children out of school in america - University of Tennessee Digital ...

Truancy
Laws penalizing children and their parents for
truancy have existed for over a hundred years. Written
when this country was young and unformed,
they represented harsh we3pons to force disparate
people to observe the law. Attitudes against immigrants
or the lower classes often were captured in
the debates of these laws. For example, the Secretary
of the State Board of Education in Connecticut
in 1872 argued:
It is largely through immigration that the number
of ignorant, vagrant and criminal youth has recently
multiplied to an extent truly alarming in
some of our cities. Their depravity is sometimes
defiant and their resistance to moral persuasion is
obstinate. When personal effort and persuasion
and organized benevolence have utterly failed,
let the law take them in hand tirst to the public
school, and if there incorrigible, then to the Reform
School. Those who need education most
and prize it least are fit subjects for coercion....24
And in [909, New York's legislature amended its
compulsory attendance law to include the following
section:
Arrest of Truants - I.. The attendance officer
may arrest without a warrant any child between
seven and sixteen years of age and who is a truant
from instruction upon which he is lawfully required
to attend within the city or district of such
attendance officer. He shall forthwith deliver the
child so arrested to a teacher from whom such
child is then a truant, or, in the case of habitual
and incorrigible truants, shall bring them before
a police magistrate for commitment. ...25
Generations later. the thrust of truancy laws are
the same, although the language may have softened
somewhat over the years. There are still laws
threatening recalcitrant children and parents with
stiff punishment if a child is truant. 26 This has led
to criminal treatment of some parents and children.
We question the effectiveness of these sanctions to
compel school attendance.
First, our survey data show that an overwhelming
24 Bremner et al. (Ed,,) Chi/drell alld Youth ill America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971) p. 142l.
"' Bremner. pp, t427-1428,
26 See Appendix J.
62
majority of parents do not need threats to favor compulsory
attendance laws.
The reasons for endorsing the laws are varied.
Parents see schools as access routes to better jobs
and upward mobility, as teaching literacy and enhancing
self-worth, as helping their children fight
discrimination, and as places were children can safely
be kept off the streets. A Portuguese mother who
finished fourth grade in Portugal and who now lives
in Massachusetts says: "[The] law keeps them from
being able to quit to work when kids might want to
and this is good." A father whose parents pulled
him out of school to work said he had felt this "limited
opportunity in the job market." A Chicano
mother of three in Denver said: "If they would have
made me go to school, it would have been better. I
told my kids, 'the day you decide to quit, you'd better
have a job and an apartment of your own.' "
Second, even if means were needed to prod children
and parents into compliance with the law, it
does not at all follow that criminal proceedings or
severe disciplinary actions like suspension or expulsion
serve this purpose well,
Truancy in some cases simply is a child's way of
saying he or she does not like school. The reasons
for such distaste can be many. If schools cared
about effectively teaching all their students, truancy
would be seen as an act which triggered investigation
into why a child was not interested in and benefiting
from his present educational program. Steps then
might be taken to improve the relationship between
school and child.
Truancy can also be the child's way of handling
other personal problems: tattered clothing, dependent
parents or siblings, health problems. The attendance
supervisor in Holyoke, Massachusetts has
found a boy or girl absents himself or herself because
of a serious case of body lice. 27 In these instances,
punishment seems entirely inappropriate.
Rather, the school needs to find out about and alleviate
the conditions which bar children from attending
school.
Our interviews have led us to believe that, like
27 Richard Golden, "Report on Truancies" (Holyoke School
Board. February, 1973),