As Michigan fights chronic absenteeism, could employers hold the key?

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Challenges faced by working parents can contribute to chronic absenteeism, according to a new book.

“The shift is like a twelve-hour shift,” said one parent whose experience was recounted in “Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve It Alone,” which was written by two Wayne State University education researchers. “It’s hard to work around that and her going to school.”

The parent ended up quitting that job because of the strain of needing to rely on her mother to ensure her daughter made it to school. It’s a frequent reality for Detroit parents.

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Housing instability, transportation inequities, and health challenges are among the most commonly reported causes of chronic absenteeism. Less focus has been paid to the role employers can play in the fight to improve attendance.

“It’s a perfect example of a sector that is likely not thinking at all about student attendance,” Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, one of the authors of the book, told Chalkbeat in an interview. Employers, she said, “could have a major impact on how much kids get to school.”

Frequent absences are a problem across the U.S., but particularly in the Detroit school district, where 66% of students are chronically absent. Students are considered chronically absent when they miss 10% or more of a typical 180-day school year. Citywide, the rate is more than 50% for district and charter schools. The high rates have a huge impact on schools, making it difficult to improve academic achievement and maintain continuity in the classroom.

Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer, who co-authored the book with her, were among a group of researchers that published a paper in October in the journal “The Urban Review” on the relationship between parent work schedules and their children’s school attendance.

“Parents’ work schedules in Detroit did have a strong association with their children’s attendance,” said Lenhoff, the Leonard Kaplan Endowed Professor and an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State. “Essentially, kids who had a parent with a more flexible work schedule were more likely to get their kids to school regularly.”

Like the parent above, they heard from parents who quit their jobs because they couldn’t make their jobs work with their kids’ school schedules.

“Employers might want to know … they’re actually losing employees because of this issue,” Lenhoff said.

They’re now trying to explore the topic further to see for instance, what schools can do to ensure parents are able to communicate with their employers in advance about school schedule changes as well as “what are some things that employers could maybe think about being more flexible about, whether it’s schedule, whether’s it’s time off in the middle of the day to go to events or things like that.”

The book takes a wide-ranging look at chronic absenteeism in Detroit and offers a solution to solving it: getting policymakers as well as community organizations and coalitions involved in improving attendance.

Here’s more of what Lenhoff and Singer said in a Chalkbeat interview:

Charter schools also struggle with chronic absenteeism

More than half the school-age children in Detroit attend charter schools in the city or in the suburbs, or are enrolled in suburban school districts. The book, though, is focused on the district.

“We’ve been fortunate to have a strong research partnership with the district,” said Singer, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State. “It’s obviously easier to study what they’re doing at scale, because it’s one governing entity, whereas, of course, we have a number of charter operators.”

They have done some research on the strategies being used in charter schools and early evidence has shown that the way charter schools are approaching the issue tends to mirror each other and what the district is doing, Singer said.

“There’s, frankly, a pretty limited toolbox that schools are drawing from to figure out how to solve these issues,” Lenhoff said.

Some families struggle because they lack a support system

In interviews with parents, the researchers found that they often rely on a strong network of family, friends, or neighbors to help with getting their children to and from school.

Some lack that network, though.

“In a few cases, parents described being truly socially isolated,” they wrote in the book. Others have a network, but its members are less reliable for various reasons, such as their own inflexible work schedules, lack of transportation, or financial struggles.

“Scientists have been documenting this for 50 years — there’s been this just societal erosion of our social linkages between each other, such that, you know, all of us have fewer people who we can call in a pinch,” Lenhoff said.

Another factor, she said, is the effect school choice policies have had. The city has a number of charter schools, and a large percentage of children in the district attend a school outside their neighborhood.

“if you live in a neighborhood where none of the other children go to your children’s school, then it’s pretty hard to call on a neighbor or friend to, you know, give your kid a ride or pick your kid up at the end of the day,” Lenhoff said.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit and writes about Detroit school issues. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.