Aproxima-se mais um ano letivo e as velhas questões
surgem com abordagens mais ou menos retocadas, na substancia mas mantendo a
forma.
Trago-vos aqui um artigo sobre o absentismo escolar que julgo interessante. Publicado ontem no New York Times pese embora a relatividade da comparação que se possa fazer com a realidade Portuguesa existem obviamente aspetos muito similares e cujas conclusões aqui são vertidas neste artigo se baseia no estudo efetuado por Robert Balfanz, Vaughan Byrnes, Johns
Hopkins que estudam de modo profundo a dinâmica e evolução da sociedade Americana com particular incidência no ensino.
Artigo do New York Yimes, 26 agosto 2014
How to Get Kids to Class
To Keep Poor Students in School, Provide Social
Services
For the 16 million American children living below the
federal poverty line, the start of a new school year should be reason to
celebrate. Summer is no vacation when your parents are working multiple jobs or
looking for one. Many kids are left to fend for themselves in neighborhoods
full of gangs, drugs and despair. Given the hardships at home, poor kids might
be expected to have the best attendance records, if only for the promise of a
hot meal and an orderly classroom.
But it doesn’t usually work out that way. According to
the education researchers Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes at Johns Hopkins,
children living in poverty are by far the most likely to be chronically absent
from school (which is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of class
days each year).
Amazingly, the federal government does not track absenteeism,
but the state numbers are alarming. In Maryland, for example, 31 percent of
high school students eligible for the federal lunch program had been
chronically absent; for students above the income threshold, the figure was 12
percent.
Thanks to groundbreaking research compiled by Hedy
Nai-Lin Chang, the director at Attendance Works, we have ample proof that
everything else being equal, chronically absent students have lower G.P.A.s,
lower test scores and lower graduation rates than their peers who attend class
regularly.
The pattern often starts early. Last year in New
Mexico, a third-grade teacher contacted the local affiliate of Communities in
Schools, the national organization that I run, for help with a student who had
25 absences in just the first semester. After several home visits, we found
that 10 people were living in her two-bedroom apartment, including the
student’s mother, who had untreated mental health issues. The little girl often
got lost in the shuffle, with no clean clothes to wear and no one to track her
progress. Nor was there anything like a quiet place to do homework.
Embarrassment and peer pressure turned out to be the
most immediate problem. By buying new clothes to replace the girl’s smelly old
ones, we were able to help her fit in and get her to school more often. We
found additional community resources for both the third grader and her family,
including a mentorship group, a housing charity and mental health experts for
her mother. As her home life stabilized over the second semester, the absences
all but stopped, and at the end of the year she moved up with her class.
Her situation is common, but there are nowhere near
enough happy endings. That’s because policy makers usually treat dropout rates
and chronic absenteeism as “school” problems, while issues like housing and
mental health are “social” problems with a different set of solutions.
To bridge this divide, our community school model
seeks to bring a site coordinator, with training in education or social work,
onto the administrative team of every school with a large number of poor kids.
That person would be charged with identifying at-risk students and matching
them up with services that are available both in the school and the community.
This approach is effective and affordable: at
Communities in Schools, which operates in 26 states and the District of
Columbia, 75 percent of the students whose cases we manage show improved
attendance. We provide our services at an average cost of $189 per student per
year, a cost that is shared among government agencies and community partners to
minimize the impact on school budgets.
