room. [laughter] right after the panel we will have a reception and there will be copies of jenny and rebecca's book available and i'm sure they will be happy to sign that copy. thank you for coming and i will handed off to jenny. [applause] >> why don't you all join me?
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thank you also much for being here. i'm really looking forward to this conversation. we will get into four issues, we will frame the problem, the issue, the challenge, the scope, what are we rebounding from and we will look at what is causing it -- spoiler alert, not just covid. we will look at strategies working and not working. what can we leave in the heap pile of history? and then we want blue sky thinking and really dream about if we can rearchitect the system and get rid of big obstacles holding us back, what would it look like? can you kick us off and scope the problem for us, where are we now? >> glad to be here, i've been tracking the pandemic fallout
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since the pandemic began and this is the tail end of that. i was hoping to track phonic absenteeism as an antidote, at cocktail parties where i was the think of with the bad news because we were going to turn this chronic absenteeism problem around quickly but i am still the stinker at the cocktail party. on chronic absenteeism first, on the basics, it is the percentage of k-12 students that miss 10% of the school year for any reason. all those things are important. it's different from truancy. how much have you missed school at all? the reason is important together that his school is good, school benefits students and when they miss a lot of it they miss out on some of those benefits. we know chronic absenteeism is an important indicator because the students that meet at are missing about 18 days a year.
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that's at least one day every couple of weeks. it can be bunched up or spread out but we know on average it's associated with some bad effects if you are chronically absent in younger years you are much less likely to read on time at grade three. in middle school you're more likely to struggle academically. in high school it's one of the greatest predictors of whether you will graduate on time. it is some of the soft skills that take you through college or the workforce. people say half of life is showing up, that really is part of this deal. i will add consistently to it. we have data, the tracker was updated yesterday again. every time estate state drops a new data file with district level chronic absenteeism data we fold it in. we have some here, it's not
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showing up beautifully because i did not put enough contrast but to give you a sense of the scope of the problem, pre-pandemic, i think the most reliable data we have is 2018 and 19, it was right around 15% and it is important to understand it was incredibly stable across those two years. in 2020 we lost the last several months of the school year. 21 we had closures, 22 we had astoundingly high chronic absenteeism, it jumped about 90% across the board. i think it's important to tag on, i spent a lot of time, got into the business tracking school closures and it mattered for this but just on the margin. this isn't school closures that cost chronic absenteeism, it's the pandemic that caused the jump. i will give you a little caution for the last two school years, we don't have all the data from all the states, including for
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2023, looking at you, texas. i want to say these are provisional numbers but the ark is not going in the direction we need it to. it's not coming down fast enough for -- fast enough. there are two ideas we need to hold in her hands at the same time to understand what happened. you can look at the tracker but if you look at high achievement districts and low poverty districts, which are separate things that overlap a lot. before and after the pandemic they had lower chronic absenteeism than their low achieving, high poverty counterparts, that is true. disadvantaged district have more chronic absenteeism. over the pandemic, the percentage increase, how much they increased, was right at 90% for both of them.
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the amount of change is incredibly widespread. it is sort of one thing that happened in a way we rarely see in education data that affects across the board. i think it's important, you can sort of see it through here that we had stable behaviors as far as attendance. during the pandemic we had a lot of things change and this is one of them. stable behaviors on froze. i think they are still moving around and i think the question that keeps me up at night is where are we going to re-freeze them a win are the habits going to settle into a new normal and it's looking like it's settling with provisional numbers should have is worried. >> can you take us through your own to strict, baltimore county -- what was your normal, where are you now? maybe dip into the question, are you feel for -- fearful this is
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the new normal? >> first so i don't get in trouble, it is baltimore city and not baltimore county. >> apologies, my fault. [laughter] >> but tonat's point, baltimore city like districts that serve large numbers of young people coming from high poverty neighborhoods always had a challenge and a focus on chronic absenteeism, similar to the pattern outlined, he went from hovering around 30%, we started around the third of students not coming and we got close to 70%. i have other urban colleagues who got over 70%, closer to three quarters of young people coming out of the pandemic being chronically absent. in baltimore city what that
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means is we know young people who are not chronically absent are twice as likely to be proficient in reading and language skills. we know young people that are not chronically absent are three times as likely to be proficient in mathematics. so when we use the term that showing up counts, it does count. even controlling for everything else, just being at school and coming regularly means you are more likely to be on grade level. what that looks like an baltimore city, even at our youngest grade levels, a lot of times folks to give chronic absenteeism or young people missing school as a high school issue. in baltimore city, our pre-k and k students have some of the highest chronic absentee rates
