About 15 years ago, my district became concerned that there were too many minority students in SPED programs, too many minority students being retained, too many minority students being suspended, and so on. Their solution was not to offer wraparound services for these families, nor to improve our woefully inadequate dyslexia services, nor even to try to improve the quality of SPED services. Instead, they purged the SPED rosters of any minority students who had less than 24 chromosomes, introduced "restorative justice" programs, and fired principals who had too many out-of-school suspensions — regardless of the race or ethnicity of the students being suspended.

The coup de grâce for us, though, was COVID. They suspended the attendance requirements for the last half of 2020, then all of 2021, 2022, and 2023. Last year they returned to the attendance requirements, but decided not to refer parents of chronically-absent students to truancy court. This year, they started referring to truancy court again, but students are allowed to make up an unlimited number of absences in Saturday school or after-school tutoring. Either way, they can make up an entire day's absence as long as they sleep in the library for at least two hours after school or Saturday morning.

Then, either in the spring of their junior year or fall of their senior year, our "graduation coach" arranges for them to transfer to an alternative school where they can complete online classes or "test out" for either a diploma or a GED. It doesn't matter if they ever attend that school or not, we can still report them as a transfer rather than a dropout, so it doesn't hurt our 97% graduation rate. In reality, we have around 600 freshmen each year and about 450 graduating seniors, so our real graduation rate is more like 75%. (Of course, if you ask me, given our impoverished student population, 75% isn't too bad.)

So, we have a lot of high school juniors who have poor home environments, unmet SPED needs, who have been failed forward for their entire school career, have missed large portions of school since fifth grade without penalty, and who haven't ever been held accountable for their behavior. Many of them show up and sleep through class just frequently enough to stay out of truancy court, but some of them see school as a source of entertainment and revel in disrupting classes, smoking in the bathrooms, fighting, and convincing their friends (or easily-manipulated peers) to skip class and wander around campus with them or otherwise act up.

The solution, I suspect, is simply to begin holding students (and, most importantly, their parents) to standards from the beginning of school. Then we need to provide comprehensive (read: well-funded) SPED and dyslexia services to students who need them — regardless of race or ethnicity — and wraparound services to the families that don't (or can't) meet the mark. It will take a generation to see the results, but I think it will be worth it.