In the 2017-18 school year, over 17 percent of Berkeley High School students were chronically absent. “Chronic absenteeism” is defined by the California Department of Education as students who miss more than 10 percent of the school year. It includes both excused and unexcused absences. At BHS, this would translate to 18 missed days or 108 missed class periods. Attendance is important because, simply put, when students don’t go to their classes, they don’t learn. To encourage students to attend all their classes, the BHS administration uses both negative and positive reinforcement. The positive reinforcement is raffling off gift cards to students who have perfect attendance for that week, and the negative reinforcement is preventing students who have thirty or more unexcused absences from attending prom or receiving work permits. While both types of reinforcement are helpful, positive reinforcement is ultimately better than negative reinforcement.
Chronic absenteeism is an enormous problem at BHS. When students don’t go to class, they don’t learn, negatively affecting both their current and future academic performance, as well as their career outcomes. Students who are chronically absent any year between 8th and 12th grade are seven times more likely to drop out than their peers. In addition, when students return to school after being absent for a long time, teachers must spend time and effort catching them up. This takes away from time that could be spent on teaching the rest of the class, meaning that chronic absenteeism academically hurts all students, not just those chronically absent.
The BHS administration must do an effective job of preventing chronic absenteeism. One way that encourages students to attend their classes is by punishing students who have a significant number of absences. Their policy is that students with over 30 unexcused absences will not be able to attend prom/homecoming or receive work permits. To prevent this, students with many unexcused absences can get their absences removed from their record by attending after-school tutoring or Saturday school. This is good because it encourages the students who would benefit the most from these services to access them. However, even though they may cause absences to be removed from students’ records, they cannot fully make up for the damage caused by the missed classes.
Another way that BHS encourages reliable attendance is by rewarding students who do not have any absences on their record. According to Sandra Guzman, a BHS attendance technician, this is done by giving “gift cards to students,” and using “Friday raffles.”
Positive reinforcement is generally better because it increases motivation and self-esteem, while negative reinforcement often fosters resentment. However, the negative consequences of having an extremely high number of absences encourage students to, even if they do not always attend their classes, at least attend them most of the time and go to tutoring to clear their unexcused absences. Therefore, to improve attendance, BHS should expand its reward system for good attendance by creating more prizes for strong attendance such as gift cards, and maintain the negative repercussions for bad attendance.