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in the whole school district. when we look at our data, our pre-k student who is not chronically absent, who attends at least 90% of the time is probably, and i think it's close to 15 times more likely to not only score higher on the kindergarten readiness assessment we have but more likely to be on grade level at grade three. it's not as if this is a one-time impact. it has impact over the trajectory of a young person's career. as we went through the pandemic in baltimore city, we had been watching the number go down and this year, special for today, i looked at some aware error data points are, we are now just in the midst of this school year again to the point made earlier, just now this year on track to
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be back where we were in terms of chronic absenteeism before the pandemic. that is still close to or just over a third of young people. this question of what do we need to be adjusting, what needs to happen in order to get more young people going to school regularly is a long-term issue, it's not a one-year thing, come back from the pandemic and we fix it and move on. it really does have real, on the ground implications for teaching and learning and life outcomes. >> if you have pre-k and k, you have a big spike there, and a big spike in teens, you need extraordinarily different strategies. did you want to add anything? >> it's a great point. often times we will talk about the grade distribution, sort of like the nike symbol. pre-k and k it is high and then
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it dips down by second and third grade and then it starts to rise up through high school. the other thing to note about the change during the pandemic was imagine the nike swoosh and then imagine someone jumps. it's not that it went up in high school and not in canada guarding, -- kindergarten, the entire district lifted so we saw it spread out. it's settling higher at the lower end. >> thank you for ruining the nike swoosh for me. [laughter] >> let's dive into this report, you had incredible findings. talk us through what you found out about students. what are students saying about their experience at school and how do you think that relates to the issue of chronic absenteeism. >> you are underselling yourself, with the nike swoosh,
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ruining brands. [laughter] one of the things that is often the second, third, fourth or fifth thing on the agenda is often to ask young people how is school? when we see this big headline, chronic absenteeism, we often are not thinking what's going on with the kids? we go to lots of different solutions. when you ask kids, which we have, when you ask them what is going on, my goodness will they tell you and give you a br eadth of information. we have a survey where we ask students along a -- along a range of dimensions, do you feel you can make your own decisions in school, does your opinion matter, how much time do you spend formulating your own
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opinion? do you get the partner with people you want to work with in school? you get to choose some projects? a range of different questions that give us an understanding about something that's really important, which are the experiences and people are having. often when we talk about school we primarily focus on what are the outcomes kids are achieving but we are not thinking about what are the experiences enabling those outcomes and expenses are the learning activities, the habits, the ways of being at school. when you ask young people how is school going, they will tell you i'm not engaging in things that are going to help me today, tomorrow or in the future. i'm really bored. aunt i don't really see a purpose for being here. kids will tell you when you ask them what is going on. the report, i found it so helpful to think about student engagement along modes of
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engagement. we've got students -- i didn't know if you wanted to talk about this -- we have students in the explore mode, a small percentage of students experiencing school in ways where they are able to ask questions and make decisions about how they learn and spend their time. there we have a really big chunk of students that are the achiever. students we might describe as i might be engaged cognitively in school, i'm not a behavior challenge, i get my homework and, and if they get a's the system says they are doing great. on the tail end of that we have students who might be in a very different mode where they are getting very disengaged. they might be passive, they might be cognitively or
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emotionally disengaged and that, while it's not a perfect overlap is one of those drivers for chronic absenteeism. there's really a relationship between the experiences young people are having and the kinds of modes of engagement they can get in. if we can understand those things as being wed, that gets us to a place where we can think about solutions holistically. >> one of the most startling stats to meet in that report is less than four so -- 4% of kids in middle and high school get the chance to feel like they are really engaged in learning. it really is not happening at the rates we need. rebecca, tell me about the parent angle. to parents have any idea how engaged their kids are in learning and let's bring it back to how related do we think this is to not showing up? >> i'm going to give you guys a
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few steps, you can find more details but i was really surprised when together with my co-authors, how stark the difference was between what you just talked about and what parents thought their kids experiences were. when parents have a good sense of what's going on with their kids, when they are younger. we tracked third through 12 grade. third grade, 75% of kids say i love school you ask them that. by the time you get to 10th grade, is 25% of kids. which to me is perhaps the saddest statistic of the entire research enterprise. i think it's sad for many reasons.
