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(denverpost.com) Skepticism is the only appropriate response to news that the Denver Public Schools will hold principals and teachers more accountable for low student attendance.

The problem of high truancy rates in Denver is not new (I first wrote about it in 1988) and was generally tolerated as long as it didn’t adversely affect teachers and administrators.

Now that there are at least some funding implications to declining enrollment and low attendance rates, a new round of promises is being made to address the problem. Principals and even teachers supposedly will be held responsible for reducing truancy. Exactly how this is to be done is a little unclear.

One principal has had some success boosting attendance by offering pizza and popcorn parties to classes with low attendance rates. (Given the fact that one of the city’s high schools has about a third of its students missing every day, the district might want to buy a couple of pizza parlors and plant its own corn field.)

The dirty little secret is there is no real incentive for administrators and teachers to suddenly get all worked up about poor attendance. There is a well-established system in place in which the answer to every educational problem is the appropriation of more money. Consider recent history. Every time the Denver school district found itself cash-strapped because enrollment had declined or the teachers union had negotiated a new wage increase, the voters approved more money. The school district may be failing a big chunk of its students, but it is emphatically not failing its teachers or administrators.

This arrangement is not limited to Denver. The teachers union is doing quite well nearly everywhere. Even when it suffers a setback, it turns out to be a victory. Just last week, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of Washington state to require public employee unions to get permission from non-union members to deduct dues for political purposes. The teachers union had been routinely ignoring this requirement and instead offering non- members a once-a-year opt-out option from the collection of political dues. (more…)

>>Following up to the last comment I bolded, it is a known fact that in MANY instances teacher unions also impose a dues requirement (or whatever they call it) for non-union members. I told a school employee about this a while ago and although she was able to remove that option from her paycheck, she was still required to contribute the money elsewhere. So much for looking out for the teacher.< >>Before I continue continue here, I am fully aware that there are at least some of you out there who are public school teachers and see the game unions have been playing with the general taxpaying public (for the record, I do make a distinction between teachers and unions–they are NOT one in the same). I am also aware that your job security is also tied into what you can or cannot say on the record about this destructive cycle.< <<

Here is a little factoid that I have mentioned on this site many times in the past, but not in this amount of detail.

This is a study conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The data again show that urban public school teachers are more likely than either urban households or the general public to send their children to private schools. Across the states, 12.2 percent of all families (urban, rural, and suburban) send their children to private schools —a figure that roughly corresponds to perennial and well-known data on the proportion of U.S. children enrolled in private schools. But urban public school teachers send their children to private schools at a rate of 21.5 percent, nearly double the national rate of private-school attendance. Urban public school teachers are also more likely to send their children to private school than are urban families in general

(21.5 vs. 17.5 percent).

Strikingly, urban public school teacher households earning less than $42,000 a year (approximately the median national income) send their children to private school at a rate of 14.9 percent, a rate 4.6 percentage points higher than the private-school enrollment rate of all families at similar income levels (10.3 percent). Simply put, as income decreases, a

greater percentage of urban public school teachers choose private schools. Perhaps that’s not surprising: especially among relatively low-income families, urban teachers are unusually well educated and especially apt to

value education. Still, it’s noteworthy that, even when the financial sacrifice required for private education is greater, urban public school teachers still choose private schools for their children at higher rates than urban families with similar incomes. (click here to read the full report)

Time to wake up!

Related

Congressional Black Caucus on school vouchers (BlackInformant.com document)

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