Various Bills to Raise Compulsory Attendance Age

August 14, 2008: Signed by the Governor, Chapter 315 of the Acts of 2008 

Status as of July 2008: Is now SB 2766. Passed to be engrossed by the House, Senate concurred in the House amendment.

Status as of March 2008: S304, S329, S343, S357, S366, S394. H401, H407, H463 and H576 which each would have raised the compulsory attendance age, have been included in SB 2462, "An Act to Improve Dropout Prevention and Reporting of Graduation Rates."

This new bill, SB 2462, makes tools available to school districts for accurate reporting of high school graduation and drop out data. It also establishes the "Graduation and Dropout Commission" to study dropout prevention and dropout recovery programs throughout the state. This commission will make recommendations on certain issues, such as raising the compulsory attendance age from 16 to 18. The text of the new bill can be found at http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/senate/185/st02/st02462.htm. The bill was reported favorably by the Education committee and referred to the committee on Senate Ways and Means in January 2008.

Hearing scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, 2007

The Education committee had a public hearing May 8, 2007 on a number of bills dealing with improving school attendance and decreasing the state's school drop out rate (see list below). Many would require school attendance until the age of 18. If the age of attendance were raised, homeschoolers would be required to continue to report to their local school districts until such time as the homeschoolers reach "graduation" or the age of 18, whichever comes first. We are not sure what would happen to the current ability of homeschoolers ages 16-17 to take the GED.

Raising the age of attendance would be ineffective in reducing the dropout rate, and would result in increased spending for school departments. Data aggregated from a three year period to calculate high school completion rates on a state-by-state basis (Dropout Rates in the United States: 2000, p. 22; National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Doc. No. NCES 2002-114) merged with information about the age of compulsory attendance in each state shows that states requiring compulsory attendance until age sixteen have a higher average rate of school completion than those states requiring compulsory attendance until age seventeen or eighteen.

Statistics

For details on statistics about high school completion rates in pdf format, see Comparison of High School Completion Rates Based on Compulsory School Age.

What You Can Do

AHEM recommends that anyone who has concerns about these bills should write to members of the Education committee. You can find contact information for members of the Education committee at http://www.mass.gov/legis/comm/j14.htm.

We believe your letter will be most effective if written from the position of a concerned taxpayer, rather than a homeschooler who wants to avoid more paperwork. In your letter, you may point out that the financial ramifications that would result from extending the compulsory attendance age would include increased costs in teacher's salaries, classrooms, and transportation. If raising the compulsory attendance age were likely to achieve the desired results, the cost/benefit analysis might justify these higher costs. However, since statistics show that raising the compulsory attendance age would not result in a higher rate of high school completion, the financial burden to taxpayers and already fiscally strapped school departments cannot be justified.