The Cost of Remediation in Public Education - Part 2

The Cost of Remediation in Public Education - Part 2

The Cost of Remediation in Public Education Another Raging Fire Being Fought With Insufficient Resource: The value proposition of prevention Part 2

Attention to Attendance Matters for All students, Not Just Those Who are Chronic 

In Part 1 of this topic, we discussed the issue at hand that districts do not invest in prevention.  The issue of communication with “some” versus “all” is the key question. With all of the focus on lost learning time and chronic absenteeism, this is an area that is finally getting more attention. What districts don’t talk about enough, however, is the large group of students who are on the fringe. These students are the ones that are not fully at chronic but consistently miss between 12 and 18 days each year. During the most recent school year, the average attendance rate for most districts dropped to 90%, meaning that the average student had missed 15 – 19 days. The results clearly showed a commensurate decline in student achievement. The reality is attendance is the number one predictor of long-term academic achievement.

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Most attendance management systems target students on both extremes (the chronic and the perfect) and ignore the vast group of students who are in the middle. Districts that have the attendance monitoring work done in-house or at sites also find that their resources are stretched to the breaking point and can barely maintain proper notification for chronic and are always working in a reactive manner.

Maintaining our focus on student achievement, the impact of falling behind academically brings multiple challenges to educators and the students themselves. The current system expects a student that has fallen behind academically to decide that they will immediately put in more time and do more work to catch up. We do not stop the ongoing daily instruction; we just add additional remediation to their workload. In some cases, the LEA chooses to remove the student from some part of core instruction to participate in the remediation knowing that this student will not receive that subject creating a new deficit.

The challenge is the group of students in the middle who have not yet moved to chronic. Those students are not receiving any of the mandatory attendance notifications because they are not yet at the stage of being chronic. What is occurring is that the student is missing just enough of the foundation learning as to be slightly behind the curve, and we end up seeing students who previously were A and B students all of the sudden receiving Cs with a possible D here or there (or similar on a rubric score where they fall from 3-4 down to a 2 on the 4-point scale). If this continues over a period of time that student will soon begin to demonstrate coping behaviors and often, they move into the chronic levels. Others, however, express their frustration through behavior that can impact the learning process for the entire class.

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In attendance monitoring, we define students into 5 categories:

·      Excellent – missing 1%

·      Satisfactory – missing less than 5% (95%)

·      Manageable – missing less than 10% (90%)

·      Chronic – missing between 10 – 15% (85%)

·      Severe – missing more than 15%

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In 2021 – 2022 due to numerous factors, the average LEA had an ADA percentage of approximately 89 – 91% for the ENTIRE LEA. This would equate to every student being manageable on the scale above.  We know that in 31 states the graduation rate decreased for the first time in decades last year. We also know that the achievement of 9-year-old students was significantly below standard on results from 2021 – 2022 as well. Just these two simple data points clearly illustrate that students in the manageable category are demonstrating a reduction in academic performance.

When we look at traditional attendance management, the focus is on the extremes. Students who are chronic or severe receive notifications leading up to a Student Attendance Review Board (SARB) process that can involve local District Attorneys. In contrast, many LEAs honor students who have perfect attendance. LEA Messaging regarding attendance is that a student must be perfect or else with nothing in between.

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When implementing a proactive preventative messaging campaign, the target audience is all students and parents, and the messages are entirely positive and focused on the goals and aspirations of the students. In 2018 – 2019 68% of all students were either excellent or satisfactory; that percentage dropped by 20% to 48% in 2021 – 2022. The percentage of chronic and severe grew from approximately 13% in 2018 – 2019 to over 28% in 2021 – 2022 for LEAs that had an attendance management system. For LEAs that did not have a systematic approach to attendance, the percentage of chronic and severe was well over 40% in 2021 – 2022. The average student missed more than 15 days of school (3 weeks) in 2021 – 2022 and we have seen the academic results.

LEAs that sustain a proactive focus on attendance and focus on all students have a much better understanding of the connection between attendance, academic achievement, and school culture. With all the focus on lost learning, student mental health, and rampant staffing shortages it is clear that we need to stop and analyze what is missing in the foundation and ensure that we support that foundation of attendance habits for every student and parent we serve on a consistent and ongoing basis.

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A systems approach to student achievement starts with attendance. With the percentage of students whose attendance is impacting their academic achievement well over 50% in all LEAs across the country, we must take a new approach. The focus on attendance must be the first, and primary focus of every LEA. This can not be something we do just in September for Attendance Awareness month, it must be consistent and done every month. We went this far backward in less than 30 months, and it will take likely double that time to restore the habits that were not even there for many students to begin with. 3rd graders today have yet to experience a “normal” year and students in 9th and 10th grade never experience a middle school environment and now must navigate the challenge of high school.  

