Skipping school the Canadian way
Author 'really surprised': Several nations with poor attendance do well on academics
 
Heather Sokoloff

National Post


Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Canadian teenagers are among the world's worst offenders when it comes to skipping school, with one in four regularly not showing up for class, according to a new report on students' feelings about school.

Only Spain, Denmark, Greece, New Zealand and Iceland report higher absentee and tardiness rates among 15 year-olds in the 28 countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Students in the United States are more likely to attend class than their Canadian counterparts, with one in five admitting they regularly skip school. In the United Kingdom only 15% report unexplained absences. Students in Japan and South Korea almost never skip.

"I was really surprised," said Douglas Willms, director of the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy in Fredericton and author of the OECD report. "I wasn't expecting such high truancy levels from Canadian students."

He said part of the problem might be that educators are putting too much attention on standardized testing.

Though most Canadian educators had no idea their students skipped more than those in other countries, everyone said absenteeism is a long-standing problem.

In Ontario, school boards are required to employ at least one attendance counsellor. The York Region District School Board, Ontario's second-largest, has nine counsellors to track down chronically absent students.

"We don't have all the answers when it comes to public education," said Bruce Nicholson, a high school principal in Abbotsford, B.C. "But the one thing we know for sure is that students who come to school do better than those who don't."

Ten years ago, Mr. Nicholson and the two vice-principals at Yale Secondary started calling up the parents of truant students each morning. The measure improved things, said Mr. Nicholson, although enough students still skip to warrant holding a full-day detention several Saturdays each month.

But if absentee rates in Canada are increasing, the recent focus on standardized testing may be partly to blame, Dr. Willms said. It is a surprising statement coming from the University of New Brunswick researcher, an advocate of provincial testing programs. He said policy makers need to remember literacy and math scores are not the only measures of a successful education system. A far more complicated factor, recently labelled "student engagement," is crucial in predicting who goes on to university and who drops out of school.

A report released last week from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, written by Dr. Willms using data from OECD tests, found half of Canadian high school students scoring in the top 40% in math and literacy do not pursue post-secondary education because they feel disaffected from school. The report found the majority of those students were from middle-class and affluent families, and felt they did not fit in at school.

Dr. Willms suggests schools undertake the difficult task of improving relations between students and teachers.

The OECD report is among the first to probe students' feelings about their learning environment in order to gauge whether a student's sense of belonging at school affects academic performance.

In the case of absenteeism, the answer is unclear. Frequently absent students are often low achievers, but not at the bottom. On average, they scored at Level 2 on a five-level literacy scale, showing at least a basic level of skill.

More surprisingly, some of the strongest performers on international tests in math and literacy -- including Canada, New Zealand and Finland -- all report some of the highest absenteeism rates in the world, with more than a quarter of students regularly skipping class.

Fewer than 15% of students in Germany and Luxembourg skip school. But those countries are hardly ones Canada would want to emulate. Both traditionally perform at the bottom of the industrial world in math and literacy tests.

PLAYING HOOKY:
Average percentage of students who skip classes

Spain: 34%
Poland: 29%
Canada: 26%
Sweden: 24%
Mexico: 21%
United States: 20%
France: 15%
United Kingdom: 15%
Korea: 8%
Japan: 4%
hsokoloff@nationalpost.com

© Copyright 2003 National Post

I've never skipped.    Somehow my dad would find out and I'd be in a crap load of trouble.  Wish I could skip math, I am not a mathimation.

Sock