Now that Chicago Public Schools students are back in school after the holiday break, the first order of business has got to be making sure every child shows up — and is properly accounted for.
We’re making note of this urgent task in part because of the alarming news about absenteeism included in the latest annual report from the CPS inspector general. Absenteeism worsened during the pandemic, but the IG found that chronic truancy could well be even worse than we already know because of underreporting by some schools.
In other words, some school administrators have apparently been hiding, or trying to hide, an even more serious problem.
Reporting of chronic truants as transfers, dropouts or simply as missing, is a district-wide problem, the IG report found in its analysis of data from the 2018-19 school year, the last year before the pandemic.
Schools presumably did this, as the Sun-Times’ Nader Issa and WBEZ’s Sarah Karp wrote last week, to avoid being penalized under the district’s school quality rating system. (The district has suspended the system because of complaints that it unfairly penalized schools on a number of measures.)
The IG reviewed records from 100 schools and found 36 had falsely reported transfer data to the district’s central office. At one school, emails showed that staff often knew the student was actually a truant, not a transfer.
Most troubling, as we noted above, is that the IG found evidence of a district-wide reporting problem.
Meanwhile, the official numbers on chronic absenteeism have worsened since the pandemic hit. Last year, as Illinois State Board of Education data show, an astonishing 52% of CPS students — 155,633 children — met the threshold for chronic truancy because they missed 5% or more of the school year, or nine days, without a valid excuse.
CPS paused audits of transfer data when the pandemic began, so the IG’s office hasn’t been able to look further into transfers and truancy statistics since 2020. Those audits must resume, now.
There’s no fixing the problem without accurate, timely information.
CPS is also putting together a team to improve data reporting and support students and schools on transfers. That team must get to work, ASAP.
The bottom line here is easy to see: CPS can’t even begin to provide a quality education for kids if schools simply write them off when they’re absent.
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