If Junior Skips School, Should Mom and Dad Lose Their Benefits?

Teachers are increasingly being held responsible for their students' performance, whether through merit pay or outright firing. Research consistently shows that teacher quality is the most important component in whether students pass standardized tests and graduate, so upping the stakes for them makes sense -- though firing an entire staff of teachers who work hard to teach disenfranchised students seems like the wrong approach.

Amidst all the more admirable efforts to improve teachers, the question of parents' roles in the education process has proved tougher to answer. Teachers frequently talk about the need to engage parents through phone calls, conferences, back-to-school nights and more -- efforts that typically have only spotty success. So many struggling school districts are proposing a more radical option: ensuring that students who skip class cost their parents cold, hard cash. Taking parents to court is one tactic districts occasionally attempt, generally doling out a fine to parents who can't get their kids in school. But prosecution is costly and time-consuming for the district and the court system, so more states are considering what four -- New York, Florida, Wisconsin and Massachusetts -- already do through the LearnFare program: cutting families' public assistance if their kids are chronically truant. The president of the teachers' union in Detroit is the latest to propose such a system.

It's easy to see why tying families' finances to school attendance would be tempting: what better way to get Mom and Dad invested (literally) in their kids' education? But such efforts are misguided for many of the same reasons blogger Jessica Shiller eloquently listed in her objection to firing the entire staff at an underperforming Rhode Island high school. The states with these programs have already figured out that students whose families are poor enough to need government aid are more likely to miss school. But there are so many factors that play into that fact -- poor health care, a lack of stable housing, not to mention the deep disenfranchisement that comes from attending bad schools and leads students to believe that school isn't important -- that denying the assistance their families desperately need isn't the solution. Making school safe, supportive and academically rigorous so that students want to be there is a much better use of administrators' energy.

Photo credit: Editor B