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 uring the past three decades, Americans have struggled to restructure, reengineer, and even "reinvent" our ailing K-12 education system. Reformers have tried just about everything imaginable: more regulation, less regulation, centralization, decentralization, and even "privatization," with experiments such as charter schools, magnet schools, and outsourcing to private industry.
While grownups work overtime to fix the schools, the students are taking matters into their own hands. They are skipping school and cutting classes in record numbers.
Yet truancy—being absent without a legal excuse—and its implications have hardly been considered in our concerted effort to fix our schools. Traditionally, playing hooky signified a misguided youth who had fallen in with the "wrong crowd," or a troubled pupil taking out his or her maladjustment on the school, or a child from a "bad home," one that was loveless, drug-ridden, abusive, or otherwise lacking the "right values."
Our educational system, of course, requires all children to attend school. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mandatory attendance prevented poor families from sending their sons and daughters to work rather than school, thus enabling children to better their lot in life. Today, by contrast, many families depend on schools to look after their young so that a single parent or both parents can work. Along with the prison system, public education is one of the few remaining compulsory services in the U.S.
In poorer, less-developed nations, where more families seek an education for their children than the society can afford to supply, parents stand in line for hours and even days to enroll their children. Class size is large, group recitations common, and secondary education extremely rare. Children and their families feel so privileged to attend school that not a moment is wasted. A colleague of mine has described walking through a park in the Caribbean where young people were doing homework at night under street lamps because their homes had no electricity.
Truancy Data
The U.S. provides quite a contrast. Here, truancy is rampant among both sexes and all groups—poor and rich, African-American, white, and Hispanic. One of the largest national studies ever mounted by the federal government—the National Educational Longitudinal Study in 1992 (NELS92)—surveyed nearly sixteen-thousand high-school seniors and found that 91 percent admitted to "cutting school."
More recently, Rita Guare and I surveyed 275 secondary school students in greater depth about truancy: why, where, how often, with whom, and what happened? Using a new instrument, the Student Truancy and Attendance Review (STAR), we learned that 68 percent of high school students at all levels cut classes (while being "officially present" at school, to use British researcher Dennis O’Keefe’s term), and 38 percent cut school altogether. The STAR data show lower truancy than NELS92, probably because the latter surveyed only high school seniors whereas ours included younger students also.
The STAR data lend great credence to a rational choice theory of truancy and dispel the "child deficit" theory. Important findings include the following:
Both sexes cut. In fact, girls (69 percent) played hooky from class slightly more often than boys (67 percent) although the difference was not statistically significant. Boys (30 percent) were slightly more likely than girls (27 percent) to leave the building when cutting class. Among all students, 71 percent said that they skipped "with friends," indicating a kind of emerging truancy culture.
Truancy is common among all races, ethnic groups, and social classes. White students have higher rates (78 percent) than African Americans (64 percent) and Latinos (58 percent). Asian Americans were lowest, at 43 percent. Students with "no English in their homes" (a proxy for immigrant status) had truancy rates of 66 percent; of those with "some English" 59 percent skipped; and "all English" students had a 51 percent truancy rate.
How well are public school systems managing this crisis? Like many monopolies, not well. When students were asked about whether their schools had written rules on truancy, only 23 percent said yes, 63 percent said no, and 13 percent did not know. Did children have to make up work missed by cutting class? Only 42 percent said yes. And less than half (49 percent) of those admitting to truancy said that they were ever caught. And of those apprehended by school authorities, 64 percent indicated that the school never even notified their parents.
Punishment also was slipshod: 74 percent said that when caught they received no punishment (such as detention or staying after school to do catch-up work). Truancy carried few official consequences for most offenders.
The data suggest that missing school correlates with poor academic performance, but it is difficult to tell which way the causality runs. Students may be skipping because they are unable to grasp their lessons, or they may be doing poorly because they are not in class regularly, or they may be skipping class because the instruction is poor.
We did find that 89 percent of the heavy class-cutters and 80 percent of the most frequent truants had low and failing grades (D’s and F’s). Students with A and B+ grades were truant much less often (36 percent cut school, and 65 percent cut class at least once). Although far too many students are truant, these findings do show a relationship between skipping and academic attainment.
Truancy and class-cutting are inversely related to self-concept. Here too, however, it is difficult to tell whether a poor self-concept leads to truancy, or truancy and its effects reduce a student’s feelings of self-worth. Either way, the data show an important relationship between truancy and personal feelings.
How might we combat truancy? Students who reported having "caring teachers and friends," "supportive parents," and schools with a more "positive climate" were significantly less likely—at the .001 level—to play hooky. Such students also had a stronger self-image and were more involved in extracurricular activities than those lacking a supportive, caring home and school environment.
The data suggest that students are rational decision-makers who assess their situation and decide, much like other "consumers" or "clients," whether to "buy" or skip a unit of education (a day or class at a time). Some chronic cutters are undoubtedly troubled youth who cannot "fit into the system," but truancy is now so endemic that we must stop blaming the victim and instead reassess the nature of our monopolistic, compulsory, government-owned, government-run education system. This system reacts slowly to truancy, manages the crisis sloppily, and, most critically, sends the wrong message about who is responsible for the education of our children.
Educators and policymakers can no longer "blame the victim." Instead of acting out some social or personal pathology, schoolchildren are making a rational consumer choice, deliberately deciding which days and classes to attend.
