Behind Each Student Drop-Out is a Parent Who Has Given Up, Too

Looking out at my high school English classroom last week, I saw more empty chairs than students poring over final exams. Of the total 47 students in my two 11th-grade literature and composition classes, 22--or 47%--had disappeared since February.

This wasn’t the scene I envisioned when I left journalism a year ago for a new career as a teacher. To fulfill a state credential requirement, I was assigned to work in a San Fernando Valley high school with a teacher known for innovative techniques that make literature come alive to indifferent teen-agers. And so I embarked on my quest to show students how to use language to help, not hinder, their lives. But I never expected that I would not even get a chance to communicate with so many of my students, for the most part Latino, Russian and Armenian. Some came for a while, at first missing only a few days each week. They fell behind but ignored the “makeup” folder I kept on my desk. Then, they disappeared.

The vacant seats made my class dropout rate a little worse than that of the Los Angeles Unified School District as a whole. According to a report issued last month by the state Department of Education, LAUSD had a dropout rate of almost 44% last year, more than double the state average. My students were part of an estimated 62,000 daily absentees that cost LAUSD $69 million in funding last year.

My school had “site-based management,” whereby parents, teachers and administrators set policy. A new “get tough” rule was adopted: Any student with 15 absences in a class fails. By June, only one of the 23 Fs on my final roster was a true academic failure. The others were caused by absences.

The students or parents I could find had varied explanations. One mother had no idea her son was missing school. Another said of her daughter: “She doesn’t want to go to school and I don’t know what to do.” A third was stumped by teen-age logic: “He’s missed all those days so he felt there was no reason to go to class because he’s already failed.”

The parents seemed unaware, oddly powerless and even unconcerned. At parents’ night, I passed rows of empty classrooms to sit in my own, gradebook ready. Only four parents came. One peered at the empty spaces for work her son had not done. “He’ll be spending all this weekend making that up, I assure you,” she said forcefully. The work was never turned in.

Most students and parents seemed not to have given up on the idea of education. Some cited family problems for their absences. One mother said her son became depressed after a friend was shot to death in a robbery. Another said her daughter was overwhelmed by grief after a sister ran away. One boy showed up after weeks away and said his grandfather had died and then his mother got sick in Mexico. “I had to go,” he said. His family loyalty was admirable, but did it have to cost more than 40 absences? A girl who had transferred from a strict private academy complained of too much freedom. “They don’t really keep track of all the kids,” she said without blaming herself.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the new Los Angeles truant ordinance is enforced next fall. Adopted in May, it orders the police to cite anyone under 18 found loitering between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Sentences include $50 fines, which parents are likely to pay. This is one solution that seems worth trying: making parents more accountable for their children.