Can you explain how parental authority always trumps? If the kid has too many unexcused absences he or she could end up with an attendance failure. That mom or dad said it was ok to miss school does not control that. You hope administrators and parents would work to ensure that did not happen, but your blanket statement seems a bit off.
We agree on the silliness of the rigid rules on attendance, but that does not mean parents trump the school. Parents can't just tell their kids to go once a week. They can't tell them not to do homework. They can't tell them it's ok to skip class or not take tests. Well, they can, but that does not mean the kid will be excused from any of that.
Parental authority always trumps school authority as a matter of basic morality and common sense. I acknowledged that this is not true as a matter of law or policy-- The State can make whatever policies it wishes and enforce them however it sees fit. I was assuming that the fact that policy exists does not make that policy either good or sensible. I was not arguing that the school's policies do not exist; I was arguing that they are at best misguided and at worst downright immoral.
As a moral principle, simply put, kids do not belong to the school (or by extension, to The State, or to "society"); they belong to their parents. The school is not responsible for my kids' health, or even their education: I am responsible for all those things. The school is an AGENT that should work for ME as their parent, not for itself or for "society". Regardless of how the school's policy defines a valid "excuse", I'm declaring that if I vouch for the student's absence, then THAT is the excuse: I have excused them as their parent, because I know better than the school what they need and what they can learn, whether at or away from school.
But more significant is the practical sense in which attendance policies are stupid. I will summarize those reasons:
1) Presence does not mean productivity. Like the example I offered of punching a clock at a factory: just being there does not mean you are producing anything, nor does it mean you are learning anything. Most kids learn almost nothing in the average school day; what they gain over the course of a year may be measurable, but most days are lost to dozing, daydreaming, misbehavior, or poor teaching.
2) Real outcomes can be measured, and attendance is the worst indicator thereof. Whether it's by testing or portfolios or whatever, there are any number of very good ways to demonstrate what a student has learned (or a worker has produced). Attendance is no indicator of such. As I have indicated, of course a school could issue an "attendance failure" according to its own policies, but that just demonstrates that the policy is absurd. If a student could demonstrate that he could master all the objectives of a curriculum in less time than it takes the school to teach them, what possible justification could the school have for keeping them locked in there just to get the "attendance" portion of the grade? ANYTHING else a student could be doing outside of school, if they were interested in doing it, is better than just sitting there and passing the time.
3) Real learning takes place outside the classroom, and much more rapidly and memorably than in the classroom. Just by making the trip, the kid saw a new city, new places, got a feel for what it's like to be there-- got a lesson that a whole semester on the history of Boston would not have given him. No parent should have to justify those things before a school administrator: an intelligent administrator (or school board, or whomever makes such an asinine policy) will realize it and encourage it.
4) Parental involvement is more important than anything a school can offer. How many parents do you know that would write a note saying "I authorize my kid to go to school only once a week"? But even if they did, so what? Most teachers I know would appreciate ANY proactive involvement with the parent that doesn't involve screaming at or threatening--or worse, ignoring-- the teachers. Even in the worst case, IF a parent is willing to write a note to excuse their kid and then lets the kid run wild, the kid is probably going to learn as much as they would in class, and if they can demonstrate it, what possible justification could a school have for saying "well even though they passed, they should still have been sitting here the whole time"? How absurd is that?
All those very compelling reasons notwithstanding, the overwhelming moral and practical reality remains: a parent knows better than a school administrator what their kid needs. All the rest is just self-justification by the run-down, outmoded educational factory, in which the "workers" (the kids) get paid to punch the clock rather than to actually produce, and the quality of the output is exactly what you would expect from such a factory.
