It's certainly much easier to criminalize children right away than to actually deal with the causes of school truancy.
After all, performance pressure is being put on children much earlier these days. If you don't learn anything, you're nothing, you're just worthless. So what are children supposed to do when they have problems in school? Those who perhaps can't cope with all the pressure? Let's just throw every struggling student into a reform institution, because after all, they'll eventually skip school out of frustration and despair, and eventually they'll become criminals.
Our school system is as inhumane as our entire society. And in doing so, we're sacrificing children on the altar of our materialism. We'll probably only realize that our own future is being destroyed a few generations from now, when it's too late...
I found the original article at RP-Online: Science.