I was recently perusing my local newspaper and came upon a not-quite-surprising statistic: The high school in the town where I live has the highest chronic truancy rate in the region, an eye-popping 46.3%. Illinois law, as the newspaper noted, defines a chronic truant as any student who misses 5 percent of school days within an academic year without a valid excuse, which works out to nine days out of the typical 180-day school year.

There may, of course, be any number of excused absences on top of this, but the focus on unexcused absences only is meant to avoid penalizing schools whose students might be dealing with documented long-term health problems or other protracted emergencies. However, given the number of adolescents I see strolling the streets in my community on any given school day, I imagine that a lot of these unexcused absences are simply young people ditching classes for reasons that make sense to a teenager’s brain.

Chronic absenteeism has, of course, been a problem in many public schools for decades, but the number of students absent without an excuse has exploded since schools started locking their doors during the panic over the Covid-19 virus. As a January 31st article posted on the74million.org pointed out, “The rate of students chronically missing school got so bad during the pandemic that it will likely be 2030 before classrooms return to pre-COVID norms.” Although some local factors, such as lack of access to school bus transportation in some communities, play a role in increasing chronic absenteeism among students, it seems that the simple habit of getting up and going to school has been lost by many students.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that I taught at my community’s high school for two years (and four years at another area high school as well)before I moved on to college-level instruction, so I am familiar with the many non-academic challenges facing both educators and students at the secondary level. Family and personal dysfunction is always a major impediment to classroom engagement and success, and I have been continually appalled at how many of my former students regularly engage with the criminal justice system—one only recently, much to my dismay, was arrested for murder.

I still keep in touch with the lives of high school students through the private tutoring I do every week, so I think I can speak to at least a few of the post-pandemic reasons poor school attendance is a national catastrophe, and why even those students who do show up at the classroom door are routinely disengaged from—and discouraged by—their public schools.

First of all, cell phones and other electronic distractions are the monsters that have eaten our classrooms. Lessons on solving quadratic equations and properly punctuating adjective clauses cannot compete with the lure of ready access to Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. This is not a problem confined to America, and the United Nations recently went so far as to recommend a global ban on cell phones and other electronic devices in classrooms in order to improve student behavior and academic achievement. 

In addition, the academic rigor of most subject instruction, already in long and steady decline before the Great Covid Lunacy, fell off a cliff as public schools switched to excruciatingly inadequate on-line teaching while desperately dumbing down classroom work and abandoning any meaningful assessments in order to hide the educational damage being inflicted upon our youngest and most vulnerable. Colleges didn’t go test-optional for admissions over the past few years out of a sense of civic duty; they were trying to avoid any discussion regarding why they were admitting so many obviously academically-deficient students onto their campuses. 

The onslaught of the egregiously uneducated has, in turn, driven many colleges to abandon all pretense of academic standards in order to keep those lovely tuition checks rolling in, which has turned many college diplomas into worthless credentials. Often explained by exalted pronouncements regarding promoting equity, so-called “flexible grading policies” have become an entrenched norm promoting mediocrity and degrading any notion of merit in higher education. 

Listen to employers lament the incompetence of recent college graduates, many unable to even read and write at a level adequate to do their jobs, if you want a lesson on the corrosive effects of turning high schools into holding pens devoid of a focus on teaching and learning. Stupidity has bubbled upwards, and it is not at all surprising that many employers are no longer assuming a college degree from a formerly well-respected college is adequate proof that a new hire can do the work required.

Finally, the simple fact of the matter is that public education has been crushed under political correctness. With so many school systems now abandoning advanced classes because of racial, ethnic, or gender balances they deem problematic and promoting curriculum dominated by grievances instead of honest inquiry, public education has become a punchline, which explains the meteoric rise of private and home schooling over the past few years. School choice and school voucher programs (not to mention private tutoring services) are hot topics today because parents are well aware that their local public schools have abandoned education in favor of a dull and destructive equity that excuses failure instead of encouraging success.

When I first started writing about the problems facing public education over 15 years ago, I had a sense of hope about the potential for improving our public schools. Unfortunately, my optimism has curdled as I have watched America’s public schools continually and predictably fail to do their most basic jobs, and I long ago suggested that we move toward a national school voucher system in order to break the power of this disastrous monopoly, one that fanatically protects its paychecks at the cost of ruined young lives and crushingly empty futures. 

Unfortunately, given the enormous political power of the teacher unions and the sheer obduracy of civil service job protections, I suspect students and parents will have a very long wait for any reforms that free them from the busywork, boredom, and bullshit that are the routine of public education in America today.