Journalistic curmudgeon H.L. Mencken once remarked that the main purpose of modern politics was to keep the public alarmed and eager to be led to safety “by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
A cynic might hear the echoes of Mencken after California Attorney General Kamala Harris this week released a report calling attention to an elementary-school truancy “crisis” – and asking for far-reaching measures to deal with parents who let their kids repeatedly skip school.
California’s “shocking” levels of truancy are “at the root of the state’s chronic criminal-justice problems,” according to Harris. No one wants youngsters skipping school, hanging out in gangs, and heading for a life of crime, of course. But a closer look at the report raises the question: Is this a full-fledged crisis or a hobgoblin?
“In California, students are marked truant when they miss school or come late by more than 30 minutes without a valid excuse at least three times during an academic year,” according to a recent report in U-T San Diego. A “habitual truant” is someone who misses five days of school without an excuse over the course of, say, a 175-day school year.
Many kids have serious truancy problems, but sky-high truancy rates – more than 19 percent in San Diego County districts, and much higher in some other parts of the state – are inflated because of such broad definitions.
I recall receiving a truancy warning letter from a school principal because my daughter was late a couple of times. She was a straight-A student and active in extracurricular events, but had issues getting ready in the morning.
“Schools lose money every time kids are truant,” explains Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, which is critical of teachers' unions. “There’s a need for different categories of truancy.”
