Traditionally, education policy focuses on reforms that address class size, teaching and learning within classrooms, school choice, and changes in leadership as ways to improve students’ educational outcomes. Although well intentioned, education policy can distract from the multi-layered causes that impact achievement and opportunity gaps, and how students’ life circumstances can affect their school attendance. Students who miss school frequently are less likely to be impacted by even the most robust and comprehensive education reforms. This paper discusses how the root causes of chronic absenteeism are complex and that policy distractions can stifle solutions to solve school attendance issues. As a wicked problem, chronic absenteeism, requires a conceptual framework that helps to organize policy responses within all levels of the educational system, as well as expansive to include other social sectors within public policy.

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Background/Context For more than four decades, researchers have shown that African American students are overrepresented in lower-track classes, while their White peers tend to be in advanced courses. In the past twenty years, school districts have implemented detracking reforms that stressed self-selection policies as an alternative to separate academic paths, yet quantitative data still show that most African American students are not attending upper-level or advanced classes in racially diverse schools. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of study This study explores how African American parents come to terms with academic placement, and the mechanisms that impact their child's educational experiences in a racially diverse school while coming from a segregated high-poverty African-American community. Setting Research took place in a racially diverse suburban school and city. The suburban city is a microcosm of the United States, not only because of the racial and economic diversity of its school district, but also because its story encapsulates the plight of many African Americans in relation to the Great Migration, segregation, disinvested neighborhoods, and systemic inequalities. Population/participants/Subjects Participants included 26 African American parents, many of whom attended the same school district and experienced their own lower-track placement. Research Design Ethnographic methods, which include interviews and observations, were used to explore the research questions. African American parents were individually interviewed about their own educational experiences, children's academic placement, family background, interactions with the school system, community issues, and perceptions of the middle school and city. Findings/Results African American students and their parents were a product of intergenera-tional tracking. Parents and their children had experienced lower-track courses. In addition, the exposure of African American students and parents to systemic inequalities in their home and community heavily influenced their academic placement and overall educational experiences. Moreover, tracking in this school was not necessarily about abilities and skills but also about separating African American students and creating a formal semblance of equality that actually reinforced systemic inequalities, a reality captured in the phrase “duplicity of equality.”

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Using the conceptual tools of anti-Blackness and the Black habitus to analyze the interviews of 38 Black youth who lived and grew up in Baltimore City, this study contends that the negative associations placed on Black youth continue to dehumanize them and prevent them from the full embodiment of student status. This article explores Blackness and its relationship with the privileges and immunities of student status within America’s collective consciousness. Through the voices of Black youth, this article provides evidence that Black students in Baltimore have not been fully granted the immunity of student status. Instead, Black youth participants describe harm in their schools and neighborhoods, as well as a tenuous relationship between Blackness and “studentness.”

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