Is school optional now?

I woke up this morning to my husband greeting me from the stairwell - he interrupted a dream that, in hindsight, I'm glad was interrupted so that I'd remember it. I was with my final class on the last day of school and had gotten distracted from whatever music video was playing on the Promethean Board. When I could once again draw my attention back to it, I saw that some strange, random fan-edited video was playing; I then looked at the clock and saw that there were only five minutes to the final bell, so I thought I'd play the kids out with something more fun. As I went to turn off the video and queue up a hype song, two students groaned at me, one saying "why'd you have to cut it off?" and the other chiming in, "right at that part, too..."

I didn't apologize. I continued to queue up the music. But as I did so, the two groaners began turning off the lights and shutting the blinds, leaving the room almost completely dark - void of that electric energy of the final moments of school we all remember. Before the song could really start, they all moved to the door, spilling out of the room, never to come back. I tried to yell - "there's still four minutes left!" - but they were gone, and I was alone.

As depressing as this dream may seem, it wasn't far from the reality of my true last day of school which occurred just two days before. I had set up a day for my students to have a "watch party" for their own adapted scenes of Romeo and Juliet - a project we'd been working on for well over a month. I thought it would be sweet (and a little cringy/embarrassing, but in a good way) for them to get to see all of their scenes on the last day, together, and then we'd have snacks and start taking the room down. A colleague and friend who introduced me to this project said this is what she'd always done, how she'd always ended her freshmen classes for the year. It was a simple, but fun send-off - something they'd always looked forward to.

But by my final class, normally 26 in size, only 9 students had showed up. So we watched the scenes in a dark room. We clapped for people who weren't there (one group had been absent entirely). When they were finished, I put on the World Cup, let the few remaining students' friends come in with passes, and cleaned up the room by myself. We had a fire drill in the last minutes of the day - don't ask me why - and as we led our hallway of a few meager bodies out to our usual spot, we told them to take their bags and leave from there. "Have a good summer, I guess!"

The funny thing is, on paper, attendance has never looked better. Every faculty meeting boasts a higher number month-over-month: 95.5% in January, 95.8% in March - unbelievably, 96% in May! That leaves only around 100 students in a school nearing 1600 chronically absent. But what this data excludes is the class-to-class attendance: where we celebrate in these bigger meetings kids showing up at all throughout the day, teachers in their individual classes are grappling with rampant hallway walking for 30-45 minutes at a time. We have kids texting their parents in the middle of a lesson under the table to pick them up because they're "not doing anything next block." I think I counted five students in the last two weeks who told me they were leaving early because the UV was high. Yes, you read that right.

We as teachers are celebrated by admin for "keeping them in school," but with this stark contrast in big picture vs. the everyday patterns, I can't help but feel absolutely deflated. I'm told I'm doing a great job at keeping them motivated and excited to come to school, but that doesn't feel true when the promise of food (that I'm paying for, mind you!) or a party on the last day of school can't even bring them in. Unless there is something that they must be there for - something tied to a grade - fewer students are showing up day-to-day.

It's difficult to understand what happened to the implicit agreement between students and school. Some blame it on the COVID years, but I think it's deeper and more complicated than that. Getting a formal education has pointed toward the same process and outcome for a long time: all children in proximity to this building, no matter their family background, culture, race, or sex, are to receive the same standard of education with the end goal of graduating high school. In my affluent area in particular, it is an expectation that 100% of them, or as close as possible to that percentage, will graduate - then 90% or more will move on to a four-year university. But therein lies one of the core issues, one I often discussed back in my own university's education program: absolutely all of their stakes are tied to a grade.

What I mean by this is that grades matter more than learning. They matter more than everything, actually. It doesn't matter if an individual teacher tries to destigmatize failure, or even an "average" grade of a C, as part of the learning process - students still deflate when they don't perform perfectly. Honors level students will "grade grub" until their report card looks how they expect it to, or until their parents are no longer threatening to take their phone away. Grade level students often give up entirely. The culture of "grades over everything" is a drastic and long-standing side effect of the No Child Left Behind movement, where, instead of having more support for struggling students across the board, school systems realized it was much easier to inflate the numbers and attach grades to absolutely everything. They had to, lest they lose government funding for not performing well enough. It all but destroyed young people's intrinsic desire to learn and improve skills.

