West Virginia education officials are able to show how student absenteeism drives down performance in the classroom.
State school officials also described just a portion of homeschooling families submit required academic assessments — to the point that the state education system can’t even pinpoint what grade thousands of those students should actually be in.
All of that information was discussed during a Wednesday meeting of the state Board of Education.
West Virginia aims to reduce chronic absenteeism by at least 50% over the next five years, said Michele Blatt, state superintendent of schools.
She defined chronic absenteeism as being missing from the classroom 10% or more of the school year, amounting to 18 days or more.
This year’s data already shows some reduction of absenteeism, Blatt said. Current data shows 23.5% of West Virginia students are considered chronically absent, which is down from 27.6% the previous year.
“So I think we’re on the right track,” Blatt said.
Georgia Hughes-Webb, director of data analysis and research for the state Department of Education, said attendance has improved across the state. She said 93% of districts have improved their attendance rates. “It’s very encouraging,” she said.
Statistics that Blatt presented show that students who attend regularly perform significantly better across grade levels. She illustrated her point with a slide that showed performance differences in English and language arts.
“If you only look at the students that attended school regularly, the ones that were not chronically absent, you can actually see the gains that those students achieved,” she said.
“This is consistent when you go through the grade levels and when you also go through the various content.”
The same performance differences were clear across grade levels for mathematics.
The state school system also drew a connection between chronic absenteeism and behavior incidents.
“Students that had no discipline referrals outperformed the others by large percentages,” Blatt said.
“So being in school and behaving in school consistently across grade levels is an increase in our achievement and the results that we see for our students.”
On homeschooling, state education officials said only some families are submitting their required academic assessments — a number that grows smaller as students get older.
For third graders, submissions of academic assessments are at 71 percent.
For fifth graders, the submissions are at 69 percent.
For eighth graders, it’s 65 percent.
And for 11th graders, the number plummets to 36 percent.
“I think a lot can be said about third grade and the seriousness that we’re taking that, but there is a lot of concern when we look at 11th grade and only 36 percent are submitting their assessments. The concern there is, are we losing students by the time they get to 11th grade to homeschool for the wrong reasons. Because if they were there to be educated, we would think that we would see those assessment results.”
Blatt described some context to the numbers. For example, the data is reported by counties from information collected there.
“As we started reviewing this data, we have approximately 3,100 students who we’re not sure what grade level they are actually in. Out of those students, 131 of them submitted an assessment,” she said.
Blatt went on to say the amount of information that parents and counties are required to submit is limited. “So when I say we’re not sure about a grade level it’s because they give an age at one time in that child’s career, so if I enroll a student and say the child is five then we don’t know anything about that child until we look to see if there’s a third grade assessment submitted. Of course that gets trickier as the child gets older and they’re leaving public schools and going into home school.”
She said the information is the best available, though. Efforts to get the information include phone calls and letters to families. A final step could be courthouse petitions to make families provide the assessment information or give up homeschool privileges.
“As we look at this data, we see a great increase in the percentage of assessments submitted for last year so we want to thank our homeschool parents and our counties, especially for early grades, in getting that data submitted,” Blatt said. “But with approximately 24,000 home school students in our state we still have a lot of tracking and reporting and things that need to occur.”