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4. We do a Good Job with the Kids Who Show Up
- Indiana University Press
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+ + + 4 WE DO A GOOD JOB WITH THE KIDS WHO SHOW UP. At Manual many of the students don’t show up often enough to get left behind. I’d been at the school for less than a week but had already discovered that its most vexing problem was also the most fundamental : there was a basic inability to get students to walk through the front doors. Teachers repeatedly told me about leading classes that were missing half of their students. They complained about students who showed up once or twice a week, or students who walked out of or into a class midway through a lesson. Then they told me about the many students who simply never made it to school. Not for a month. Not for a week. Not for a day. And not for a single class. It happened every year, they said. It got worse as the school year went on, with many students—freshmen and sophomores in particular—disappearing. The missing kids were faded memories, their empty desks symbols of another generation of dropouts who would be forced to find a way in the world without even the most basic education. Principal Grismore and other school district leaders worried most about this problem at the start of the year. That’s because state funding for schools is based We do a good job with the kids who show up. 25 on the number of kids who have registered and shown up at least once during the first month of the year. It doesn’t matter if the students come again or if a studentignoresthebuildingfromOctoberthroughMay.Oriftheylearnedanything . As long as a student shows up once early in the year, Indianapolis Public Schools can count on another seventy-five hundred dollars in state funding. So, Grismore told me, he spent about a third of his time in the early weeks of the school year dealing with the problem of missing students. He kept a running list of “no shows” and farmed out the task of calling homes to teachers and other staffers. As the school year began, he was shooting for 946 students. Anything less than 946 could result in one teacher being transferred to another school. It wouldn’t be easy. The number 946 was roughly 200 students more than had shown up during the school year’s first days. The tenth day of the school year was a warm Tuesday. It was August 25 and the end of summer was four weeks away. Temperatures were blistering and the days long. The state fair, an annual rite of summer, had just wrapped up. But at Manual students were starting to settle into their school-year routines—the students who had shown up, that is. The first week’s attendance rate hovered near 81 percent. But in reality the problem was even worse than it sounded. The roster of absent students didn’t include the many students who had not yet enrolled and not yet shown up for their first day of school. And thanks to a convoluted government accounting policy, a student could be counted as present for the full day even if he or she missed half of the day’s classes. As the morning bell rang, Grismore raced from room to room, dealing with everything from upcoming student photos, to ongoing problems with class schedules, to a parent who was on the phone complaining that her child had been assigned to a pair of advanced placement classes. In a school marred by profound academic failure, the mother was worried that her child couldn’t handle the work and would see her grades slip. At the same time, Grismore was preparing to head out in the neighborhoods surrounding Manual in hope of rounding up a student or two who hadn’t yet appeared. It was clearly a show. He had a columnist on the premises, so why not impress the district bosses, who wanted to see as many seventy-five-hundred-dollar additions to the bottom line as possible? A few staffers who’d heard that Grismore was going to take me on his hunt for students complained, calling his effort a public relations ploy. They said the school didn’t take absenteeism seriously, as evidenced by the lack of a formal attendance policy. The issue was at the center of a constant struggle between the principal and teachers who argued he wasn’t giving them leverage to hold [34.227.112.145...