Education Week - October 25, 2017 - 25

WEBINAR: School Accountability, School
Quality, & Absenteeism Under ESSA
Join Hedy Chang and Education Week
staff writer Evie Blad
Tuesday, Nov. 14, at 2 p.m. ET.
www.edweek.org/go/webinar/
Absenteeism

Principals, Let's Get Every
Senior Into College

By Sergio Alejandro Garcia

Get t y

HEDY N. CHANG is the executive director of Attendance Works, a Californiabased nonprofit that builds awareness and action around absenteeism.
PHYLLIS JORDAN is the editorial director at FutureEd, a think tank at
Georgetown University.

Getty

deal with the most vulnerable children.
Schools and districts must flip their approach to attendance
on its head, moving away from punitive responses to unexcused absences or truancy and instead embracing communitybased strategies to get more students to school every day. Some
places are already seeing results from this shift.
"Portraits of Change," a new report from Attendance Works
(a nonprofit for which one of us, Hedy N. Cheng, is the executive director) and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns
Hopkins University explores several encouraging models.
Cleveland, for example, brought its chronic absence rate down
from 35 percent to 29 percent in a year by enlisting a wide
array of education and community partners. Cleveland's attendance campaign included phone banking and outreach, incentives, professional development for teachers, and mentoring
for students struggling with attendance. Long Beach, Calif.,
engaged the entire community, including its health professionals, in its campaign to cut absenteeism across the board. New
Britain, Conn., deployed additional outreach workers to help
cut kindergarten chronic absenteeism in half within two years.
When attendance climbed in those New Britain kindergarten
classrooms, so did the scores on literacy tests.
What these approaches have in common is that they don't
rely on blaming the students or the parents. Schools and districts must replace outdated and ultimately ineffective responses to truancy-such as fines, suspensions, or even jail
time for parents-with broad, community-wide approaches
that address the root causes of absences.
That includes educating parents on how quickly absences
can erode academic performance and encouraging them to convey the importance of attendance to their children starting in
the early grades.
Chronic absenteeism, more than any academic indicator, is
something parents, teachers, and the community can improve
if they use data to target action and address barriers to getting
to school. Fortunately, public data will be more available than
ever before for scrutiny. And the inclusion of the metric in state
accountability plans brings an added urgency to getting more
kids to school every day. n

Social-emotional learning
represents crucial skills and
dispositions, but we already
ask too much from our
teachers."

lyzed Molly with too much of a good thing.
The social-emotional-learning movement
has identified a universe of important capacities to develop in students. In one way
or another, most of these capacities address
students' fundamental needs for social relationships, motivation, or self-regulation. The
sooner SEL leaders can narrow the choices
they promote to educators and simplify teachers lives, the sooner teachers might listen. n

at high-end grocers and when suggesting
essay topics to undergraduates, participants
reacted better to having fewer choices. A large
body of subsequent research has reinforced
that surprising conclusion: Choice is highly
motivating, but only if the choices are limited
and meaningful to the chooser. I had para-

HUNTER GELBACH is an associate professor of
education at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is also the director of research at the
Boston-based Panorama Education, a data-analytics
company that surveys K-12 school communities in
order to provide data for teachers and administrators
to use in their improvement efforts.

n recent years, the overall graduation rate for public school students
nationwide has climbed to 83.2 percent-and principals need to build
on this momentum. Dig a little
deeper into the data, and you'll find
that simply getting seniors out the
door with a high school diploma in
hand isn't enough.
Nearly 70 percent of youths ages 16 to
24 who graduated from any high school in
2016 were enrolled in college by the fall of
that year. But the numbers have traditionally been much lower for public schools nationwide-39 percent of high school seniors
who graduated from public schools in 2011
attended four-year colleges in the fall compared to 64 percent of their private school
counterparts, according to a 2016 report by
the National Center for Education Statistics. That number was even lower for public
schools that had more than three-quarters
of their students approved for free and
reduced-price lunch (29 percent attended
college). This was also true of schools where
students of color comprised half or more of
the student body (33 percent).
I am the principal at Artesia High School
in Lakewood, Calif., where our demographics are similar to other schools in low-income, urban neighborhoods: 15 percent of
our students are English-language learners,
76 percent are Hispanic, and 79 percent are
from low-income families. Many arrive their
freshman year testing well below grade
level in language arts and math.
But our school decided not to let ZIP codes,
demographics, or socioeconomic status define our students' success. In the past six
years, we've taken concrete steps to ensure
that all our students are college-ready and
have the financial and educational support
they need to enter higher education. This
fall, an astounding 94 percent of Artesia's
most recent graduating class of 329 students started college-74 percent of them as
first-generation students. The others were
set to attend trade schools or enlist in the
military.
It is easy for school leaders to assume that
readying students to attend colleges is the
work of teachers and guidance counselors.
But principals play a key role in students'
preparation. Improving academic outcomes
for our students took the effort of our entire
school staff, and there's no one-size-fits-all
solution. Here are five effective strategies
for principals that can help students achieve
success after high school graduation:
1. Demand excellence.
Most school leaders want to make sure
teachers, counselors, and students commit
to excellence. That can mean having teachers who are willing to teach summer school
to prepare students for upcoming Advanced
Placement classes or participate in professional-development programs. But admin-

istrators should give 100 percent as well.
They should stay late, find funding to support extracurricular programs for students
and professional development for their staff,
and have an open-door policy for everyone in
the school community throughout the year.
2. Make it personal.
Teachers, counselors, and administrators should encourage all students, even if
they are struggling. At our school, we greet
students by name and make sure to check
in with them regularly. Teachers in all core
subject areas regularly offer tutoring before
and after school and privately identify a
handful of students each quarter who would
benefit from extra attention. Administrators
and counselors also reach out to students to
see how they are doing at home.
3. Change the school culture.
When I began at Artesia in 2011, the
school was known for gangs, violence, and
little else. To get students to prioritize their
education, we started a campaign to redefine "cool." We created a public-recognition
program that celebrates students who are
high achieving or who have made improvements in their GPA. We also implemented
an intervention program for students who
were consistently tardy or absent and rewarded those who had perfect or improved
attendance with home visits and Disneyland tickets. Now, instead of skipping class
or coming late, students are motivated to
show up ready to learn.
4. Create space for support.
Many students are driven to succeed but
lack the know-how to apply to college. A designated area in the school building for college preparation can make all the difference.
We built a student union within the school
that offers students comfortable space for
extra academic, career, and college assistance. It's also a space for regular presentations from colleges and college-application
and financial-aid workshops.
5. Follow the data.
To find solutions for academic and behavioral problems, we research approaches that
have worked at similar schools before trying
them out for ourselves. For example, keeping data walls of test scores and pass rates
in all classrooms so that teachers, parents,
students, and administrators can see them
allows for transparency and lets students
track their progress. We also set ambitious
improvement targets, such as a 15 percent
gain in state test scores.
Of course, five steps aren't enough to encompass every initiative school leaders can
use to transform student success. Schools
must continue to strive toward the goal of
getting 100 percent of graduating seniors
into college. Higher education is still the
only institution that provides a clear gateway for students to escape poverty. It is our
duty to open that gate for all. n
SERGIO ALEJANDRO GARCIA is the principal of
Artesia High School in Lakewood, Calif.

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