How to Succeed in School

Here's a novel idea on how students can improve their academic performance at school. It's very simple -- SHOW UP!

There's more negative news coming from the Milwaukee Public Schools.

MPS attendance slipped a bit last year.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Attendance in Milwaukee Public Schools dropped slightly last year, with a bit steeper decline among high school students.

Despite all the attention that has been focused on the need for better attendance, getting kids into school continues to be a major problem in thousands of cases. Overall attendance has been flat in MPS for at least the last eight years and substantially trails behind any other school district in Milwaukee County.

Attendance is one area where common sense and data generally merge: Kids can't learn if they're not in school, and the worse the attendance, the worse a student's problems in school tend to be.

A new report from MPS administrators says attendance overall in 2006-'07 was 87.96%, down more than 0.3% from the prior year. Overall attendance in MPS has hung close to 88% for years.

Jennie Dorsey, the new head of the MPS department that oversees issues including attendance, said she could not give a specific cause for the downturn or assess its significance.

She said a grant from the state Department of Public Instruction was allowing MPS to spend $510,000 more this year on efforts by social workers and social work assistants to deal with children and families with attendance problems. Dorsey said MPS officials hoped attendance systemwide would go over 90% in coming years.

Overall, the report says, MPS students missed more than 1.8 million days of school last year and were in school for nearly 13.7 million days. About 36% of absences were excused and 64% were not excused.

High schools continue to have the worst attendance and provided the biggest decline last year, from 80.4% to 79.6%. While attendance in high schools has improved from under 78% a few years ago to around 80% in recent years, that still means 1 in 5 students is not present in school on a typical day.

All those unexcused absences are inexcusable.

On a typical school day, 1 in 5 students are absent.

That's awful.

...In general, attendance problems are not spread evenly - many students have excellent attendance records, while a concentration of kids have chronic problems getting to school.

So, kids have chronic problems getting to school.

Doesn't that make it sound like there are barriers preventing them from attending?

They can't get to school.

That's misleading. The kids could get there, but they don't go.

In previous years, MPS researchers have put together figures showing that grade-point averages of students who attend at least 90% of the time were substantially higher than grade-point averages of students with attendance problems.

DUH!

Was it really necessary for MPS researchers to check that out?

Of course, students who show up for class have higher grade-point averages than the students who don't go.

Again, I say, DUH! I say, Double Duh!