Mon May 5, 2008 at 11:17 AMBy: imperfect attendance Best Of The Week A *hypothetical* high school with 70 percent attendance at 100 days suggests that on average students have attended only 70 days and missed 30 days of school. Or at the hypothetical school with an enrollment of 1000 students, on most days 700 students are present and 300 are absent. The old scorecards used to claim that these averages didn't represent the typical student and that somehow a few chronic truants were skewing the numbers. Although it’s true that this is an average and there may be students that have not missed any days or only a few, a substantial number had to miss a lot of school to get such low attendance rate numbers.

This is not "cooking the books," as one commentator suggests, unless the argument is that actual attendance is not taken properly (a teacher issue?). But if you assume that attendance is counted properly then this is very poor attendance and claiming that the real truth is being obscured by not considering the range will not change this sorry reality.

To get an attendance rate of 70 percent some students missed more days and some missed less. Well how many students would have to have missed more to skew the attendance rate, 10 - 20 - 50 - 100 - 200? If, at 100 days, just 200 students at hypothetical school had missed every single day and the remaining 800 attended every single day, the attendance rate would be 80 percent, instead of 70 percent. But would one say that 200 are only a few students? It is *not* just a few students skewing the attendance figures. To get an attendance rate of 70 percent (or 80) a substantial number of children must be missing or cutting on most school days. Sure - some are missing less and some are missing more - but a whole lot are still missing a whole lot of days.

Harper had a 2007 attendance rate of 74.9 percent or average days of student absence of about 44 days. Did a few Harper students skew Harper’s attendance? Apparently not. In 2007 Harper reported 662 chronic truants (!!!) and a chronic truancy rate of 54.3 percent. A little more than half of Harper's students missed 18 or more days of school. Marshall reported 410 chronic truants last year, Robeson 347, and Kenwood reported 568. Do these statistics suggest only small numbers of disconnected students in general high schools? True - the majority are attending but too many are not.

By the end of January this year, CPS reported systemwide attendance was down compared to last school year by 2.4 percent points. Tilden had the lowest year to date attendance of the general high schools - 58.4 percent and Fenger had a rate of 61.5 percent. In fact, some 17 neighborhood high schools had year to date attendance less than 70 percent. Four elementary schools - Lavizzo, Tonti, Cuffee, and Pasteur also had sub-70 percent attendance.

CPS central has not been held accountable for failure to successfully address truancy.

It does seem, as the commentator suggested however, that CPS chose its "turnaround" metrics to fit its "turnaround" picks. We should ask why that all important metric - graduation - wasn't included. Certainly there were schools that didn't meet the turnaround criteria that should have been on a turnaround list. Two high schools, not among this year's 7 schools meeting turnaround criteria have had chronically lower five year graduation rates than some of the 7 high schools meeting this year's turnaround criteria.