How to Degrade the Value of a High School Diploma in a Few Easy Steps

The Richmond Public School System reported an enrollment of 27,221 students this past fall. Of those, 7,234 had seven or more unexcused absences. Earlier this month, as I blogged here, the School Board suspended the absenteeism policy while the administration studied what to do. Now comes John Butcher with background and statistics showing how extraordinarily negligent the school system has been in policing its absenteeism policy.

First, let us pause to consider how endemic the problem is. Look at the chart above, which John compiled with data provided by the Clerk of the School Board. (See his presentation on Cranky’s blog.) The mind-bending statistic is not that more than 26% of the city’s students had seven or more unexcused absences — it’s that 2,125, or almost 8% had 20 or more unexcused absences, and 469 had 50 or more!

Now, let us consider how Code of Virginia requires districts to deal with absences:

  • Any absence: Notify parents; obtain explanation;
  • 5 absences: Attendance plan;
  • 6 absences: Conference with parents; and
  • 7 absences: Prosecute parents or file Child in Need of Services Supervision (CHINS) petition.

According to John’s data, the city undertook only 173 prosecutions and filed only 60 CHINS petitions in 2017. “That’s a 3.22% compliance with the law,” he writes. “Viewed otherwise, it’s a 96.8% rate of violation by our School Board.”

The 2017 data, by the way, is no aberration. It’s consistent with the record of non-compliance since 2012. As far as Butcher can tell, the state Board of Education has done nothing to enforce the law.

Perhaps the reality on the ground — absenteeism is so endemic — that school authorities feel too overwhelmed to grapple with the problem anything. If that’s the case, perhaps we should stop pretending that a Richmond high school degree is worth the paper it’s printed on. Richmond schools purport to graduate 76.6% of its students on time. Educators may think they are helping kids on the margin by keeping them in school, but diploma inflation erodes the value of the degree, thus hurting students who attended classes, completed the work and deserved to graduate. Compassion for one group victimizes the other.