BLOG SERIES: "Do as I say, not as I do."

The Metric That Doesn't Exist

By Julio César Manzano, MBA | Fulbright Scholar | ESOL Educator | Founder, Camino Academy

They won't learn from someone they don't like — so why don't we measure that?

Is there a metric for how much a kid remembers their teacher?

I've been sitting with this question for a while now, and I keep coming back to it because it exposes something uncomfortable about how schools actually operate — what they choose to count, what they choose to ignore, and what falls through the cracks as a result. Or better said, who falls through the cracks.

I'm an ESOL teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools, a Fulbright Scholar, an MBA graduate, and the founder of Camino Academy. But before any of those things, I was a little boy in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas who understood exactly why other kids didn't show up to school — because I lived it. And that lived experience shapes the work I do.

The Student Who Was Always Late

Last year, I had a student who was late every single day. Every day. And the response from everyone around her was the same: frustration. The counselor was frustrated. Her teachers were frustrated. Even her own mom. Everyone was focused on the behavior, and nobody was asking why?

When I asked her, she told me she takes her little sister to school every morning because her mother can’t. They had been separated. Their relationship was fractured. She felt completely alone in all of it.

There is no attendance code in any system I've worked with for "caring for a younger sibling due to family separation." The system logged her as tardy and moved on. No follow-up. No conversation. Just a mark in a column.

Here's what was actually happening. She was parenting a younger sibling, grieving a broken relationship with her mother, navigating a school system that responded to her pain with discipline, and trying to learn English. All of that — before 8 AM.

Researchers have rightly moved beyond Maslow's rigid pyramid — needs don't line up neatly in tiers; they overlap, compound, and hit all at once depending on context and culture. Self-Determination Theory, Social-Emotional Learning frameworks, and growth mindset research have all expanded on the original model. But the core insight still holds, and every teacher I know has seen it play out in real time: when a student's basic needs are in crisis, learning becomes secondary to survival. My student's needs weren't waiting their turn. They were collapsing simultaneously. And the school expected academic performance.

The Framework Everyone Cites and Nobody Funds

"Maslow before Bloom" is one of the most repeated phrases in education. The idea is straightforward: a student's physiological safety, security, and sense of belonging need to be addressed before they can engage in the kind of higher-order thinking that Bloom's Taxonomy describes.

A 2025 federal research brief from IES confirmed what teachers already know from experience — students with a strong sense of belonging are more likely to be engaged and perform well academically, and strategies that prioritize positive student-teacher relationships are among the strongest predictors of that belonging. Culturally responsive practices — approaches that recognize and incorporate students' lived experiences — are foundational to building it.

A meta-analysis by Korpershoek and colleagues (2020) found significant positive relationships between school belonging and academic achievement, motivation, and social-emotional functioning, alongside significant negative relationships with dropout rates.

The research has been clear for years. So why are we repeating the same patterns? Most importantly, why aren't we asking the right questions?

And I think the honest answer — and what keeps me up at night — is that the system was never broken. It's functioning. It's just not functioning for these kids. My kids. Us. My closest colleagues I work with care. Every single one of them. But caring and capacity are two different things.

Teachers are tired. We're buried under administrative work, documentation requirements, IEP meetings, and behavioral interventions for thirty students at a time. Counselors carry caseloads that would be unthinkable in any other profession. Administrators are managing budgets that were cut before the school year even started.

Everyone is running on a hamster wheel that spins faster every year, and by the time you look up, another student has disappeared from your roster and nobody had the bandwidth to ask where they went or why.

The system doesn't need us to be indifferent. It just needs educators to be exhausted. And that is enough to keep the outcomes exactly where they are.

The Numbers Behind the Absence

The students I teach are part of a much larger pattern, and the data on it is sobering.

A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Dee, 2025) found that immigration raids in California's Central Valley coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with the largest spikes among the youngest children.

A 27-state analysis released in March 2026 by FutureEd found that chronic absenteeism among low-income students remains more than 9 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels. Hispanic and Black students experienced the largest pandemic-era increases and remain the furthest from recovery.

A RAND Corporation report from 2025 found that in roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent, and 40% of districts ranked reducing absenteeism among their top three challenges.

Research by Santibañez, Gottfried, and Freeman (2024), using longitudinal data from four California districts, found that Latinx English Learner absenteeism rose with increased immigration arrests in their communities — a pattern not found among non-EL students.

The students behind these numbers aren't disengaged. Many of them are working to support families. Many are navigating family separation. Many are afraid to come to school because of what's happening in their communities. And the systems we have in place to respond to their absence were designed without any of that context in mind. And I know because I talk to their families and ask them.

