Opinion |- CalMatters

By John England, especially for CalMatters

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Governor Gavin Newsom and I don’t have much in common politically. He is the Democratic governor of California; I work for a think tank in Utah that supports limited government. Newsom opposes school choice and has placed a moratorium on some new charter schools in California. I am a former public school principal who has become an advocate for school choice and supports alternatives such as charter schools.

On one thing, Newsom and I agree — criminalizing chronically absent students and their families is a bad idea.

The school attendance crisis is real. almost one in four students it is chronically lacking throughout the country. Absentees put pressure on students who fall behind and on teachers who are left to fill in the gaps.

Some lawmakers believe that addressing chronic truancy, also known as truancy, can be achieved through courtrooms and criminal codes. They say if parents are threatened with fines or jail time, students will start showing up.

It sounds harsh. It is also wrong. Criminal laws for truancy ignore the real reasons children skip school. Instead, these laws turn the frustration of a complex problem into a blunt legal hammer.

As a public school principal, I have always been concerned about chronic absenteeism. I have spent many hours with parents and students trying to understand why the school is not working for them.

Some teachers wanted me to go to court. But legal action never solved the problem. It was simply a way of conveying a problem that schools did not feel equipped to address. The feeling was understandable. The solution was not.

Truancy is not a politically biased issue. Timmy Truett, Republican of Kentucky, and Kamala Harris, a former Democratic vice president, senator and attorney general from California, pushed for tougher penalties for absenteeism.

In Kentucky, a Act of 2024 the court referral requirement for truant students has led to a wave of families withdrawing their children from public schools to homeschool rather than face legal consequences.

And in California, Harris’ policy of arresting and charging parents with misdemeanors has had equally troubling results. A mother from California was arrested after her daughter, who has sickle cell anemia, skipped school due to hospitalizations.

Harris, while running for president, said he regretted the criminalization of truancy in California. And Newsom in early October signed a bill ending California’s policy of punishing parents with a fine or a year in jail for their children’s chronic truancy.

All truancy laws share a fatal flaw: they ignore why students are absent in the first place.

Health problems, bullying, economic hardship and weak connections at school are often the real obstacles. Threatening parents doesn’t help resolve them. This only deepens the divide between families and schools.

Beneath the statistics lives an uncomfortable truth that few want to speak out loud: public schools don’t work well for every student.

Some face dangerous or hostile environments. Others face ideological conflicts or simply feel lost in the system. Families often give up because their schools don’t meet their needs.

There is a better solution. Schools must move from punishment to prevention. Over the past 15 years, many countries have made tremendous progress toward this goal.

Iowa built a data system to catch absent models early. Georgia is required teams present and school climate committees. These efforts share one trait—they treat truancy as a problem to be solved with families, not a crime to be prosecuted against them.

Schools that intervene early see results by building trust and addressing practical barriers such as transport, bullying, health and engagement issues. These strategies they rarely make headlinesbut they work.

Lawmakers should follow these examples. Address safety and climate issues directly. Help schools build stronger connections with families. And expand educational opportunities for those who don’t thrive in traditional settings.

Attendance improves when families trust their schools, not when they fear them.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.