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how could we kill the love of school, for something kids are naturally born to do, which is to learn? and this is not a national priority. people don't really care if kids don't like school and i think that's awful actually. we should care that kids don't like school because how kids feel about school has a huge bearing on if they show up at school and also how they do and how they learn. parents, they know in third grade, they are more or less on par, does your kid love school, more or less they know. they know that kids love school less as they go on but they think it just goes down a little bit. by 10th grade, 65% of parents say my kids love school. versus only 26%. then you have about 29% of 10th
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graders saying they are interested in what they learn. and parents of 10th graders say 71%, my kids are interested in what they learn. 33% of 10th graders say they get to develop their own ideas in school, think about that for a moment. only a third of kids in high school say they get to develop their own ideas, what's the point of school if they don't get to develop their own ideas? you have 69% of parents saying they do. to me this shows that parents are in the dark and it's not their fault. it's because parents are going off of the feedback loops schools are giving them, which is grades. grades only tells a piece of the story. you do see absolutely grades dipping when things are a big problem. you can talk more about this. but it doesn't pick up the type
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of visible disengagement that jenae was talking about, when kids are in passenger mode, they are showing up and doing the bare minimum but they are not emotionally or cognitively engaged and that can go on for a long while. but if it lasts too long kids eventually start looking for other things to entertain themselves. to me, chronic absenteeism is a symptom of disengagement. >> i want you to dig in on one point, which is parents can't help a problem they can't see. they are not seeing a big problem so that is a problem. tell us briefly before we move onto strategies, what happens when parents and schools are on the same page and working together to support student engagement? >> my colleague emily and i have been leading a global network on
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family and school engagement and we've done a lot of investigation on this topic and we know when parents and teachers and school leaders have strong relational trust, so if they are rowing in the same direction and communicating and talking about things they all care about, those schools are 10 times more likely to be improving against achievement outcomes alongside mental health and teacher retention numbers. we really want to make sure we are bringing parents into this equation. >> this is a nice segue into strategies which clearly are going to get into relationships, the relationships parents have two schools, students have to school, teachers have to school. i would love to come to you, strategies. what is working, what have you tried, what is not working and what is working? >> i think that's the heart of
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the issue. i want to build off of this theme of relationships because what we are seeing, just to verify what you are saying is the schools that have the most cohesive cultures, that have the most fluid school climates, meaning there's not tons of disruption, not lots of chaos, are the ones that are making the most rapid progress along many continuum and that's an important piece. yes it is chronic absenteeism but also achievement. when we look at some of the characteristics of things working, for us, a lot of the focus that's been most successful has been making sure we are a differentiated strategy. pre-k and k focus, we've seen that community engagement specialists who come around and
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look at wraparound services particularly in districts that have large numbers of young people coming from poverty, one of the things we see is parents in large part are not always sitting home because of one thing. you don't not bring your child to school for one reason. the ability to connect on things like employment, on health care, on housing assistance, things you can't expect a third grade teacher to do but this engagement specialists has time to do and make a difference. it also begins to build relationships with home and families where you can have honest discussions about actually it is important to be in school every day. we don't often like to talk about it but post-pandemic what we've we don't often like to talk about it, but post-pandemic we have seen a rise in not only the young people, but families
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saying, does it really matter if we are in school every day? how do we have those conversations as a larger community around the importance of being in school every day? in order for those conversations to stick, at least in the community i serve, relationships is what gives you the right to say actually, when it is raining is not a great time to say let's just stay home today. pre-k is not just a playgroup. it is a laying the foundation for some newfound -- newfangled term called executive functioning that allows kids to develop processes. what we are seeing in the early grades is those kind of partnerships. in the younger grades, it is listening to young people. one of the things that they told us, particularly in places like baltimore city, is the ability to generate income, to know you can get a job is going to pull young people away from something
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they don't see the connection. one of my favorite examples of this is in one of our high schools. i met a young man in one of our career tech programs. through the construction program, they are renovating and abandoned property, which we have too many others in baltimore city. it's right across the street from the high school. the young man's eyes lit up as he was showing me through his work in carpentry in the school. he was a very frank about the exchange occurring. like, yes, to get through that math class, that history class, i know i get to come across the street and work on this house and that gives me joy. i think that when we talk about relevancy we forget that for young people being part of a community is belonging. it does not mean you have to