At my previous school one of the campus goals was to "increase minority students' sense of belonging." My second year there, I was the ESOL teacher calling home to tell their families their children were missed at school. The paraprofessional assigned to one of my sheltered classes and I coordinated home visits. One day we showed up at a student's door, but it never opened. We left a note. I still don't know if that student came back.

When an institution writes "belonging" as a campus goal, I need to ask: where is the evidence of that commitment beyond the document it's written in?

Learning for Independence (LFI) and ESOL Conversation Circles

What Would Have Actually Helped

In MCPS, I was trained in restorative justice circles — a practice rooted in indigenous traditions that prioritizes dialogue, relationship repair, and accountability over punishment.

For my student who was always late, a restorative circle would have given her the one thing she didn't have anywhere else: a space where the people who loved her most listened. Where she could say "I take my sister to school every morning and I feel like nobody in this building understands what I'm dealing with." No punishment. Just grace.

A 2025 IES practice guide found that the Circle Forward restorative circles program in Boston Public Schools had a positive effect on student attendance. In Pittsburgh, restorative practices led to significant reductions in suspensions and improved school climate perceptions. In Oakland, implementation was associated with improved attendance and reading achievement alongside decreases in suspensions and discipline incidents (Augustine et al., 2018; Jain et al., 2014; Jarjoura et al., 2023).

But a 2026 Education Next analysis raised an important counterpoint: many schools adopted restorative justice without building the infrastructure to sustain it. They removed punitive consequences but didn't provide the staffing, training, or follow-through needed to make the alternative work. The practice was adopted in name but not in substance.

Restorative justice works when it's resourced and when the people facilitating it understand the full context of what students are carrying. It doesn't work as a policy checkbox, or a stand alone PD. And the pattern of adopting promising practices without resourcing them is one I've seen repeated across every school I've worked in (different states) — which brings me to the deeper issue.

The Structures That Need to Come Down

This conversation is uncomfortable, and so it usually stops at metrics. Instead, teachers are asked: What is your Student Learning Objective? Does your learning target have a language objective?

What are schools failing to track? That's the real problem, and honestly, I'm tired of having the polite version of this conversation.

The structures themselves produce the inequity. I need to say that clearly because I think we keep dancing around it. The attendance system that marked my student "tardy" every day punishes a child for the consequences of immigration policy, family separation, and poverty, and labels it accountability. She was carrying adult-sized trauma and expected to function exactly as the system is designed — for a student whose parents are home and whose basic needs are met before the first bell. The rest of the students? The system wasn't built with us in mind, and patching it with good intentions hasn't changed the foundation.

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) argued that educational institutions actively reproduce racial inequality through policies and practices that appear neutral but center whiteness. Tara Yosso, in Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline (2006), uses counterstorytelling to expose how institutions blame Chicana/o students for unequal outcomes instead of examining the historical patterns of institutional neglect that produced those outcomes.

At first glance, tardy policies appear race-neutral. The counselor referral appears race-neutral. But when these systems disproportionately harm Latina/o students who are navigating immigration, family separation, and poverty, the appearance of neutrality is itself the mechanism of harm. In Restorative Justice language, we say intent doesn't excuse impact. For better or for worse.

Adding new metrics won't fix this. Funding a restorative circle while leaving every other structure intact won't fix it either.

The question that needs to be asked is which of these structures needs to be dismantled entirely — the tardy policy that never asks why, the discipline pipeline that responds to symptoms instead of causes, the attendance system that counts bodies but not barriers, the campus improvement plan that lists "belonging" as a goal and allocates zero dollars to achieving it — because as long as they remain in place, the outcomes will remain the same.

Our Work

There's a saying in education: "Students don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." A good teacher knows it. But individual caring has limits when the system surrounding that teacher is designed to ignore the very students they're trying to reach. You can pour water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom for years and wonder why it never fills up — or you can change it. The bucket. The system.

My student didn't need just one adult who quietly cared about her inside a broken system. She needed the system itself to change. To shake. To be disrupted.

This is the work that keeps a fire in my chest, every year with a stronger sense of urgency. It's the reason I became a teacher, the reason I pursued my MBA, and the reason I'm building something new. Because I've hit enough walls to know that some of them aren't obstacles on the path — they are the path, by design, and the only way forward is to stop walking the same corridor and build a new one.

I'm grateful this student was placed in my class. But that was luck, not infrastructure. And no student should have to rely on luck to be understood.

Next in this series: "Espoused vs. Enacted" — what schools say they value vs. what they actually fund, staff, and sustain.

What's the metric that doesn't exist in your field? And which structures need to come down for it to matter?

#EducationEquity #CulturallyResponsiveTeaching #CRT #MaslowBeforeBloom #RestorativeJustice #ELLEducation #CaminoAcademy #TuVozTienePoder #LatinxInEducation #TeacherLeadership #Edtech #Disruptthemarket