School Attendance Should Be Voluntary

709 Words3 Pages
I believe that school attendance should be voluntary. Some people may think that this is a bad idea, but I don’t see how it possibly could be. Voluntary school attendance can have plenty of benefits, and it sounds like students would really welcome the idea of voluntary school attendance. The president commented on five education topics in his 2012 state of the union address, recommending federal action on four: job training, teacher effectiveness, learning standards, and college costs. His fifth recommendation, for states to increase the age of compulsory school attendance to 18, was an outlier in that this is an area of undisputed state authority and he proposed no federal action to incentivize states to act. One would imagine that the evidence on the impact of the compulsory school attendance age had to be strong and imperative for the states to act compelling to justify his foray into this area in his most watched speech of the year. Had President Obama not spoken of this issue at all, it would still be an important policy question. According to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, 13 states were considering legislation to raise the compulsory school attendance age to 18 in 2010. 1 Passing such legislation is hardly automatic. Only one state of the 13, Maryland, has subsequently passed legislation to increase its compulsory school attendance age, and it is doing so in gradual steps that will not lead to a required attendance age of 18 until the 2017-18 school year. One news headline sums it up: Obama Push on Mandatory Attendance Age Stalls in States. 2 What is the evidence of the effects on student attendance and high school graduation of the compulsory school attendance (CSA) age? Would increasing the CSA age to 18 in states in which it is presently lower produce noticeable benefits in terms of higher graduation rates? What are the
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