Jimmy, here. Janie, here...

It's time to rethink every aspect of education.  That would include the mandatory attendance laws.  In America it is considered a right rather than a privilege to get an education.  That worked for about 50 years.  Now the generation being raised doesn't know that the right also carries with it a responsibility.  They only see the privilege it is capable of producing.

I find it indicative of this generation's parents that they are blaming the standardized tests for their children's poor performance in school.  But they are falling for the distraction, not the root cause for poor performance.  When a standardized test is scored, it compares in one way or another a student's performance to all the other students.  Stanines are used, a Bell Curve is used, or some similar statistical measure is used so that people can tell more accurately where a student stands than does a teachers' manipulated grading system in measuring student knowledge alone.  In Texas, at the moment, parents are up in arms because the "best" students are not scoring well on tests.  It's always possible that a wrong key was used in grading.  It's just unlikely.

It's more likely that student performance in the classroom is so poor that teachers have had to use means other than knowledge in order to boost performance, or even more likely, that a student is not in a competitive environment with a teacher, so a student's average  is high because of the number of revisions allowed for papers, make-up work, and participation grades.  So, this generation of parents want to shift blame than have their children become responsible for their own behavior.

But testing and grading are results of a wider problem.  Attendance is indelibly intertwined with grades.  Parents don't always see the number of absences, the amount of make-up work allowed without instruction, when 20 or more groups on a campus are pulling students from classes for one reason or another.  School sponsored absences account for a lot of absences for athletes on trips for out-of-town contests, for theater and band competitions, for club conferences, for shortened days and stunted weeks for holidays and testing, for UIL competitions, for field days, for number of days allowed for "sick" absences, for sitting in the waiting room of a vice-principal or counselor, for schoolwide fairs and science projects... the list really is almost endless.

Reconfiguring the school's instructional system would naturally affect all of the above activities, so attendance would have to be addressed.  The bottom line is that attendance laws make education ineffective.  Attendance laws have the effect of turning educational institutions into daycare learning centers where "well-roundedness" of a social and instructional mix of activities lead to not enough time for learning.  It leads to a very different definition of mastery than is used in most other circumstances.  In fact, if mastery were defined well and adhered to in the newly reconfigured school, attendance would take care of itself.  It would also draw a line between those who are responsible and those who are not.  And when responsibility is tied to money and basic needs, an individual's creativity in a gifted area rises to the top.  Everyone responds to incentive.

There should be a definite end to the attendance laws since they have not produced the quantum leap forward in education that the WWII parents had envisioned or that the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson's policies predicted.  They have produced a generation of those who want the right to an education with the privileged economy it is designed to produce without the responsible learning that it takes to support and improve the economy.  Reconfigure the schools, then watch the performance of the students change.  Attendance does affect output.  The natural consequence for lack of attendance tied to productivity and total time in a program would force students to switch program schools for not meeting deadlines or the mastery required when proceeding to the next level of training, experience, and simulation.  Also, if proven productive principles are adhered to, then most of the reasons for poor attendance disappear.

If incentives and productivity are linked to progress, attendance will not figure in to nearly all students' progress.  For the very small percentage that it does figure in, it would be easy to fund an all-experience school or type of business where lackadaisical students can either store up experience credits for a time in their lives when they have more incentive to complete a program or make a little money for their time spent in a service or retail business.