Student Absences Are About to Have Higher Stakes In Most States. Will Cheating Follow?
Schools across the country are about to be held accountable for student attendance — attaching stakes to a measure that previously had much less significance and increasing the risk that schools will try to manipulate that data.
But it’s unclear how effectively states have prepared for that possibility, or have systems in place to accurately monitor absenteeism data at all.
“It’s human nature, when the stakes rise, to want to game the system,” said Phyllis Jordan of the Georgetown-based think tank FutureEd. She recently wrote an analysis finding that 36 states plan to use chronic absenteeism to measure schools under ESSA, the federal education law. “In that regard, I don’t think chronic absenteeism is any different than other measures, like test scores.” . . .