Where are all the kids?

What to expect:

5 min read

This week, we dive into one of the largest epidemics facing K-12 in the past 5 years - chronic absenteeism. Here’s what can help:

• Tech Talk: Parent communication for the 21st century

• Surplus Scoop: Be careful - students are making fake social media accounts of their teachers!

• Brainy Bits: Absenteeism = predictable?

Tech Talk

Showing up is half the battle

For most schools, when a student is absent, a phone call or message gets sent home. This critical message ensures student safety, and helps keep everyone accountable.

But what if your school doesn’t have this? Or in secondary schools, where skipping is more common, and students find clever ways of not getting caught. In these cases, us teachers need to contact home and may even be the only one who alerts their parent/guardian.

What if there is also a language barrier between you and the parent/guardian? In multicultural nations, such as Canada and USA, this happens more than you think.

Well whether it’s about an absence or a missed assessment, TalkingPoints may be the edtech to help. Although your LMS may have parent contact built right in, very few have translation features available. And yes, you could use Google Translate, but this does not help them communicate back to you.

In the apps, teachers set up a conversation and send a link directly to the family member. When that parent/guardian clicks on it, the chat directly opens up in their app (or even just a web browser).

Here’s the cool part - you write in English as you normally would, and without any extra steps the parent/guardian receives it in one of 150 supported languages. They then reply in their language and you instantly see it in English. So your screen shows a fully English conversation, but theirs shows it all in their language. 

This allows for real time communication, builds a welcoming relationship between the teacher and family, and acts as a quick reporting tool about a missed test or absent child.

Healing this broken telephone means the chance of success is now higher for the student. The parent/guardian can now be more involved with their learning, without their child acting as a translator.

This app can be an integral tool to fight absenteeism. According to third party research, when TalkingPoints is used absenteeism rates drop by up to 15%, and grades increase by up to 12%, especially with ELL and special education students.

The best part in our opinion - this app is absolutely free for teachers. With the new school year approaching in some jurisdictions, TalkingPoints may be a key tool to include in any family welcome package as an option for parents/guardians to contact you.

Check out the Brainy Bit below to see some research on why reducing absenteeism needs to be a goal for your upcoming (or current) school year.

Surplus Scoop

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to learn more:

• These students set up fake TikTok accounts of their teachers - and it almost destroyed the school.

• This teacher’s lesson plan led to students solving a 35-year old murder case - and five other cold cases!

• 65% of parents use screen-time to calm their preschooler down, but it may lead to trouble down the road.

Brainy Bits

Making Predictions

Research has already shown that absenteeism is associated with poor academic success, high rates of long-term mental illness, later financial difficulties, and even higher amounts of criminal activity as adults.

But what if we could predict absenteeism patterns right at the start of a student’s school journey? That’s what researchers tried to find out in a very recent paper published by Wood et al. (2024).

This massive study involved analyzing data from over 62,000 UK students aged 5-13. Using this data, researchers wanted to see if a student’s early learning school ready assessment results could predict levels of absenteeism.

Many counties and districts have these assessments, including much of the UK, Canada, the USA, and several other nations. These assessments check for both basic academics (like early numeracy skills) and social skills, to evaluate if a child is ‘ready’ to join the school system. 

It’s a very useful tool as not every child is going to be ready at the age of majority - and that’s okay! But studies like this shine a different light on an often overlooked issue.

Absenteeism in this study meant that a student has been absent for at least 10% of all school days, regardless of reason. The study also tracked how many years students continued this behavior, helping rule out when a student may have just been sick more than usual.

Using regression data models from the collected info, they found that students who were deemed not ready at the time of enrollment were found to be significantly more absent. But here’s where it gets interesting - when diving into the data, researchers found three key points:

• The seeds of absenteeism, not including random disrupters like a pandemic or natural disaster, are sown early in childhood. 

• These rates shine a very bright light on inequalities in a society; marginalized communities, like ELL students and low-income families have much higher rates of absenteeism, regardless of school ready assessment results.

• School ready assessment results can act as an indicator to help identify students who are at risk of long-term disengagement.

So what do these results mean for your classroom? Take a look at any school readiness assessment results to better prep your classroom approach. Pay close attention to these specific students and do your best to keep their family in the loop along the way.

Have you seen higher rates of absenteeism in your students in recent years? How is your school handling it? Hit reply and let us know!

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References

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

TalkingPoints. (2024). Reach all of your students’ families. Retrieved from https://talkingpts.org/teachers/ 

Brainy Bits:

Wood ML, Gunning L, Mon-Williams M. 2024 The relationship between ‘school readiness’ and later persistent absenteeism. R. Soc. Open Sci. 11: 240272. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240272