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have a hands-on activity in the middle of calculus. it means, do i have adults working together that are able to channel what i feel like is important with this thing called school. a community can do that. this young man is telling me, i don't feel different about algebra. i'm not thrilled about it. but, do you know what? going to algebra allows me to do what i really love doing and i get credit for it. it's not just extra. i get credit for it. we have to look at what time counts as learning time. is it is only see to time, only occurring at one point in a traditional school day, we have a generation of adolescents that now haven't tasted what it feels like to be free from the encumbrances. that with both families and
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young people looks very different now. that is part of what we are seeing, where we can make those connections in tangible ways. yes, relationships. but, relationships that make sense in the daily realities of families and young people. >> i want to jump in a little on that. i will mix metaphors, but i think it makes sense. we both have problems with the throw and catch of this and a chicken and the egg problem at the same time. we have a lot of work to do on the engagement front, particularly in high school. that is catching. we want to make sure we can receive children back so they are more welcome after pandemic disengagement. it is much harder to do because we have a lot of kids that are already more disengaged as evidenced by chronic absenteeism. you mentioned, we needed to be able to have tough conversations with parents because part of
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this is, well, we need to make the environment more engaging. that's true. but if you have some kids that are disengaged, and sometimes you can't talk about what is the sort of taboo. we need families to pitch in and engage kids with school. i think we are only dealing with half the problem. i don't think we can fix the problem until we work on both the catch and throw. it is also chicken and the act. if they aren't in we are working backwards. it's tough out there. >> i want to come to you guys. you do incredible research. you do research and development for community led design. you listen to communities and students. a lot of what you hear is about what we are hearing, relevance, experience, engaging experiences.
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this is very much about trust. i want you to jump in and tell us may be by telling parents to show up can be tricky. what is the historical context here and the opportunity? >> i will do that through three other points, but i promise i will get there. everybody in the audience, raise your hand if i get the answer. let me put these two things in context. what did you say, throw and catch? >> yes. >> think of throw and catch and the field in which the throwing and catching happens. that is what we are focused on that we don't often talk about. we don't always talk about the field in which the ballgame is happening. my colleagues and i do a lot with school design. what is the actual thing we are asking, pushing?
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the thing that we wanted to come to has to be worth coming to. letting schools that we have to often walk and chew gum at the same time. we can't shut the doors with rnd and make a whole new school that is all perfect because we have to teach young people. we need these strategies. we need to be telling parents, rain is not an excuse. you have to bring your kid to school to learn to read. we have to think about the actual design and structure of school. let me talk about what i mean by that. you are all looking down at phones, looking at chairs. the thing that your phone and chair has in common is it is a designed experience. often we take for granted that school is a defined -- designed experience. we think it dropped down as a virtue of natural law and now kids go to the bus and start at 7:30 and end at 4:00, working together in age batched groups.
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that structure was helpful for a certain time. it got lots of people in school. lots of basic literacy. that's really important and those things really matter so i don't want to denigrate or downplay that. but that structure and design is for a time that is not quite exist anymore. we aren't in factories. we are doing a lot of field work. young people are going into jobs and professions we cannot even dream of today. school really does need to be designed in ways that will enable them to learn in ways that are relevant. i could have used hands-on calculus, to be honest. that would have kept me engaged. but i see your point. what we think about is the concept of, how do you go around and do that? i want to tell a story of a high school in north dakota.
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we worked on across the country with all different government models. there is a school district in the prairies of north dakota and in that community something profoundly special is happening. the school leader there had a group of seniors. the seniors were under credit because they were disengaged and chronically absent. they weren't going to graduate. this was february of their senior year. in north dakota, it's a state where they had a little bit of freedom and context to make different decisions about how learning could happen. through work with transcend, with knowledge work, through borrowing and adapting practices that have been proven and tested elsewhere they came up with a model of learning called the studio model. it allowed young people and teachers to come up with eight week long effectively independent studies that were interdisciplinary.
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math, social studies, history. there was one young person that was a senior. he said, do you know what? english class was a good map to me. -- knapp --nap to me. the thing that kept him in school was the studio model where he got to learn blacksmithing and make horseshoes for his family farm and coat racks in these types of things that farmers in his community need. he thought, that's really cool. i want to do that. and you are telling me i can get a hundred $50 or 250 dollars or more doing blacksmithing work? incredible. you are telling me that if i get a trade here i can make more than that, even more if i were to leave school tomorrow?