Implications and Next Steps
The truancy epidemic clearly indicates that compulsion is a poor foundation for a quality education. Students must be committed to their own learning, with parent and community support. Government should do tasks the family and community cannot; compulsion overrides the responsibilities of family and students. When 91 percent of the nation’s high-school seniors are cutting class, something is wrong. The following changes can help alleviate this situation and give children enthusiasm about education.
1. From conscripts to consumers. Students are the schools’ clients. When kids skip these services, it is time to ask why: "You skipped my class yesterday. Did you have a personal problem, or is my course boring? Have you learned this material already, or am I teaching over your head?" Our consumer-driven culture constantly barrages us with customer surveys, yet few pollsters or educators ask students what they prefer to study and learn.
Such surveys would permit teachers to tailor courses to their students’ interests. For those who enjoy snow sports, Jack London’s White Fang might be just the thing. Those who learn best at the computer keyboard could write their own stories. This is an attitude change more than anything else. Educators should take truancy seriously and reform schools to make them more interesting. That should be obvious, but it is rarely done.
2. From crime to symptom. In a system based on conscription and compulsion, truancy is easily misunderstood. We see it as a transgression, a crime, rather than a symptom and a signal. Education begins with the family. The choice of which school to attend (public, private, religious, strict, creative, classical, or progressive) should be a matter for discussion between parents and children, as now happens in selecting a college or university. The government’s role should be to increase the variety of choices rather than restrict it.
Teachers are most directly involved in and affected by truancy. I recall that when one of my students had been missing for a few days and I asked, "Has anyone seen Jerry? Is he okay?" a student spoke up: "Yes, he was in the last class. He said that he’d ‘forgotten his homework’ and was afraid to come to class empty-handed." I said, "Go get him. Tell him that we love him, homework or no, and that he can make it up this afternoon. I don’t want him or anyone else to miss today’s reading of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, because today Scrooge gets what’s coming to him." Jerry came in, all smiles, and the lesson began.
3. From compulsion to voluntarism. In other parts of the economy, voluntarism is rapidly replacing compulsion. When parents, students, and community reclaim education as their own, "investment" in it increases. Social capital, to use the late James S. Coleman’s term, is the key to change. Social capital is the sum of interactions and support by all those in the school environment: teachers, parents, students, other relatives, and neighbors.
Research has shown that schools with positive social capital (such as Catholic schools) regularly outperform schools without it, particularly among poor, urban children. Cutting school is a rational response to a system that substitutes conscription for personal and family responsibility. Voluntarism must flourish if truancy is to be reduced and learning enhanced.
4. From regulation to civic responsibility. School attendance is best ensured by a sense of commitment, not rules and regulations. Young people should see school and learning as their "job." It builds our civic culture and prepares them for a productive adulthood. Schools do need rules and regulations on attendance, but we must recognize that such regulations alone cannot work. A sense of civic duty—a commitment to the wider culture—shifts attendance from an externally imposed obligation to an internalized, personal responsibility.
5. From requirement to privilege. Schooling is a great privilege, a chance for the learner to encounter the best ideas, skills, values, and virtues of our society. Learning is exciting and can be great fun. High truancy levels remind us that we cannot force people to learn. We can only offer the opportunity, emphasize its importance, and reward its results. In societies much poorer than ours, students queue for seats and opportunities. And in many private schools, students and families struggle to gain admission, pay the tuition, and succeed in class. We must inspire that commitment to all our schools.
6. From monopoly to mixed enterprise. Monopolies are worse than inefficient; they are ineffective. Thus our public schools should attack truancy head on: we should eliminate the very concept of truancy and the policies that enforce it. Schools would then be forced to earn their students’ (and parents’) confidence and loyalty outright, through an education that is interesting and of high quality. Defining truancy as a legal transgression gets the school off the hook and puts the stigma on the student, who must attend or break the law. Ending compulsory education in the U.S. neatly defines away truancy, challenges public and private schools to serve their customers, and returns authority and responsibility to parents.
Such a redefinition will require major changes in the structure, ownership, and incentive systems of our schools. We must shift public education from a monopoly to a mixed enterprise. Students already attend a variety of public, private, parochial, magnet, charter, and other schools. Home schooling is also increasing. Many parents and children are going directly to the World Wide Web and other sources of information. This self-help approach should both reveal and create new attitudes toward education and redirect responsibility for attendance.
7. From truancy to ownership. The time has come for reform. As Hickson noted more than thirty years ago, "children abandon schools in the second grade attitudinally and in the tenth grade physically, not because they are ‘stupid’ but because they don’t care. They have been estranged from school." Truancy is a symptom of the misalignment between state and family responsibilities, and must become a catalyst for changes and improvements. Schools and their teachers must listen to students and make education an exciting activity, something not to be missed.
Ultimately, truancy in the late-twentieth century is a problem because the law defines it as such. Birman and Natriello explain, "From an historical perspective, the problem of high school absenteeism is only as old as compulsory attendance laws. Only when school attendance is mandated does truancy become a crime. Only when school attendance becomes universal is non-attendance viewed as deviant. It is easy sometimes to forget that only in the past 35 years or so have high schools been attended by more than 50 percent of adolescents."
It is time to consider another explanation of truancy— the adverse effects of conscription and the public school monopoly on our children and their families—and act on it.
Bruce S. Cooper is Professor of Administration, Policy, and Urban Education at the Graduate School of Education, Fordham University. He is a senior researcher at Coopers & Lybrand and a research fellow of the Hudson Institute. He has published some two-hundred articles, chapters, and books on school reform, labor relations, school finance, and private education.
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