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With the strict graduation requirements, a student who fails just 3 classes in 9th grade cannot graduate on time. Imagine the feeling of hopelessness once a student understands that they cannot catch up without doing something extra. These students and parents may not have fully understood the concept and importance of attendance when in a subject-driven environment. While that is the extreme side, the same student who all of the sudden is a C student when they never were before can have the same social/emotional impact.

LEAs that sustain a proactive focus on attendance and focus on all students have a much better understanding of the connection between attendance, academic achievement, and school culture. With all the focus on lost learning, student mental health, and rampant staffing shortages it is clear that we need to stop and analyze what is missing in the foundation and ensure that we support that foundation of attendance habits for every student and parent we serve on a consistent and ongoing basis.

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  A system to support attendance is not a one-time expense and should be placed behind the budget firewall as an essential cost of doing business. Every public company maintains a budget for marketing and ensures that the company focus is clear to the consumers. It is time for public education to do the same.

The real question all parents, board members, and community members should be asking their Educational Leaders is why every LEA is not spending at least $25 per student on prevention?        
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The simple answer that may be received is that the LEA can do it themselves? If that is true, then why are they not doing it? These same LEAs are opening the school year with vacancies in key staffing areas (chart shows a report from March 2022 representing the 100 largest Urban School Districts), the reality is that the dedicated staff that we do have the need to prioritize their efforts and the process of creating grade span specific messaging, operationally delivering it on an ongoing basis, and staying current on all changes and needs of these students would require additional staff.

The other reason might be that $25 per student for a 10,000-student LEA is an annual $250,000 contract that is for an “outside consultant.” The argument would be that this money should be first used to hire additional staff or increase compensation to maintain those staff that already serve students. The flaw in this case, especially for ADM states, is that there is not an additional $250,000 until we change attendance behaviors. The first year is funded with an investment of one-time funding, and the subsequent years come from ongoing operational savings.  Additionally, in this arena, the $1.29 million does not become available until you first invest the $250,000.

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Back to the $25 per student cost. In a recent report on the Today show, there was a story on school districts spending $20 per student for a Yondr pouch that secures a cell phone during the school day. This is a reactive strategy to intervene on the concerns of cell phones taking away from learning. It is clear that school districts can invest in areas that are important to them as can be demonstrated in this letter sent home regarding the implementation of Yondr in a Texas school district. This investment is clearly focused on academic achievement improvement and changing behaviors. The difference, however, is significant when we understand that this action is more likely to be perceived as punitive than proactive and without debating the merits recognizing the impression and feeling that is generated from the program is often as important as the implementation of the program itself which is why proactive communications can change behaviors through conscious choice of the parents and students.

If an individual goes to an investment banker and ask how to obtain a potential 200% - 300% return on your initial investment, there are going to be very few possible options that the banker could suggest, and any that are possible would likely violate some law or ethical principle.

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If we truly want to change the narrative in public education back to a focus on teaching and learning and get away from the divisive and divided politics of the current era, the first approach is to go back to basics and get students to attend school and then invest in the programs, staff, and services that will support students and teachers to keep these students wanting to attend. Remember, 95% attendance just means the student only missed 1 day per month, there absolutely is room for every LEA in America to improve.

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Parents want to understand. Parents want to feel like they are part of the process of their child’s success. Parents need to know exactly how they can help – getting their children to school on time, every day, and ready to learn is the first step. We can’t expect parents to understand the evolution of education as their student progresses through the K-12 system if they are not taught about it. Part of our job as educators should be to draw parents and students into our system with positive, encouraging communication and messaging that builds their own understanding of the progression and value of attendance.

The Science and Research of Building Habits and Changing Behavior

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The nexus between wildfire prevention and lost learning may not seem obvious, but the two challenges have several similarities. Wildfires can cause catastrophic damage to property and life and many times can be prevented. Students who do not attend school regularly can quickly fall behind academically requiring remediation, drop out, and end up on a pathway to prison, or worse, which can also be prevented if they internalize the need for good attendance habits throughout childhood. On February 4, 1735, Benjamin Franklin discussed “Protection of Towns from Fire” in The Pennsylvania Gazette. In this article, he coined the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It is ironic that his advice, had it truly been followed may have reduced the wildfire issues we had in recent years.

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It seems that all of humanity has continually struggled with operationalizing habits and procedures in a quest for finding the next great thing that can make it easier to accomplish whatever goal is focused on now. One of the most recognizable remediations is the multi-billion diet and exercise industry. This industry has fully embraced the understanding that sustaining a habit requires constant reinforcement which is in large part following the marketing guidelines on messaging. We know that it can take between 6 to 20 impressions to obtain brand awareness and then ongoing reinforcement to sustain it. If we neglect to continue to engage there is the possibility that the customer may go elsewhere, which is something that has been facing LEAs that have declining enrollment and the influx of other options for parents to choose from.