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this new eight week structure where this young person got to ask what if i got out, what do i want to do, what do i want to try? we often lose the fact that school is a place for practice and trying and we turn it into a space of performance. these studios allow young people to practice and try new things. he got into blacksmithing and decided i want to go into the trades. this was a 15-year-old that was saying, i could go anywhere and work for a wage under the table. i do not need to stay in school. this is not helpful. there are so many stories in that district like that because they decided, we need to do school differently. we need to do high school differently. instead of kids getting off the bus and from 8:30 until 3:30 doing the standard thing let's switch this and design a model to enable deeper customization, to your point about differentiation, that will
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enable young people to make choices for themselves. what we are seeing is that their attendance is now at 99%. they are a small district. so they weren't getting as chronically absentee but they were having students severely under credit. this year they have none of that. they came up with this model, this approach to solve a real, tangible problem in front of them, students that could not graduate because they were absent so much. sometimes we have to think about the design and the field in which we are throwing and catching. i think it is one of the real missing pieces. it is complicated for us, but we we are doing these strategies. >> we have throwing, catching, and the field. we will move to the spectators, the parents, coming to rebecca. i want to dig into the role of parents in all this. parents often feel like they don't actually have a lot of of
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influence or control. tell us about the brilliant book you wrote. >> i 100% agree with the intervention, the catch. we need to rethink the ways in which the system serves young people. i do not think we are going to get out of the chronic apogee is a problem -- chronic absenteeism problem by just shoving kids into school. talk to any district leader and they are at their wits end. they are pretty million things. absolutely we need to rethink how the system catches kids and shift the system around so it better serves kids. and it puts on the table the question of the throat. -- throw.
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what are parents roles and the expectations we have of kids? it has become a taboo issue. we have done three years of research for our new book "the disengaged team" -- teen" looking at kids and parents particularly in adolescent years around this issue of disengagement. the issue is, we have to be careful because of his stream. in the u.s. has a long history of blaming parents, largely for parents and parents of color and that's about history. we don't want to repeat that. it does not mean we can't have the expectation that every kid should go to school. we absolutely need to have that expectation. from all of our discussions with parents, and it is really parents of adolescents. i would be curious for you to fill in the gaps about kids in pre-k. but parents of adolescents it is
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having high expectations and absolutely about tone. we have talked about that. you cannot go around blaming parents. every parent we have talked to is like, i've got it, i got it. our kids need to be in school. you don't need to tell me my kid needs to be in school. they are not going. they are not going. they are adolescents. what do you want me to do? we know that from years of research really the only way to get to the solution is to bring the families in as partners. to do that, you cannot go around -- really it is all about tone. think about how you talk to your own kids if you really want them to partner with you on something. it is invitational language. it is sitting and listening. it is building a relationship of trust. to say, what is going on? this is the expectation. kids need to be in school. this is why it is good for them. we can talk through it. it is what parents are waiting
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for really. >> do you want to add something about the book even though you are a moderator, a co-author? what you want to pitch in? this question of parents? >> you threw me for a loop. a couple things strike me. we were shocked at the number of -- i think, really stepping back, we were really shocked at the number of kids that don't feel safe in school, that don't feel like they belong in school, that don't feel capable in school. that don't feel like they could find a path to success in school. that's clearly a school design problem. and we were also surprised at, between school design and parents, how easily it could be turned around. not silver bullet, not in a day, but this is a problem we can solve. parents have an incredible ability to help shape excitement around learning and an attitude
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towards learning at a mindset towards learning. that can make a difference. we only have five minutes. i really want to get to the blue sky thinking because i want everybody to leave with a few ideas they can take away to say, this is what, if we had no barriers, no obstacles in our way, what would you like to happen? what would you like to see happen today to get more kids back in the classroom? >> first, i want to say, we are getting more kids back in the classroom. >> even more. >> that's true. but i just like -- to say it is an intractable issue, the chronic absentee rate went from 68% after the pandemic and declined 20% in two or three years. so to say it is impractical -- intractable or it is not moving, we need our own sense of agency
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and from a district leader perspective if we can think of time in schools differently. what does it mean to have time in learning? the unit, how do we measure what learning time really looks like and where learning time occurs? because that su ofm the attractiveness of engagement is being able to learn in different ways. we just had a snow day. mom confession. myq kid that was so excited to not have any school was on a zoom call for three hours prepping for mock trial. she let me know why she was thrilled she did not have to be there, but somehow this kid with five other kids and no adults on the call is digging deeply into legislation, cases, case law,
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because there was an activity that made sense and was occurring not within some confined way. if i had one big push i would say, we need to think more flexibly about time and place and what constitutes actual learning. >> i will tell you, i am a skunk at the garden party, not the biggest blue sky. but one of the think i am looking forward with bringing down chronic absenteeism rates is our call for state leaders to make sure this is a number one priority. we put out the 50% challenge with education trust and attendance works. that is where states are committing to cut their chronic absenteeism rates by 50% over five years. that would be to aspire to do a little better than before the pandemic. i would call folks to pony up. >> we have two minutes.
