In "Inexcusable Absences", Dana Goldstein examines the results of criminalizing truancy and shows its ineffectiveness and how it damages the poor. Despite this, truancy is nevertheless a problem since, as Goldstein notes, it is correlated with lower grades, dropping out of school, and legal trouble (34). Such a pervasive problem deserves a pervasive solution. This essay proposes that providing transportation for students between their home and schools, plural, and allowing them greater flexibility in choosing and changing their courses and classmates, would effectively increase attendance and academic performance.

The most important part of the plan is infrastructure that would enable students to travel conveniently from their neighborhood to their school, and from their school to other nearby schools. It may be a subway system or a system of buses or any other means of transportation, depending on the locale. What matters is firstly, that it connects students to many schools, and secondly, that it is cheap, possibly free for low-income students. The second prong of the plan is logistical: it involves enabling students to easily cross-register at other schools, be it for one or ten courses or for the entirety of a week or two. The final prong involves transportation in a virtual sense; many schools should move parts of their education onto the Internet, including, in particular, student data, enabling students to find and communicate with other students, even in faraway schools.

The most important effect of this system is to give students access to many different courses and classmates, which is an effective way to make students interested. As Goldstein notes, half of "chronically absent" students simply choose not to go to school (36). Clearly, then, school is not providing anything that motivates them to want to be there. The most obvious reason is that students are not aware of any courses at their school that are interesting to them, to which the obvious solution is to find those courses for the students to connect the two. This is already a solution being sought by people such as attorney Amber Morris, who helps some students enter sports programs they like (Goldstein 37), but it may not be enough if the school does not offer any courses that interest the students (or anybody else) in the first place. A system allowing students to easily visit and register for courses at other schools would make this occurrence much less likely, as students would have a much wider array of courses to choose from and would be more likely to find at least one that interests them. If this happens, truancy would decrease and students would be more dedicated to their courses as well, improving performance. Another common force that motivates students to go to school is social: students often enjoy meeting friends at school. But some students with obscure interests may have trouble finding like-minded friends at their local school, and some other students may be ostracized for other reasons, such as physical characteristics or simple social awkwardness. This can be mitigated by the "virtual transportation" or electronic component of education. Electronic platforms could allow students to search for other students who share their interests; once the students are connected online, the ease of commuting between schools would enable them to meet up between or during classes, providing the social incentive for many more students.

Finally, for students who are incorrigibly academically detached, the system outlined above can still hope to attract them with sheer novelty. The transportation and logistical network makes it easy for these students to study at a different school for a week or two and experience a different way of learning and a different crowd. This can be repeated indefinitely throughout the student's educational career. Given the popularity of study-abroad programs in college, it seems likely that smaller-scale programs letting students visit nearby schools would also attract students effectively.

The remaining half of the "chronically absent", then, are "avoiding something negative" at school or have responsibilities at home (Goldstein, 36). For the former reason, the flexibility afforded by the proposed system in finding different classmates and teachers can clearly let students avoid people they dislike without missing school --- they can simply spend most of their time at a school or in a course without those people. As for students whose families could not otherwise afford to send them to school, a correctly subsidized transportation system would make it affordable. Finally, the electronic platform would also make it easy to design almost-entirely electronic courses, enabling students who really have to stay at home for personal reasons to enroll nonetheless. Online courses by themselves might be less effective unless the students have strong self-discipline, but the transportation system provides another avenue of mitigation: teachers from nearby schools could visit these students occasionally, to check up on their progress or to administer important tests securely. Like-minded friends that the student has met online could visit as well, providing an invaluable morale boost in the form of friendship. These visits would enable such students to get an excellent approximation to traditional education without sacrificing their responsibilities.

As has been shown, the proposed plan resolves all of the common causes of truancy, but there are many ways it might be criticized as infeasible, the most natural objection being the cost --- building a transportation network spanning enough schools and neighborhoods to yield all of the above benefits would take astronomical amounts of money. But, if the network is developed and used as desired, many students will commute between schools every day and the cost of transportation will be spread over many students, so it can be kept cheap. Secondly, although the transportation network would likely have to prioritize schools and students in its design, it could still be open to the general public at a cost typical of other public transportation. Consequentially, the transportation system need not be a money sink; it can provide a revenue stream in itself, and with judicious planning might even be self-sustaining in the long run. If this does not occur, mass transportation is at least still more efficient fuel-wise and produces less emissions than everybody driving their own car. Given the well-established threat of global warming as well as the positive externalities of a less polluted cityscape, sinking some money into this transportation project seems worth it.

Another objection to the plan's benefits is inconvenience; perhaps the incentive of going to courses a student enjoys will be offset if students must go through long bus rides every period to get to that course at a faraway school and back. This can be solved, however, with careful design of course schedules and integration with the online component. If classes are designed to last longer, and specific days are laid out for classes of "normal" courses to be taken mostly online, students can commute less often, and need not always commute back from the school offering their dream course to keep up with other classes.

A final potential objection is that mixing students between schools makes it impossible to properly assess via standardized tests and reward high-scoring schools, but that was a bad idea to begin with and should be scrapped --- doing so penalizes exactly those schools who need help the most.

In conclusion, a system that transports students between different schools and unlocks access, physical and virtual, to more classmates and courses, will effectively get students to come to school and improve their performance by letting them find options they prefer.