And what's left is the mindset that if an assignment doesn't have a grade, it doesn't matter at all. If there is not something critically important happening in class on a given day, students are much less likely to attend (or their parents will schedule haircuts and dentist appointments in place of them - don't think I was going to leave parents out of this). As mentioned before, it's a common occurrence for them to ask around to their friends to see if they "did anything" in class, and if the answer is no, they text their parents to pick them up or write them out.

Clearly, this signals a change in values not only for this generation of kids, but their millennial parents, too. And as critical as I'd like to be of them, I think it's worth digging into the school system that they went through, especially seeing both the foundations and fallout of NCLB. They sat through standardized testing, watched student and teacher autonomy get deprioritized, and experienced school as a credentialing machine rather than a place of genuine learning. Some of their disengagement from school's authority isn't laziness, though it's easy to cast it off as such - it's a logical conclusion drawn from their own experience that the institution doesn't fully deserve the deference it demands.

They were also the beginning of the tide shift in how that deference is actually played out, and this I fully agree with: respect is only ever earned, it can't be demanded. They were the first generation raised on the idea that their feelings and experiences were centrally important. Millennial parenting culture skews heavily toward emotional validation and child-led decision making, which are genuinely good correctives to authoritarian parenting, but can curdle into a reluctance to ever ask a child to do something uncomfortable, challenging, or inconvenient. "My kid didn't want to go" becomes sufficient reason for chronic absenteeism. This, of course, contributes to the crisis of resiliency we see in young people today.

These parents and families are busier than ever - but I fear at the cost of genuine learning. And I don't mean learning the core subjects, studying Romeo & Juliet, the Pythagorean Theorem, or the Periodic Table. I mean social-emotional learning. Critical thinking. Debate. Collaboration. Conflict resolution. Real-life stuff. It feels like a catch-22: These are not skills that feel fair to "grade," but students and their parents are largely uninterested in participating if there is not some sort of consequential marker attached. The only solution I've personally found is what I call an "integrity grade," where, indeed, 10% of their quarterly grade reflects how well students have demonstrated their honesty, respect, and personal responsibility. It is by no means how I'd like to ensure they develop those character traits, but it seems to be the only thing that will work for many of them.

At the end of this school year, the most anticlimactic to date, I'm left wondering what we are actually asking students to come to school for, and whether that still makes sense to them, to their generation.

The American school system is no stranger to harsh criticism, especially lately, and a part of me cringes at participating in the pile-on. But it's necessary, especially as an insider, to call out what hasn't been working. Though teachers are generally well-liked and spoken about positively in our culture, we are not valued. Our opinions don't really seem to matter when it comes to systemic decision-making about our own jobs, and it always feels as though the people who actually get to make the changes haven't set foot in a classroom since the 80's. No one really understands what it's like unless they're currently in it. So it's our prerogative to get louder and louder until someone in power listens.

Here's what I think needs to happen: we need to abandon NCLB and unlearn all of the conditioning it brought into our schools - all of the attachment to grading, especially financial incentives. All it ever did was punish and defund schools with fewer resources to begin with, causing them to fall further into dysfunction. We need to instill in our students the belief and knowing that, sure, grades are important, but not the most important by a mile. What's more important, especially in this timeline, are skills in critical thinking, media literacy, conflict resolution, autonomy, interdependence, and resilience. In a sentence, school needs to focus much more heavily on life skills. Kids have been asking for this since I was in K-12.

I see teachers in their individual classrooms emphasize these skills all the time - the best ones I know make it a priority. But under the pressure of a system that wants so many other things from us, that wants to blame the kids' problems on phones or attention spans or how they're not doing enough standardized testing, or how their teachers aren't establishing a close and loving relationship with every single one of them, it is nothing short of a pipe dream to do that work without burning out eventually.

At our last-day-of-work luncheon yesterday, where we send off our retirees every year, one of them said something I won't soon forget: "This job is impossible. But weirdly, once you realize that it's impossible, it somehow becomes more possible." I think what she meant was that we can really only continue if we focus on the room we're in, and the kids who decide to show up. There will always be bigger problems to fix. There will always be families who don't value the work we're trying to do, parents who believe their kids when they say they're "not doing anything." But I love what I do - I love watching the kids make plans to film their projects at someone's house. I love reading chapters of John Green to them. I love watching how their perspective of social media changes after we watch The Social Dilemma. I love having real conversations with them.

So I will continue to show up, and I will be there as fully as I can be for the ones who meet me there.