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you and rebecca have to go fast. >> two things. one, i would give parents a guide to questions aligned with some of the questions we found when we asked students about experience. ask them at dinner or in the morning. these questions help you have deep conversations. they cannot do anything they don't know about and they have to know what to ask in order to learn. two, every school community across the country will have a school design team to help them do deep community driven work to reimagine learning. >> rebecca. >>janae took mind, so i will come up with a new one. in our new book we have an entire parent toolkit for parents to know -- it's great. i'm glad you took the point. to help guide them on what they can't do at home and how they can talk with schools about their kids disengagement. there is a lot they can do.
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so my new one would be, anything that we can do what help, as families, or in the school building to promote student autonomy and agency, all of the stories that foretold a bar because kids were -- that were told our because kids were given a lot of autonomy. just a little bit more. a little bit more autonomy and agency to specifically try and apply their academics. i think anything that does that, i do not think there is one silver bullet but that is what i would say you need to do. >> reimagining time and place, putting state leaders under the gun, 50% challenge and i love your chronic absenteeism calculator, very cool.
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we have a line in our book that we will clog. discussions are for adolescents what cuddles are to infants, necessary for brain development. students need more agency and to feel they have a reason for being there. it needs to be more relevant, more tied to the real world. the construction and studio example was powerful. we will wrap it up there and then do some q and a. can we have a round of applause for our fabulous panel. we have a microphone going around the room. who has a question? i need a green sweater, please. -- in the green sweater, please. >> i'm a high school teacher. i have four high school students here. we have been discussing the topic on and off. i like that you talk about lots
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of stakeholders like , what does the field look like, throw and catch. who are the throwers, who are the catchers? the catchers are the students. are we paying attention to them? we are in a different generation of history and human development. these students come up whenever we are throwing to them, are they interested in catching or are they just letting go or are we pushing them away? i think there are so many questions and very little answers. but i will say one thing. to study the humans that we are throwing things to because we are the catchers. i don't see here mentioned the stakeholder as a teacher. what are the teachers doing? the curriculum. what are the outcomes? what do we want them to walk away from high school with?
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28 credits in d.c., 21 credits in other states to graduate. what are those credits look like? are they owning those learnings? are they part of assigning those outcomes? i love the fact that you mentioned. project-based learning. there are so many points. somebody has to put it together to include the main catchers, the students. >> who else? >> my name is scott goldstein with a dc-based teacher efficacy and teacher retention organization. a few things we have been working on including flexible schedules, the time and place of the day allowing student enrichment giving more time back to teachers. community schools, which
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baltimore is an exemplar of in the country and closing experience gaps. one thing we advocated for your last year that yeezy is starting to put in place it on micro grant program. schools that don't have -- that d.c. is starting to put into place as a micro grant program to get money directly to teachers who want to run really enriching project-based learning, field trips, other expenses. with all these things, one thing that gets in the way -- and this happened in the pandemic -- we look at students that are really far behind in reading and math and say, you just need more time in reading and math and it further disengages the students read even though it is critical for them to get that. we put in place strategies like high impact to drink and then they are missing out on things that are a hook for them to come to school, project-based learning, vocational education. how do we manage the fact that
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we aren't putting so much scrutiny on the students that are furthest behind that we aren't actually disengaging those students further. >> i will go to rebecca first because this came up in the book and it is a great point. rebecca: it is a recommendation in our report which is out of care and love, parents, family members, caregivers, as well as schools, take away extracurriculars and enriched agent take -- agentic learning experiences when kids begin to struggle academically. one example. arts, music, dance, drama. this is a nationally representative survey in the u.s.. kids that get straight as, 60's -- 60% of them are involved in arts enrichment. kids that bring home straight ds
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half of that, 30%. we know from all of our research on student development that when kids are involved in something they are interested in they do way better in school. they show up. they get excited. it is energizing. they feel like they have an identity. they feel a positive association. we were talking about how beforehand they should be part of the campaign. do not take away extracurriculars when kids struggle academically. >> what about kids that are really misbehaving? how can we then reward them? it feels like the wrong message. >> some of it is attaching reward to what should be essential components of learning. he doubled down on doing what a lot of independent schools do, building club time into the