As the number of students who need remediation increases, it has become evident that despite all the research on attendance and achievement, we have not been reinforcing this messaging enough. This understanding is deeply grounded in research done in the late 1800s by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus who created the concept of the Forgetting Curve.  

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The Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting, recently cited in a November 2017 Psychestudy article shows how learned information slips out of our memories over time unless we take action to reinforce the concept to keep it there. As academic institutions, public schools have utilized this landmark research to institute instructional strategies such as “spiraling,” and continual reviews based upon the concept of “spaced learning.” Ebbinghaus showed the steepest drop in memory happens quickly after learning, so it is essential to revisit this information multiple times in the beginning, just as advertising begins with a very strong awareness campaign. After a period of time, the research demonstrated that longer gaps between these review sessions can be utilized, so long as the subject is constantly reviewed. This theory of action is also the foundation for most treatments and supports changing or developing habits.

Leading back to our prior theme of fire prevention, likely the best example of ongoing messaging in marketing to maintain understanding, brand awareness, and reinforce good habits was created by Albert Staehle in 1944 to solve an issue that came to light in 1942.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the populace of the United States, particularly those living on the West Coast began to have significant concerns about the impact of the war coming on the mainland. In particular, the concern was that if an attack occurred and there was an unexploded military ordinance left behind it could ignite uncontrollable forest fires if a camper accidentally ignited the ordinance. This fear was visualized in the Walt Disney movie “Bambi,” with the devasting impact of fire caused by man. In 1943 a campaign to prevent forest fires was launched and initially had a license to use the Disney characters from the movie to deliver the message. This license was only for 1 year, so another pathway needed to be developed. 

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In 1944 the longest-running public service advertising campaign in U.S. history, which continues today and has educated generations of Americans about their role in preventing wildfires was created by Albert Staehle when he debuted the Forest Service leader and spokesperson: Smokey Bear. Interestingly, many who have seen this campaign believe that the creation was Smokey the Bear; making this an excellent example of another set of research on memory from paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who coined the “Mandela Effect” in 2009. The “Mandela Effect” is a situation where a large mass of people sharing false memories believes that an event, person, or thing occurred when it did not.  

Over the past 78 years, Smokey’s message has only changed slightly, with the catchphrase evolving from: “Smokey Says – Care Will Prevent 9 out of 10 Forest Fires,” to the 1947 version of “Remember…Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires. In 2001, the current catchphrase was adjusted to “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires” in a move by the USDA Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters, and the Ad Council responding to a massive outbreak of wildfires in natural areas other than forests.

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Despite these campaigns' amazing success, the leaders of this critical issue recognized the research of Ebbinghaus and did not rest on the laurels that everyone now knows what to do. The annual investment in messaging has not stopped, and at times due to changes in behavior, has increased to obtain the desired prevention and results. This is exactly what must be done with messaging on attendance. This is a core basic need as education is the one business where every year every one of our clients is new (maybe not to the LEA, but they are new to the grade level). We must continually educate and engage with our clients and doing so with proactive and preventative strategies is the first basic step that all LEAs must take.

Dust in the Wind
"I close my eyes
Only for a moment, and the moment's gone.
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes, a curiosity.
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind.

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea.
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see.
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

Now don't hang on
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.
It slips away
And all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

Dust in the wind
Everything is dust in the wind."
      Kerry Livgren, Kansas

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Ben Franklin coined his timeless phrase, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” in 1736, and as is true of many of his quotes and advancements, it still has great relevance today. Franklin and others understood that better information means better ideas, which means better protection. Implementing a preventive campaign on the importance of attendance will help to reinforce your constituents’ learning and habits and improve their power of recall and motivation so that they can build and retain the habits they’ve learned in the long term.  “Attendance is the gateway to improved student achievement, and the first line of defense against lost learning.” We need to act with a sense of urgency to restore our educational systems and this should start with a small investment of $25 per student into our ongoing budget. To quote several of my mentors as I was growing toward becoming a CBO “that amount per student is budget dust, compared to benefits that will be received for students.”

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To every LEA in America, and in particular each CBO and Board of Education, I urge you all to check above the windowsills and the tops of each of your bookshelves until you have found enough of this “budget dust” to change the pathway for tens of thousands of students that you have pledged to serve. I would also like to note that the product Pledge is a proactive prevention product that is used to ensure that dust can do no ongoing harm. So, our “pledge” is to use our “budget dust” to do some ongoing good to impact student achievement.

Please return for Part 3 of this series which will look into the myths and realities about prevention strategies in public education.

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