When Chronically Absent Students Still Graduate — Who Does It Hurt?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the long-term harm of graduating students who were chronically absent and never truly learned the material.
Key Takeaways
- It hurts the student most - A diploma without learning leaves graduates unprepared for college and career
- It hurts future teachers - The next level's teachers inherit students who lack prerequisite knowledge despite passing grades
- It devalues the diploma - When graduation doesn't require attendance or learning, the credential means less for everyone
Transcript
If we make high school diplomas worthless by giving them out no matter what, then what ends up happening is people need college to get even basic jobs.
And I saw some really alarming statistics out of DC public schools this week, and I don't want to pick on DC too much, but they have schools where the truancy rate is 88% and the graduation rate is 70%.
And the test scores are about what you would think if the truancy rate is 88%.
And, like, we've got to think about that for a second.
Like, what is going on here if 70% of students are graduating, perfectly respectable-sounding graduation rate, but most of the students are not there most of the time?
Like, the truancy is just off the charts in some of these schools.
And it turns out that, as you would expect, this has been years in the making.
Like, it's been known for years that teachers are pressured in these schools to pass kids even if they do not come to school at all.
And when kids are pushed through school and pushed through graduation and given a diploma, no matter what they do or don't do, no matter how much they learn or don't learn, and again, the standardized test scores show that kids are not learning, what happens after graduation?
Like, as an employer in that area, if you saw that a student graduated from one of these schools, they have their diploma, but it's from one of these schools that graduates people who do not attend.
Like, what are you going to do?
Well, what you're probably going to do is you're going to say you have to have a college degree to work here.
And this has been a big problem in a lot of industries where the credential inflation doesn't really match the required skills.
Like, you don't need a college degree to do a large number of jobs.
And as an employer, though, if you realize that a high school diploma is utterly worthless, like there is no guarantee that that a candidate can even read if they have a high school diploma, it's perfectly rational to say, actually, I want to see some college.
I want to see that this person has done some college because I can't trust the high school diploma.
We're pushing the cost of this onto the students rather than doing them a favor by giving them a diploma that will open doors for them in life, we're actually decreasing the value of that diploma for everybody who earns it and making it necessary for them to get expensive college education just to get the same basic kind of entry-level job.
So I understand the incentives for the individual and society, and the community as a whole might be a little bit different here.
But these are just alarming statistics that I'm seeing out of DC where students are chronically truant and yet graduating and not really knowing anything.
This is not a good situation, but let me know what you think.