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school day. it's not extra. what are other ways of doing that? what other young people told us is having more flexible for caty . even some of our entrance criteria high school felt the same thing some low achieving schools found. if you create days within the school year where young people have a young morning for half a day to just go to the extra teachers -- to the teachers where they need extra help, they learn more and have more time to catch up. but it requires administration. we have to look more creatively at scheduling. we had aha moments from teachers and principals that were like,
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we always thought of that as extra time. but having one day a quarter where students can make of work during the school day and get to their job after has changed how young people feel about that. this piece about having club opportunities during the day i think sends the signal. we used our new maryland daughters to double down on this. one of the things we knew is young people coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to have instrumental music, visual art. we doubled down with community advocates. i agree with you. i think there is a minimalist approach, a deficit approach to young people that are behind that is stripping them of everything. when all of the science, frankly, everything we know about youth development is that itlly eds to be increased.
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i agree with you. i think it is a policy decision. i think it's a budget decision and i think it is a willingness to disrupt "how things have always gone." >> may i add? i love these points so much because it is all of the zande design question. what i am hearing if you also designed how the school day felt and that is very real. now let's apply that in a slightly different space. if we are working on the 100-year-old schedule we have been given you have reading, math. you have to get on grade level. but it is a choice. we can structure school in a slightly different way where you aren't going in age-based cohorts so you are off grade level if you get a certain grade. it could be you are grouped on ability level and moving through your school day based on ability, unlocking new opportunities. you might be flying in bass and
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really struggle in reading. you might be in small group doing advanced calculus etc. in math, but really need reading help. instead of a saying, you are behind in reading it is like this is where you are and you can grow and get better. i want to add that long term, these are absolutely necessary things we are doing here in the short run and in the long run we can reimagine and rethink the design of the thing so we aren't operating from the beginning with the deficit-based approach. >> and this is happening a shift from competition -- competency based education. it will free the opportunity to be more innovative about design. it will require leadership and buy in from parents who often resist these innovations because they don't know what is coming and nobody take the time to explain it with them. >> and, if we are honest because
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we have botched them before. parents are like, we are doing that again. you did the whole pbl thing and now my kid can't read. >> to add one thing, there is a time dimension you are referring to. short run and long-run. we have to put the redesign blue sky thinking on a track that can go over a long-term period, but it takes a long time and doing it quickly is a good way to do it wrong. but, there is a chronic absenteeism crisis. we have to be clear eyed about what we have to get done, on what schedule, and what it might mean for success. >> it is interesting to think about five-year development plans like a lot of companies do. thinking short-term priorities, get kids back to school, and also, the five-year plan.
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a question in the back, please. >> thank you. i want to, to be provocative, challenge the premise we have a chronic problem with absenteeism. i think usually in the room i hold the highest credentials. i was the valedictorian of absenteeism at my school. i was the worst behaved to student, i was told, in the school's 200 year history. like you said, rebecca, absenteeism is a symptom of disengagement, absolutely true. disengagement is a symptom of a broken system. the broken system has three pillars. we have the incentives, the inputs, and the outputs. the incentives were designed with over 100 years ago, which you alluded to, jenee. you mentioned to dr. corey steiner. we work with him and he is awesome. but point is, if the system doesn't create incentives that lead to learning and if educators have never been afforded an opportunity to
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understand the science of how students learn and students are asked to learn but never taught how to learn, we have a factory that keeps generating failure and disengagement. if you are asking me to go back without changing the variables of the system you are asking me to go back to increase my anxiety, depression, and possibly my suicide unless you fix the system. the talk has to be systemwide rather than system -- symptom-based and i would put engagement in the symptom category. does that make sense? nat: when you look at the nature of the change in crops that -- chronic absenteeism over the past four years it is pandemic related, a spike during the pandemic. part of my argument that this is a change in behavior that is not system based is a lot of parents were sent a lot of messages. a lot of students were sent a lot of messages over the pandemic that it is dangerous to come to school and if you do, someone may die. that will change your behavior. our messages to come back to
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school have been somewhat less powerful. which is probably appropriate. but, the affects their is i think we have changed behavior. and it is certainly not the case that both things can't be true at the same time. >> you just said the thing i was going to say. i do want to say that, i agree that is a really nice reframing that i agree with. one of the reasons jenny and i wrote the book is to figure out what -- two nat's point about the short term thinking, what can parents and teachers do today as system transformation is happening? i have a bunch of colleagues at the center for universal education and every single one of us, no matter our work stream is focused on system transformation. it will take time. it is a long-term prospect.
