Michael Zwaagstra: Ontario Government Right to Make Attendance Count for Marks

Commentary

Imagine you own a business and an employee regularly fails to show up for work. What would you do? Unless the employee had a valid reason, chances are you would dock that employee’s pay for the hours they missed. In the most egregious cases, you would fire the employee and hire someone else.

What you would almost certainly not do is simply accept that this employee isn’t interested in showing up for work. One of the most important parts about having a job is showing up. If you can’t do that, there isn’t much point in working there.

This principle works elsewhere in life, too. For example, if students regularly skip class, their marks should be negatively impacted. To get a quality education, regular attendance is not optional—it’s essential.

Unfortunately, absenteeism is a growing problem in Ontario schools. Far too many students skip classes and expect teachers to accommodate them. Not only does this create extra work for classroom teachers who are typically expected to help absent students catch up when they return, but it also makes it difficult for students to pass their courses.

The Ford government is finally taking steps to address this problem. In one notable change, attendance will now count for 15 percent of the final mark in grades 9 and 10 courses, and 10 percent in grades 11 and 12 courses. For students who care about their marks, this creates an obvious incentive to regularly attend classes.

Critics of this new policy argue it’s not good assessment practice to consider attendance when calculating student marks. In their view, learning behaviours such as attendance are separate from learning outcomes, so behaviour factors such as attendance should be kept separate from and reported independently from academic grades.

However, this argument overlooks the day-to-day realities of classroom teaching. Most teachers will tell you there’s a world of a difference between the theory of assessment and dealing with real-life students. It sounds nice to keep student behaviour and mastery of learning outcomes completely separate, but in reality these factors are closely intertwined.

For example, students who regularly skip classes typically get lower marks because they miss important instructional time with their teachers. But unless you directly tie attendance to marks by telling students they will lose marks for every class they skip, many students will fail to make the connection. Deducting marks for skipping can be an effective way of encouraging students to make the right decision.

If some of this debate sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2012, Edmonton physics teacher Lynden Dorval was fired by his school district because he refused to go along with his principal’s no-zeros edict. According to no-zero policies, teachers cannot give a mark of zero for any assignment, even when students deliberately choose not to hand in the assignments, purportedly because not handing in an assignment is a behaviour and should have no impact on students’ final marks. In other words, the Edmonton school district prioritized a theory of assessment over the lived experiences of classroom teachers.

Unsurprisingly, no-zero policies have proved to be a total disaster wherever they are tried. That’s because students quickly realized they could get higher marks if they were selective about which assignments they chose to hand in. Teachers were handcuffed in their ability to give meaningful consequences since students knew their teachers could not deduct marks for late work and could not give zeros for work that never came in.

Just as the arguments for no-zero policies were based on an excessively rigid theory of assessment, critics of the Ontario government’s plan to incorporate attendance in the final grades of students make the same mistake by failing to consider the daily realities of teaching and learning. Obviously, making attendance count for marks won’t solve absenteeism overnight. But it’s a step in the right direction to bring some common sense back into school classrooms.

Michael Zwaagstra is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.