The fact that families have to provide an attendance report does not mean that secretaries in schools with high Free&Reduced lunch have the time to devote to this. When what will primarily be, low income families, show up at the last minute for the attendance records on possibly as many as 5 diff. kids in 5 diff. schools, it will be a joke. The schools will not stop everything they are doing to provide this in the time frame the family wants/needs. Then they'll be mad and so on and so forth.

Since every district in Mi. is using diff. software for attendance its not as if the DHS office can link to a school for the records. And since they are understaffed b/c our state under the Republicans is doing SO WELL (sarcasm) this will just be a waste of human energy.

This is nothing more than a 'move more people off the dole' and 'move them out of state'. And that's what it will do. That and result in much higher homelessness among students-who guess what? They struggle to get to school!

I'm an attendance freak. I think the easiest thing we expect of parents is to get their kids off to school in the morning. Not doing so is neglect, IMO.

BUT --- this appears to be just another attack on the poor. And like you said, the schools just don't have time to jump through even more hoops.

that in Michigan, the primary people this will hurt are single white females with young children. That's not Detroit. Unless or until the United States gets serious about dealing with this segment of the population, we will continue to have an unguarded pathway of poverty for America's children. And we all know, that the children who miss school are poor. Often very poor.

i am a teacher and am also an attendance freak. but taking food off the family table for a high school freshman's irresponsibility is just another humiliation of the poor. and bullshit.

Certainly parents would be responsible for getting 6 year-olds off to school, but 15 year-olds are an entirely different matter. I know of one case with a defiant child who's mother drove her to school every day and picked her up after school every day. The mother found out later that the girl walked in the front door and out the back, returning to school when it was time to be picked up. In addition to getting the child to and from school, the mother had the child in counseling -- social worker, psychiatrist, psychologist. If that mother had been in Michigan and on public assistance, what else could she have done to prevent her child's truancy? Why should an entire family suffer because of the actions of one child?

And, what happens when a defiant child realizes the economic power they have over a parent just by ditching school? What a way for a child to aggravate a parent.

This whole plan is nothing more than a state's attempt to reduce their public assistance program without actually taking the unpopular step of eliminating it. They are placing the onus on an already troubled child. More of the war on the poor and on women who are the largest group on public assistance.

I'm guessing not.

And while the only achievement gap we care about is that between whites and blacks or Latinos or Native Americans, there's a hefty low-SES/high-SES white achievement gap that nobody seems to say much about except teachers and their principals.

The little rich bastards are less likely to be in the bottom quartile of students, less likely to drop out of school, less likely to be receiving entitlement funds until they retire.

It's not the little rich bastards that teachers are held to the high standards of keeping up with the high achieving kids or even average students.

It's not the little rich bastards who start school with a vocabulary deficit, a deficit in phonological analysis, and who continue to accrue this and so many other deficits barring intervention programs from the time they're sentient to the time they leave home.

However, in this case there's another point to be made: The state has less leverage over the little rich bastards' parents. This country's all about using money to control people and subordinate governments, from highway funds to education funding to Medicaid funding. Granted, I think it's a bad practice. It's nonetheless a common one, and this is just the same practice extended slightly.