Truancy report banks on smoke and not fire
I was a tween truant, a chronically absent adolescent, a statistic before such statistics were made so scary.
And yet I survived. I’ve been arrested once, “officially,” but I’ve never spent a day in jail and I don’t think I’ve been all that big of a drain on the state penal system, the social service system or any other system.
Still, according to the definitions of state Attorney General Kamala Harris’ report on “what truancy can do for you,” I should be locked up from causing mayhem, and pushing the public safety and judicial systems to the brink of chaos.
Yes, Kamala, you are Chicken Little. No, parents, educators and those easily scared by successful scare tactics, the sky is not falling.
As I edited our localization of this story Wednesday afternoon, where we focused on the truancy numbers and percentages for Imperial County and talked to local officials, I pulled up the report and looked over the statistics and definitions a little more closely. I’m no statistician or peer reviewer, but the state Attorney General’s Office clearly wants someone, anyone to be deeply, even gravely concerned about potential bogeymen.
It’s hard to get a bead on whether truancy and absenteeism is really a major factor in both youth and adult crime considering how badly the numbers are presented and skewed by questionable definitions and very tiny sample groups.
I cannot find anywhere in this report in which socioeconomics, location, education of the parents, whether children being raised in one-, two- or grandparent homes, or whether other interventions or disruptions in place are taken into account. It’s just raw, untreated data.
Do we know as a society that bad kids make bad adults? Sure, sometimes. Can we anecdotally attach a correlation between dropping out of high school with a trip through juvie, then county jail, eventually graduating to state prison? Again, probably in many instances.
Can the attorney general of California use really unscientific standards, sketchy math and leaps of faith to draw hard lines between kids who are late for kindergarten, becoming sixth-graders who miss 10 percent of the school year, to high school juniors who drop out, to career criminals in Pelican Bay?
Yes, because that is what has been done in essence in a very lazy and blanketing way. She’s got some accuracy on her side by virtue of the causes and effects of crime and the way nurturing a child works. But the whole cloth, numerical approach doesn’t.
The information presented seems to ask the media, parents and educators to suspend some disbelief, and it wasn’t until I read a column in the U-T Thursday morning that I saw my unease articulated elsewhere.
Imperial County is in the bottom 15 of the state’s counties in truant students at 23.5 percent. To give some context to our numbers, San Diego County, with 274,000 elementary students, has 19.2 percent truancy. Los Angeles County, with 818,000 students, has 20.5 percent truancy. Calaveras County has 31.2 percent truancy among its 3,200 students, while Yuba County, with 8,100 students, has 4.9 percent truancy.
Where’s the context? There is none, there’s no rhyme or reason to choosing these examples other than they are interesting and make the point that student populations vary so greatly from one county to the next that the percentages also vary greatly.
Harris’ definition of truancy is a student absent or tardy by more than 30 minutes without a valid excuse three times in a school year. Given that wording, it’s surprising the percentages are not larger, that this isn’t more of a “crisis,” again Harris’ word.
Is there really a truancy problem in this state given how easy it is to be considered truant? And can you take one scenario and play it all the way through to become something else, making the pieces fit and the data support theories along the way?
It’s like every other social problem in this country and in this state — the factors that contribute to troubled people living on the fringes of society exist on many different levels.
And like other social problems, it’s easier to attach blame somewhere and look for one-dimensional solutions than look for holistic approaches. Reports like this are just nonsense and diversions.