Larry Abramson:

Ask Detroit teachers about their biggest challenge, and many will say, “You can’t teach kids who don’t come to class.” Last year, the average Detroit public high school student missed at least 28 days of school.
Now, as part of its effort to get parents more involved, the district has launched a major initiative to improve attendance. The effort includes parent workshops and attendance agents charged with pushing parents to send their kids to school every day.
George Eason is one of Detroit’s 51 attendance agents. He’s staring at a printout that says a lot about the city’s attendance problems. He flips the pages, counting the absences that one student has racked up only midway through the school year.