Transcript: Alec MacGillis

My conversation with the award-winning investigative journalist

In Ontario, where I live, schools were closed for 135 days during the pandemic. Both here and in the United States, there was very little critical media coverage on this unprecedented public policy. But my guest on this week’s program was reporting on those left behind by school closures from the very beginning.

Now, he’s covering an element of the aftermath that’s not getting much attention — the crisis in absenteeism.

Alec MacGillis is an author and an award-winning investigative journalist. He’s a reporter at ProPublica, and his latest piece, published both there and at The New Yorker, is “Has School Become Optional?”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Alec, welcome to Lean Out.

AM: Thanks for having me.

TH: It's wonderful to have you on the program today to talk about your latest reporting, in a partnership between ProPublica and The New Yorker. In that piece, you note that “Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10% of school days, or 18 in a year — nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to 28% of students.” Now some cities have rates of more than 40%. You have reported on the impacts of pandemic school closures from the very beginning. What do we know, in broad strokes, about the group of students who are most affected here?

AM: Well, what's remarkable about this rise in chronic absenteeism is that it really is happening everywhere. It's pretty extraordinary. The rates are going up even in middle class suburbs. But the rates are worst in our big cities. Our cities that struggle with poverty and other issues saw fairly high rates of absenteeism even before the pandemic. But that's now shot up, since the pandemic, to where a lot of cities are actually now over 50%, even when it comes to their chronic absenteeism, which again means missing 10% of school days. So that's 18 days in a school year. Miss more than 18 days, you're chronically absent. And we've now got a lot of cities that are above 50%, which is astonishing.

What I found, going around the country and talking to people about this problem — and I focused on some working class suburbs of Detroit — what I found was that there's just been, in a lot of families, a complete erosion of the norm of going to school.

Over decades, in our country and elsewhere — but it really started in the U.S. — we had built up this expectation that you go to school. That's just what you do. And if you're not going to school, then you even had a word for that, you were a “dropout.” But you went to school. During the pandemic, during that year or more of closures in a lot of cities, that norm just eroded. The routine, the habit of going to school, fell away. In a lot of families, it became kind of optional to go to school.

It wasn't that big a deal if you missed a day or two or three just because you didn't feel like it, or you maybe felt some sniffles, or you hadn't slept well, or it was cold and rainy out. Whatever it might be, that threshold for making that decision about whether to go to school or not has kind of fallen somewhat with the erosion of that norm. It's an enormous challenge now, because what do you do? How do you build back a social norm, a routine? That is really what we're talking about right now.

TH: And when you layer in other circumstances, like poverty or family challenges, it can get very complicated. Tell us the story of King and Jisaiah Prude.

AM: They were two children that we were looking for in the suburbs — they’re called the downriver suburbs of Detroit, these industrial towns that stretched down southwest of Detroit, where a lot of the big auto plants are. I was out with a woman by the name of Shepria who works for a company called Concentric that gets hired by school districts to go out looking for chronically absent kids. This company has been around for a little more than a decade, and their business is now booming because you've got all these districts that are desperate to find these absent kids. 

She is working for these districts in the Detroit area. She had this whole list of kids on this day, and it was my third day going out with her. She was going looking for these kids on her list, and we came to this one house. A small house, that had a brother and sister living there that were on her list. They've been missing a lot of days. They were nine and 11 years old, if I recall right.

She knocked on the door and the mom was home. Mom has eight kids, most of them were home, gathered around her. The mom was actually quite friendly and said that what had happened was that Jisaiah and King had woken up in the morning. She'd gotten them up to go to school in the morning, but then what she told the worker, who was coming to the door, was that she had left the house. The kids assumed she was going off to her job as a security guard, and when she came back, they had not gone to school, but had gone back to bed. By that point, it was 10:30 a.m. or so, and she decided it was too late to send them to school. What she told me later, when I went back to talk to her more that evening, was slightly different. It sounded like she had gone to back to bed after getting the kids up, because her job was actually usually at night. She'd gone back to bed and then when she'd woken up, the kids were still at home. In any case, the kids were still at home.

It's a very common situation in a lot of families, where you have parents with tough work and sleep schedules, where they're not necessarily fully present in that morning period when you're getting kids off to school. The mom, her name was Kuanticka. What Kuanticka told me was that it had just gotten a lot tougher since Covid. Because during that year when schools were closed, as she put it, the kids just got too comfortable. 

That was the word I kept hearing people use: comfortable. There was a certain ease and comfort to that pandemic period, when kids were doing school online. You would log on, or maybe you wouldn't log on. You were in the comfort of home. Literally, there was no struggle to get kids out of the house, in the right clothes, to the bus, to the car, or whatever it might be. We were all just kind of giving ourselves a pass, in a sense, in these districts that had such long school closures. It's really hard to get kids and families back into that basic rigor of going to school even when it's cold and rainy out. That's what this particular mom was articulating quite well — that challenge. And she was just kind of overwhelmed by it.

TH: I want to note here, for our Canadian listeners, that the province of Ontario, where I live, closed schools for 135 days during the pandemic. The Ontario Science Table, in 2022, reported a sixfold increase in severe absenteeism. You write, in the piece, that absenteeism “underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health — exacerbated by social isolation — and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours.” You point out that this issue has attracted little attention from either elected officials or the national media. That is certainly the case here in Canada. Why do you think that is?