NY State Ed’s pathetic response to rising chronic absenteeism in schools: We’ll stop tracking it

For years now, we’ve been slamming the State Education Department and its rulers, the state Board of Regents, as having turned against anything resembling excellence, but we’re still shocked at SED’s latest move.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just issued a blaring alarm about how truancy soared in New York schools in the wake of the pandemic, and remains insanely high.

SED’s “solution”: Hide the data.

DiNapoli found that nearly a third of Empire State students are chronically truant — up sharply in the wake of all those school shutdowns and farcical “remote learning.”

The K-12 rate of chronic absenteeism hit 29.1% in the 2022-23 school year — meaning that multiple hundreds of thousands of kids missed at least 10% of the 180-day school year.

More alarming: The rate was highest for high-school students: 34.1%, 7.6 points worse than for elementary and middle-school students.

In New York City’s city public schools: 34.8% of students were chronically absent in Fiscal Year 2024, down just slightly from 36.2% the year before.

Kids that miss a lot of school not only aren’t learning, they’re likely losing ground.

They’re on a path to dropping out, or “graduating” without anything like the knowledge and skills a high-school diplomat should represent.

Chronic absenteeism is also a huge warning sign of delinquency, drug/alcohol abuse and future dysfunction.

As DiNapoli warns, “reducing chronic absenteeism will be essential for turning around pandemic-era learning loss.”

That is, the young people who on average lost a year or more of ground during COVID will never catch up if New York’s schools don’t get a handle on this; quite the contrary: It’s getting worse.

SED’s advice to school districts is to rein in pervasive truancy: Be sure to offer free school breakfast; communicate more frequently with parents; reward good attendance (with gold stars, no doubt).

Plus, SED officials have told the feds that they plan to stop reporting chronic absenteeism.

It’s all innocent, they pretend: Instead, they’ll offer an “attendance indicator,” supposedly because the “negative effects of missing school manifest even before a student’s attendance reaches the level of chronic absenteeism.”

It’s just a coincidence (hah!) that this switch silences the now-ringing alarm bell, allows for years of blurring everything as the new reporting rules actually get implemented and makes it impossible to meaningfully compare past attendance measures with future ones.

Pathetic.

Another non-coincidence: The Regents are getting set to OK new high-school-graduation “requirements” that basically toss all regard for actual achievement and even basic academic proficiency.

Turning our high schools into diploma mills will let the educrats claim their approach is a huge success.

SED and the Regents have given up on educating New York’s kids; their only “clients” now are the teachers unions (not the teachers) and the other special interests that profiteer off the education system.

Mind you: Neither SED nor the Regents report to Gov. Kathy Hochul; it’s Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie who effectively calls the shots.

But the governor sure isn’t rocking the boat by calling out this obscenity; that makes notoriously mild Tom DiNapoli look bold by raising one alarm (in a report most parents will never hear of) about a single aspect of this disgusting, ongoing betrayal of New York’s children.

As a class, the Empire State’s elected leaders are completely complicit in this conspiracy to sacrifice New York’s future.

Damn them all.