In school districts struggling with high dropout rates and absenteeism, what’s the best way to keep the kids in school and on track to graduate?
For one thing, make sure that school is a place where they want to be.
That’s one takeaway from a new Fordham study of Bronx public school leaders trying to advance equity in their schools and ensure they’re welcoming and supportive for every student.
For these schools, that meant overcoming the effects of poverty, exclusion, and bias, or whatever else might be keeping students away. Schools in the study “thought about this really holistically” and reduced absenteeism as a result, said the study’s author, Elizabeth Stosich, Ed.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and associate chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy.
Poverty and COVID Hurt Attendance
Her study was published in November in Frontiers in Education. From 2021 to 2022, she examined the efforts of four district leaders and eight school leaders in one of the 12 community school districts in the Bronx. It’s a district where absenteeism is an especially tough problem because of high rates of poverty and the death rate—one of the city’s highest—during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.
The schools she studied were trying to advance equity through continuous improvement, a management approach from the corporate and health care spheres that more and more schools are adopting. Among other things, it emphasizes a bottom-up approach to understanding an organization’s problems and making changes.
Getting Creative: Laundry, Fun Fridays, and Campfires
What did that look like in the schools? One of them set up a laundry because some families lacked access to one, hindering their kids’ attendance. Teachers identified the student groups in each school who felt the most ignored—in one case, English learners—and found ways to engage them. One school launched “Fun Fridays” full of meetings by clubs that reflected students’ interests—strategically scheduled on a day when students tend to be absent.
Teachers cooked with students or began art projects; one of them set up a faux campfire around which students could tell stories. “They really got creative, and it spurred new ideas,” she said.
Asking Students What They Truly Need = Success
Crucially, all of these initiatives came from talking to students themselves, Stosich said.
“By going to students and asking what they truly need, and then redesigning school in that image, that is how they engage in more really transformative work to support student success,” she said.
Also important was creating inclusive, supportive school environments for students from historically marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds, she said: “They thought about, yes, getting students into school, but then creating the experiences that would pull them in and keep them through both a more engaging and culturally responsive curriculum and instruction.”
While absenteeism remained a stubborn challenge, the districts’ schools showed a lot of improvement compared with similar districts in the area, she said.
‘Start Small to Learn Fast’
Stosich noted the importance of a long-term focus on equity, in addition to short-term efforts. Continuous improvement has a “start small to learn fast” approach, involving a series of short-term inquiry cycles combined with empathy interviews and data gathering to get at the roots of an issue and find the best solutions, she said.
“Oftentimes in education and other fields, we start with a solution,” she said. “We’ll adopt some practice across the whole district or across the whole school before we even know if this would lead to improvements. It can lead to a lot of burnout and ‘initiative fatigue’ among educators who are not convinced that the next new thing is going to be any better than the last new thing.”
The reasons for absenteeism evolve and change, and vary from one school to another, she said, “so spending time to really understand the problem is essential.”
