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Jean Robinson, a senior at the High School for Teaching and the Professions, speaks at a press conference Wednesday about truancy reduction.

As the new kid at the High School of Teaching and The Professions in the Bronx two years ago, Jean Robinson awoke each morning filled with dread and anxiety about going to school.

“You know, everybody has their own different cliques and I wasn’t really fitting in with any of them,” Robinson said.

A sophomore transfer, Robinson missed her old friends and began skipping school. Over the course of the 2009-2010 school year, she missed more than a month of school and, with each passing day, knew a high school diploma was further and further out of reach.

“I thought about it every day, but I just felt like I needed that extra push,” Robinson said. “I didn’t have that at the time.”

Robinson’s paltry attendance rate caught the eyes of city officials, who at the same time were launching a citywide push to raise attendance rates among students who were absent most often. They paired Robinson with a mentor who monitored her attendance and made sure she was showing up to school.

With the help from her mentor, a school guidance counselor, Robinson last year reduced her absence rate by more than 50 percent, missing just 10 days of school.

Robinson’s turnaround was touted by Mayor Bloomberg as a success story of the year-old attendance initiative called “Every Student, Every Day,” which, in addition to mentors, included letters home to parents and celebrity wake-up calls. As a result of the first year’s success, Bloomberg announced Wednesday that the city was more than doubling the initiative’s scope, from 25 schools to 50 schools with more than 4,000 students. (more…)

Last year, the city launched a campaign to reduce absenteeism with a letter home. Today, it’s following up with a phone call.

Students from 25 schools who have missed 10 or more days this year will soon start receiving early-morning wake-up calls from celebrities such as Magic Johnson and the rapper Big Boi, the city announced today. The calls, which city officials say will eventually be made to frequently absent students in all schools, mark the second phase in the city’s push to boost attendance.

The first phase, which launched in August, marshaled resources from across city agencies to target the most frequently truant students at the 25 schools. Extreme absenteeism is down at those schools, the city said today.

The attendance initiatives follow a 2009 report by Center for New York City researchers that revealed that the city’s 91 percent average attendance rate masks chronic absenteeism among a fifth of students.

The pitfalls of tardiness are explored in two pieces in the GothamSchools Community section today, coincidentally enough. Collin Lawrence, a former teacher who has been recounting his four years working at a small high school in Brooklyn, writes that no one seemed to care that few students got to school when it started.

And launching a new column, Bronx high school college counselor Brendan Lowe describes waking up at 5:30 a.m. last month to call students scheduled to take the SAT.

Lowe writes:

Crazy? Perhaps. Did we help our students? In a short-term sense, absolutely. Last year, 40 of 59 students (67 percent) failed to show up for their first sitting of the SAT, thereby wasting one of two possible fee waivers. This year, 57 of 60 students — 95 percent — actually took the test.

The city’s complete press release is below: (more…)

The city sent letters to the parents of more than 5,000 frequently absent students today, urging them to make sure their children come to school in September.

When school starts, phone calls will follow the letters, Mayor Bloomberg said today, describing the first fruits of the interagency task force on chronic absenteeism he convened in June.

Following the task force’s recommendations, the city is launching a campaign to boost attendance among the most absent students at 25 schools. Bloomberg announced the campaign, called ”Every Student, Every Day,” today at Brooklyn’s PS 345, where 91 percent of students attended on average last year.

The city’s 90.74 percent average attendance masks the fact that 20 percent of students missed more than 20 days of school last year, Bloomberg said. That figure was first reported by Center for New York City researchers in a 2009 report that called on the city to marshal the efforts of city agencies and community groups.

The 25 schools participating in the Every Student, Every Day pilot will assign volunteers from programs such as City Year, Citizen Schools, and Learning Leaders to mentor the most frequently absent 1,500 students. They’ll also host special attendance-focused parent meetings early this fall. (more…)

Inspired by a recent report that many elementary school students missed more than a month of school last year, the general welfare and education committees of the City Council just concluded a hearing about absenteeism in the city’s schools. One question that surely came up is how the Department of Education holds schools and students accountable for attendance.

The answer: not as much as it could.

In the centerpiece of the DOE’s accountability system, the school progress reports, a school’s average attendance accounts for 5 percent of its grade, the same proportion as teacher and parent surveys. The DOE chooses to base 85 percent of schools’ progress report grades on test scores because attendance on its own simply doesn’t ensure success, officials say.

“Most students do attend school regularly, but many of them do not get the outcomes we believe they should be getting,” DOE spokeswoman Maibe Gonzalez-Fuentes recently told me.

And what about accountability for individual students? Teachers can assign students failing grades for assignments they miss during an unauthorized absence. But DOE regulations don’t require students to attend school a certain amount of the time to be promoted. (more…)

Even when kids are in school, they’re not always in class, reports Bronx science teacher Ms. Rubin:

Nothing too out of the ordinary today, except reading this article made me realize that I need to do a better job of keeping up with absent students. Also, several students constantly get pulled from my class for ESL, reading, or counseling services (since they aren’t allowed to get pulled from math or English, science and social studies are the two classes they usually miss), so even if they are “here” every day, they may have only sat through one or two entire classes for the whole week. Then there are the three students I have who haven’t been in school for over a week because they can’t come back until they get caught up on  their vaccinations, and the new student who just joined my class last Friday, and the student who is in school every day but spends most of her time in the AP’s office instead of class because of behavior issues… I feel like I am constantly working with kids during lunch and after school to try and catch them up on what they missed, and I am still not doing an adequate job.

High school students are not the only ones missing school. Chronic absenteeism in the elementary grades is a major problem, too, especially in districts with a high concentration of poor and immigrant students (see chart), according to a report released this morning by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Twenty percent of kids in the city’s elementary schools missed more than a month of school during the 2007-2008 school year, researchers found while investigating whether attendance systems put into place after the death of Nixzmary Brown are catching child abuse before it becomes deadly. In some schools, more than 40 percent of students missed that much school, making them “chronically absent.” The numbers vary widely across the city, as the but also within individual zip codes, the report points out.

Why does absenteeism matter? New research shows that kindergarten — which is not mandatory in New York State — is essential to academic success. “Among poor children, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts the lowest levels of educational achievement at the end of fifth grade,” concluded a recent report out of Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty.

The Center for New York City Affairs report indicates that patterns of school non-attendance begin early in a child’s school career, said Clara Hemphill, the education reporter who was senior editor for the report (and who was also my boss for a time at Insideschools.org, the Web site she founded).

“The DOE has poured millions of dollars into reforming high schools, but this report shows that by high school much of the damage is already done,” she said.