- Atlanta Hawks point guard and former Rainier Beach High star Jamal Crawford, former Garfield High and UW star Will Conroy, and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn (the short guy on the left) introduce the “Be Here, Get There” campaign.
I somewhat ridiculed Mayor Mike McGinn during the 2009 mayoral race for attempting to make school reform a campaign issue. “The schools issue is a losing one for McGinn,” I insisted with my typical bluster and confidence. “He should be focusing on things he can actually do.”
Well, yesterday Mayor McGinn set out to prove me wrong once again (winning was the first time), by launching the city’s new “Be Here, Get There” campaign aimed at dramatically cutting truancy and improving attendance at Seattle’s public schools.
Argue all you want about cause and effect, but the correlation between school attendance rates and graduation rates is huge and indisputable. On average 9th graders who miss between 16 and 25 school days go on to graduate at a rate of only 59 percent, compared to an 87 percent graduation rate for peers who miss five or fewer days. The correlation for unexcused absences is even stronger, with only 35 percent of 9th graders missing 21 to 25 unexcused days going on to graduate.
Improve attendance, improve graduation rates—or so the thinking goes. The modest goal is for 80 percent of students to miss fewer than 10 days of school a year, up from the 62 percent rate today.
To this end the mayor’s office worked in collaboration with the district, the Alliance for Education, and Get Schooled, to develop an outreach and incentive program designed to create awareness among students and their families about how critical regular attendance is to the child’s academic success, and to induce attendance through various prizes. At the elementary school level the classroom with the most improved attendance record will win a prize each month (like a Pagaliacci Pizza party), and the classroom’s teacher will receive a Starbucks gift card. At the middle and high school level, all students with five or fewer absences per semester will be entered in a drawing for prizes ranging from food, to a Raleigh bike. The schools that most improve attendance will receive school-wide prizes, like a visit from Molly Moon’s ice cream truck.
All the prizes are being donated by local businesses, so the entire program costs taxpayers nothing, and the campaign’s progress can be tracked at the Get Schooled Seattle website, providing a real-time accounting of the program’s success. Get Schooled also provides tips and tricks for improving attendance and staying in school, plus a celebrity wakeup call service where students can sign up to receive personal wakeup calls from the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Nicki Minaj, Trey Songz, Greyson Chance, Ciara, and Sway Calloway. I’ve got no idea who any of these people are, so they must be cool (or whatever it is kids call “cool” these days)!
Is McGinn delivering the kind of dramatic reforms that will transform Seattle schools? Obviously, no. A mayor can’t do that. But he deserves credit for providing initiative and leadership on the absenteeism problem, while focusing on things he can actually do.
Maybe he should be superintendent.
So who is doing “mayoral” things while he runs at tangents?
This frustrates me mightily. Not city business and not strategic, just a campaign ploy.
Because athletes, especially high-profile basketball stars, and especially those from RBHS, care so much about academics.
Yeah, bribe ’em to stay in school, or to get good grades, that’ll work! : P
As a society, we don’t give a rat’s ass about education. Credentialing is what matters. It would be nice to reach a point where everyone is honest enough with themselves to admit that…
Didnt a number of McGinns staff take an extended leave of absense to run the anti-Tunnel campaign? Seems kinda odd that once again the Mayor is trying to fix something he has no real power or control over and at the same time, not really leading by example.
So McGinn isn’t going to make it past his primaries in a couple years?
@3,
Why couldn’t it work? Society not caring about education trickles down to the students themselves. Giving them something tangible to get their butts in the seats (other than brownie points or the vague promise of a career in a decade) could potentially work, at least if it’s based on improvement over time, and not just raw numbers.
A robocall from some celebrity to wake up in the morning is probably only slightly more effective than one of those “The More You Know” ads or some motivational cartoon of a dog in sunglasses who raps and plays basketball. Who comes up with this shite?
Goldy, as a former truant Seattle School alum, I can tell you that the correlation is backwards. Being forced to sit in your seat and listen to roll call, endless back talking and busy work does not lead to high graduation rates. Kids who get something from class go to class, those that don’t skip. If they skip too much, they lose credit and can’t graduate.
So of course there’s a correlation, its built right into the policy. Those that get into the habit of skipping keep skipping until they have a better use of their time. Rather than bribing them to sit through pointless wastes of time, a better strategy would be to improve the time they are there.
IMHO, that’s firing the old garbage teachers. But that’s not in the cards so maybe a starbucks card will work.
Cause and effect is pretty relevant to argue about here. This particular theory of change seems specious on its face.
These comments are really something. The mayor tries to get kids to go to school regularly and with no cost of the taxpayer. And most of your commentors think this is crummy. Goldy must have the conservatives really scared because they spend so much time trolling his comments.
@8 That is my line of thinking on this as well. Attendance & Graduation Rate correlate because they have the same underlying cause: interest in school (specifically the teaching methods or material being taught in each class)
Those who find their classes engaging attend them and do well, those that aren’t engaged are likely not to attend class (some attend even if they aren’t engaged, which would explain the ~15% negative offset on graduation rates)
A study would have to be done to confirm this; though the results wouldn’t be as strong as the attendance/graduation rate data, given that student engagement would be a qualitative measure.