69传媒

Each day, students and parents in New Jersey鈥檚 Chester schools head to the district website and fill out a link to a , which indicates that the student is 鈥減resent鈥� for the day.

Administrators monitor the forms and check in with students who appear not to be engaged. They鈥檝e been lenient so far with anyone who turns in their form after the 9 a.m. deadline.

Attendance is one of the many facets of K-12 education that has changed dramatically as the novel coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of U.S. schools to close buildings and deliver instruction remotely.

Typically, taking attendance is simply a matter of asking, is the student in the building or not? With most school buildings closed, it鈥檚 now represented by a more amorphous set of factors: whether the student is engaged in learning, completing assignments on time, staying in touch with teachers.

That atmosphere has created quite a bit of confusion for Chester鈥檚 school leaders, who are considering eliminating the Google form requirement. The information schools collect can provide valuable context about how they鈥檙e serving students remotely. But it鈥檚 a time-consuming task for families, particularly those with multiple students under one roof.

Brad Currie, the district鈥檚 director of planning, research, and evaluation, worries that revising the policy would confuse parents even more. His team decided this week to stay the course for now. 鈥淲hatever we can do to not stress people out,鈥� he said.

Emphasizing Leniency, Flexibility

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to report chronic absence data as a measure of school quality. During COVID-19, though, several states have given schools flexibility to decide whether and how to take attendance. State governments in Colorado and Oklahoma, among others, have suspended requirements that schools report attendance numbers to them, but encouraged attendance tracking for districts鈥� own purposes. Kentucky has pushed schools to focus on project completion dates rather than instructional time.

Florida schools are tapping into the technical infrastructure of the state-funded to keep tabs on students鈥� progress. New Jersey hasn鈥檛 issued any attendance guidance, Currie said.

Many districts have simply stopped taking attendance altogether, or focused on preparing teaching materials and getting students access to technology before determining whether they were using it. Georgia, , and Washington, D.C., have declared that all students will be marked 鈥減resent鈥� for the rest of the school year.

Researchers at the University of Washington鈥檚 Center for Reinventing Public Education have been tracking district approaches to a variety of topics, including attendance. Fourteen of the 82 districts in the current iteration of the have attendance tracking systems in place, as do half of the 18 charter management organizations in the center鈥檚 analysis.

Some districts are taking attendance but emphasizing leniency, especially when using completion of assignments as an attendance tracking approach. Angola High School in Indiana, for instance, is giving students two days after an e-learning assignment is posted to attempt to complete it. 鈥�69传媒 may not understand the material and may have questions, and we want to create a culture where students will attempt the work,鈥� said Travis Heavin, the school鈥檚 principal.

69传媒 that already use learning platforms that report student logins and participation to teachers are ahead of the curve. But 鈥渋t鈥檚 not a proxy for whether they鈥檙e learning or not, or whether they鈥檙e necessarily engaged,鈥� said Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the Aurora Institute, an advocacy and research organization for online learning. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 want students to be logged in necessarily to a single platform for eight hours a day.鈥�

Teachers at Woodside Elementary School in Sussex, Wis., are giving students daily assignments, such as a trivia question or a drawing activity, that they complete as an indication of their attendance for the day. If the school records that a student misses that assignment three days in a row, administrators try to reach the family.

鈥淭he least of our concerns is being very stringent that a kid has to be in front of their computer from this time to this time,鈥� said James Edmond, Jr., the school鈥檚 principal.

69传媒 who have struggled with attendance prior to the pandemic are continuing to do so, Edmond said. Other students are missing assignments if they or their parents don鈥檛 understand how to access virtual lessons. 鈥淚f they don鈥檛 know what to do, and it鈥檚 too frustrating for them, they just say, 鈥榊ou know what, forget it,鈥欌�� Edmond said.

Measuring Online Engagement

Some educators and policymakers have been looking for lessons learned from state policies around virtual schools, which have been teaching students remotely far longer than most traditional public schools. A for online schools, for instance, requires that schools notify a parent or guardian when a student has failed to respond appropriately to a school assignment from a staff member within five school days. In Oklahoma, virtual schools are to measure attendance by considering factors such as 鈥渙nline logins to curricula or programs, offline activities, completed assignments and testing.鈥�

But measuring engagement time online can be an imprecise science, said Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University鈥檚 College of Education and Human Development. A student might have schoolwork open in one window while spending more time on social media or a game in another window. Virtual schools that have quantified attendance as 鈥渙ne interaction per week鈥� fall well short of ensuring students are engaged, he said.

Virtual schools鈥� attendance monitoring methods have also been controversial. A 2016 Education Week investigation found that some virtual schools have a low bar for marking students present, which means attendance numbers don鈥檛 reflect students鈥� academic progress.

Miron thinks many traditional public schools, which have lower average class sizes than virtual schools, are well-positioned to keep students on track remotely, once they get procedures in order. 鈥淚 have confidence that with some training, for a class of 25 to 30 students, you can have face-to-face contact with them,鈥� he said.

Why Attendance Matters

There are myriad reasons why students may not be virtually attending classes during the COVID-19 crisis. Some lack access to Wi-Fi or digital devices. Others are more focused on basic necessities like getting food or taking care of siblings while parents are still at work.

Many schools are struggling to reach students who have not been engaged in learning since the pandemic hit, Education Week reported this week. Among more than 1,000 teachers who answered a nationwide survey this month from the Education Week Research Center, an average of 21 percent of their students have been 鈥渆ssentially truant鈥� or unreachable during COVID-19 closures.

Some districts, like Los Angeles Unified, have connected with most middle and high school students but elementary students. The average truancy rate was highest among students in middle school classes, according to EdWeek Research Center surveys of teachers.

69传媒, and students, need time and districtwide policies to 鈥渇igure out what the new routines are, and to make sure that they鈥檙e healthy and well,鈥� Patrick said. She compares the traditional model of taking attendance to the 鈥渇actory model of punching a time card,鈥� which doesn鈥檛 take into account the quality of a student鈥檚 learning experience.

Attendance monitoring might seem like too much of a logistical hassle for schools and parents when students are learning from home, but it may prove valuable once school buildings reopen, said Bree Dusseault, practitioner-in-residence for the Center for Reinventing Public Education.

鈥淭his attendance data is going to be very important for future teachers to know what students had access to, and it鈥檚 also going to be important for making sure that we don鈥檛 lose whole cohorts of students,鈥� Dusseault said.

All districts should be keeping records of students鈥� engagement with learning materials, though not with a goal of administering consequences or punishment, she said. Teachers who inherit students who were affected by the pandemic will benefit from records of which students were able to participate, and which ones struggled to engage.

69传媒 that already had systems in place to keep in touch with families by phone or email will have an easier time tracking virtual attendance, Dusseault said. For those that did not have measures in place, she recommended that now is a perfect time to start developing that infrastructure.

With everything from graduation requirements to shifting rapidly to accommodate the urgency of the pandemic, schools are now focusing more on whether students are learning than whether they鈥檙e merely present, according to Patrick.

鈥淢aybe this is an opportunity to really consider what we are taking attendance for,鈥� she said.