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i think there are particular shifts in behaviors we can do today. i think there is a lot of evidence teachers can embrace autonomy support of teaching practices regardless of what the school leader does, in the classroom, without changing curriculum, without changing disciplinary procedures or processes that does give kids more time and agency and boost engagement and interest. >> and academic achievement. >> when you do that, results follow. i would absolutely encourage folks to look at the work of john marshall reeve who has tested this in the u.s. and across 13 other countries in randomized controls and trials comparing classroom to classroom within schools. it's quite impressive. there is one. at one is what parents do at home, what caregivers and families do at home. there is a lot what they can do shifting how they talk about school. thus, what are your grades? more, what did you learn?
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jenee: i 100% the system work. that is why we think so much about redesign long-term. i have learned in life that systems level work also needs on the ground short wins. you can be running at a 100, 150 year old problem like i am tired i need a win in september. i don't want us to cut ourselves off from the idea that we have to solve a long-term systems issues but there are real kid right now that need to learn to read and needed to get in school and we need to create short wins too. i think we can do both. but systems change requires short wins. we have to get them. we won't get them if the kids aren't in school. we can't design anything if they aren't in school. i respect that and i pushed to say we hold both in that way. nat: and, a psa that school is
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nice. it's great to go to school. i love lots of schools that are great places to go to every day and i have faith that most american public schools are good places to go. i want to make that nice and plain. we can talk about marginal improvements. but we don't want to come off as the saying it's just a factory and it is drudgery. that's not the case. jenee: dr. cory snyder, one of his favorite lines is a school is fine. but our kids deserve better than fine. and find is what i lot of young folks are getting. >> and i love the theme of elevating the problem. let's get more people, outside of education, outside of these storied halls of brookings and everything. we need to not to be ok with these numbers. we need to not be ok with
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studies that kids don't like school. it needs to not be, well, all teens hate school. the consequences of teens hating school is worse that it has ever been. we need them to care. there is something really important about elevating this. i know in these circles, these are issues you are all grappling with. but i have very struck at a national level about how little we are making this a priority. that's another issue. and we probably have time for one last question. who is my favorite child? this one. >> people who advocate book bannings invoke parental rights. is it safe to presume banning books will actually decrease people coming to school because they don't feel included? do parental rights people have an answer to school absenteeism? rebecca: i love this question. who wants it?
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i'm so glad i don't have to answer. i'm looking at you. dr. santelises: i actually think there is common ground. i think that regardless of what people think about a particular series of books or anything else , this idea of developing a mobilization around having kids in schools in meaningful ways, engaged it's something that across ideologies, aisles, everything else can occur. i don't think this -- god, it's a lovely space to be in. it doesn't have to be polarizing. i think that this piece about getting young people to school. -- if you look at the work matt has been doing, he's been doing
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it across the ideological spectrum because hopefully we still have a core national consensus, i want to believe, that school is still something we desired in the promotion of our democracy, however broken it may feel at times. this country was founded on the idea that at some point, more educated citizens is actually a good thing. so i actually don't think that this one, out of the many topics, has to be a partisan topic. it's a way to bring people together, regardless of how you feel about whether you should be teaching toni morrison or william shakespeare. if you come to school, we can actually read both. i hear what you are saying, but i do not think this is a partisan issue and i have never experienced it as a partisan issue. people disagree on some of the remedies.
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but, i don't think this is an issue in education where there needs to be any splintering. rebecca: that was beautiful. we can wrap up. thank you, everybody, for being here. thank you to our pinellas. -- our panelists. we will sign books after if anybody wants to come back. >> earlier today, family members of the late president jimmy carter gathered at washington national cathedral in d.c. for a funeral service with eulogies from president biden and others. all living former presidents were in attendance.

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