Did you know that 4 out of 10 Chicago teachers missed 10 or more days of school last year?
Those numbers include sick days and other personal leave, but they don’t include professional development days, parental leave, long-term disability or other family and medical leave.
That statistic might be shocking, but it’s not just Chicago. Other large Illinois districts including Elgin, Rockford and Springfield had similarly large percentages of teachers missing large chunks of the school year. Across the state, 34% of teachers missed 10 or more days.
Illinois is one of the few states that track data like this, but there’s reason to think teacher attendance is a problem nationwide. According to the School Pulse Panel from the Institute for Education Sciences, 72% of districts reported that teacher absences were higher in 2022 than they were pre-pandemic. The latest results from June 2024 suggest those numbers may have come down a bit, but they are far from returning to normal.
Worker absences are up across all industries, so how worried should we be in education specifically? One difference is that teaching is more like a service job in the sense that, when the kids are there, the school needs someone to cover the classroom. In education, an absence means someone has to pick up the slack, so when a teacher is out, it has real, immediate costs.
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The most visible are financial. In 2023, public and private schools across the country employed a combined 376,000 short-term substitutes. Schools have responded to pandemic-era staffing shortages by raising the hourly wage for subs — paying $21.46 per hour on average in 2023, up 35% from 2018. Given those rates, and depending on how many days and hours each sub worked, schools could have paid nearly $17 billion in substitute teacher costs in 2023.
That may actually be an undercount, because in recent years districts have been unable to find subs to plug all their gaps. That leads to a different type of cost, of teachers having to cover for their peers. When educators are assigned extra tasks, like lunch or recess duty, or told to cover in another teacher’s classroom, that contributes to a bad cycle of increased workload and stress, which can lead to even more teacher absences.
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Ultimately, students bear yet another type of cost when their teachers are absent. As might be expected, research has found that one-off substitute teachers are not nearly as effective as regular full-time teachers. Lower-achieving students are both more likely to be assigned to subs and more negatively harmed when their regular teacher is absent.
What’s driving the increase in teacher absences? And what can districts do to turn it around?
The first thing to note is that it’s probably not any one thing. Looking at the Illinois district data, I found only very small correlations between teacher attendance and the rate at which they stayed with their district employer, the evaluations they received or the district’s overall staffing levels.
The teacher absences also don’t appear to be driven by the spread of COVID or other illnesses. One might expect those to affect students and teachers in similar ways, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Across Illinois schools, there was very little connection between the rate at which students and teachers were missing school.
But the strategies that districts are deploying to address student absences could also be extended to teachers. For example, a 2018 District Administration article suggested building awareness of teacher absenteeism rates, offering prizes or awards for individuals or teams with strong attendance records and building a cadre of reliable on-site subs who can step in.
As Tim Daly has suggested on his Substack The Education Daly, teacher absenteeism may be one symptom of a multifaceted problem in which schools have lost their sense of purpose. Student achievement is down, stories of fights and other forms of disruptions are rampant and teachers are being lenient when grading students even when the kids aren’t attending school or haven’t mastered the content.
Moreover, principals and district leaders may have been hesitant to crack down too hard on teacher absences for fear they would lose employees. That may have made sense in 2022, say, when the labor market was particularly tight. But those fears should lessen somewhat as it’s becoming easier to hire.
Another way to interpret the elevated absenteeism rates is that they are simply an indicator of a more stressed, less engaged teacher workforce. In that sense, the numbers could be considered a leading indicator of employee dissatisfaction, and more states and districts should be tracking their stats and exploring ways to reduce absences in their schools.