Preventing students from cutting class used to be serious business in Canadian schools. Back in the ’70s, when I taught history at Aurora High School, an hour’s drive north of Toronto, the number of kids who skipped was relatively small—normally fewer than a dozen out of the 1,000 students that went there. To keep a lid on the problem, we employed the educational equivalent of SWAT teams. The initiative was led by our then-principal, Don MacKinnon, a former math teacher, and his second-in-command, Wayne Houston, our vice-principal, who rode herd on the dragnet operation.

Each day, homeroom teachers filed first-period attendance reports, and a dedicated attendance secretary produced sheets listing any absentees, known then as “anomalies.” Regular teachers like me were the “chasers.” We roamed the halls to round up lates and even swept the stairwells of the apartment buildings across the street. This routine consumed hours each day, but it had its benefits: for one, members of Principal MacKinnon’s SWAT squad were rewarded with lighter lunch supervision duty.

This level of enforcement weakened over the decades, as school districts across the country cut budgets for attendance secretaries. By the 2010s, chronic absenteeism—defined as missing 16 to 18 school days a year, or 10 per cent of instructional time—was no longer rare in Canada, even though school attendance is the law for minors in every province and territory. Roughly 23 per cent of Canadian students sampled in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment reported skipping school at least once every two weeks. In 2019, data........

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