The Empty Desks Are Telling Us Something

This is the season when schools begin counting the missing.

Not the children who vanished entirely, though there are some of those. But the ones who slipped just far enough away to become a statistic. The black sophomore boy in a failing city school who has spent ten years being told, in the polite language of interventions and learning plans, that he is behind. The white senior in a struggling rural school who has already learned that his diploma may be less a ticket to adulthood than a receipt for time served. They missed the bus, then the lesson, then the point.