The Power of Grit on School Attendance

New school year means a new initiative will start.  Ours is improved school attendance.  This is my ninth year in my building and over and over again, I see the same attendance patterns play out.  We spend lots of work hours on our chronic truants between meetings and phone calls.  No we have shifted our effort towards reaching the chronic absentee.  Folks, this is a worthwhile endeavor that can reach more kids and improve academic performance.  We have turned to Attendance Works to shift towards a system of support, rather than a system of consequence for absenteeism.

Kids are absent from school for lots of different reasons.  As educators we know some do not have the support system that other students have.  Some have medical conditions that are out of their control.  And some just lack grit.  Those are the students I think we can impact as a school and as parents.

Angela Duckworth has made a career of research and writing on grit.  I read her book this summer and though it does not specifically provide insight on improving school attendance, it does provide a framework of habits and qualities that can help.  Grit defined in it's simplest definition is the passion and sustained persistence it takes to pursue long term goals.  It's about resilience and self-control.  The book is a great read.  But what does grit have to do with chronic absenteeism?

Why do kids miss school?  Surveys suggest that kids feel less engaged and connected with school as they get older.  To be clear, engaging students in the education process is the job of the school.  It should be our mission to help them see that school is theirs.  Grit is a personal quality of a student that arrives to our building.  So who then has that responsibility?  Families can raise gritty kids.  Gritty kids not only attend school, they power through obstacles and have a sense of purpose for what ever they take on.  They participate in extra-curricular activities and learn from adverse experiences.

What can parents do to raise gritty kids?  Duckworth describes this as "wise parenting" and it has only a few, but impactful components:

• Authoritative (not authoritarian)
• Hold high expectations
• Offers lots of support

She writes that this style helps produces kids that not only perform better, but they will try to match or surpass their parents through imitation.

After dealing with truant students for almost 13 years as an administrator, I can tell you that our kids that miss a bunch have parents that are not practicing this style of parenting.  Don't get me wrong, we have kids that miss a bit that do have gritty parents.  Again, we are not focusing on those with medical conditions or the severely poverty stricken (those could be a separate post).  We are talking about the kids that are staying home all day because they just didn't want to go.  The parents will call them in sick and go about they day.  This kind of permissive (or a lack of) parenting will hurt the student in the long run.

Instead, that parent should have consequences in place for blowing off school, communicated goals for school performance and be connected to the school if the child is not feeling supported by the school.  These meet the wise parent guidelines that Duckworth has set forth.  I can't tell you how many times I get the response "I just don't know what to do with them anymore."  When parents and caregivers lack grit, so will their kids.  This is best built from the ground up when they are small.  Trying to come in on the back end in adolescence is quite difficult.

Now that we are moving to a model of support, wise parenting will the be the dialog with our families.  Grit is a great personal quality that all of us can support in kids.  They will attend better and perform better and are more likely to lived more fulfilled lives as adults.