Why Are Teachers Missing So Much School?
Teacher absenteeism gets a fraction of the attention devoted to student absenteeism - but it's a major issue that threatens to derail pandemic learning recovery.
Last year, 43 percent of teachers in Chicago Public Schools were absent at least 10 times.1
The State of Illinois considers ten absences worthy of concern because “the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that when teachers are absent for 10 days or more, student outcomes decrease significantly.”
So, more than 4 in 10 Chicago classrooms have a level of teacher absenteeism that is associated with diminished learning. Absenteeism is not only higher than before the pandemic, it has worsened each of the past three years. Pretty alarming, right?
And yet, the Chicago Tribune has not run a single story about this issue since 2020. Neither has the Chicago Sun-Times. Crickets.2 [UPDATE: It took until Nov. 2024, but the Tribune finally editorialized on teacher absenteeism. Better late than never!]
Local and national news outlets have binged on coverage of student absenteeism, cranking out articles like Krispy Kreme donuts, especially after Bianca Vazquez Toness paved the way with her reporting in the Associated Press last August.
But teacher absenteeism - which is arguably more important because of its broader effect on student learning - is the problem that shall not be named.3
That’s why I found recent coverage by Sarah Mervosh in The New York Times refreshing and surprising. It felt like a turning point. Mervosh details possible reasons for the rise in teachers missing school and describes the difficulties districts face in finding enough substitute teachers, leading to scary measures such as school closures and warehousing students in the cafeteria. Well done, Times.
But sub shortages are not the only consequence of teacher absences. I found myself curious about the breadth of the problem, what’s causing it, and how we can resolve it.
I spent some time digging around. Ok, more than a little time. When I finished, I was no longer focused on teacher absenteeism at all. It had become a window into a larger quandary.
Today, I’ll focus on why we should be paying closer attention to teachers missing school. In my next piece, I’ll connect it to the big picture by showing just how messy this has gotten at the ground level. Some districts can’t even tell the public how often its teachers are absent.
And that, my friends, is an encapsulation of how our pandemic recovery is going: not well. It’s time to be honest about it.
Here we go…
Why are teacher absences a big deal?
About six weeks before the first wave of COVID shut down our schools, Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero published a Brookings paper calling for teacher absenteeism - not student absenteeism - to be used as a measure of school quality.
Their argument? Substitute teachers aren’t just difficult to find, they are expensive and ineffective instructionally. Having more school days taught by subs harms student learning. It’s something to be avoided in any way possible.
Hansen and Quintero point to evidence that American teachers are absent more often than peers in other industries and countries. Is this because teachers get sick from their exposure to germ-broadcasting little people? Probably not. Female nurses, who surely face even greater bio-hazards, miss the same number of days as female teachers and male nurses miss work less often than male teachers. Tellingly, teachers tend to be absent on Mondays and Fridays.
Due to these patterns, the authors recommend treating teacher absences as an input that schools can influence through a combination of better working conditions and accountability for being absent too frequently. Good schools get their teachers to show up.
Why are teachers absent so much?
The most common explanation is pandemic burnout. Teachers have been through the ringer: Zoom school, re-opening debates, hybrid schedules, mask enforcement, student learning loss, behavior challenges… you name it. Indicators of teacher stress and unhappiness have been setting records.
Employee unions are keenly attuned to the burnout angle. Last fall, the AFT issued report called Beyond Burnout that described promising results from an 11-district pilot including “a personal development course to immediately address individual wellbeing.” The NEA had already published its own views on the topic - incredibly, also titled Beyond Burnout - reporting that member surveys pointed to teachers leaving the profession sooner than they had originally planned, which would cause mass shortages.
(Quick aside: Something puzzles me about the unions. They wrote thousands of words on the consequences of burnout without mentioning teacher absenteeism. Not once. Isn’t that odd? Unions have a vested interest in this issue and the platform to address it with districts by negotiating solutions that support higher attendance. It had been my impression that this what the unions are, you know, meant for.)
Nonetheless, it’s very difficult to dispute the notion that teachers are missing more days because they are cooked.
Still, it’s simplistic to attribute the entirety of the teacher absence issue to the pandemic. Why? For one thing, there’s good reason to believe that even before COVID, teaching was in crisis.
In 2022, Matt Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon published a paper arguing that when considering key dimensions like prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction, “the current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.” They find that matters took a sharply negative turn around 2010. Perhaps COVID arrived at an unlucky moment when morale among teachers had already been free falling for a decade.
With that context in mind, this starts to feel like a generational disruption to the teacher labor market. When I reached out to school and district leaders, they often described absenteeism in those terms. The gist:
Teaching now compares less favorably with other white collar professions. Some teachers liked the logistics of virtual schooling. No commute, wake up a little later each morning, shut down behavior issues by turning off a student’s mic, be there for your own kids more after school. They envy their friends who still have the option for remote work some or all of the time. Maybe those friends also get a free smoothie bar and a smorgasbord of self-care benefits. Teaching, meanwhile, has none of those things. Teachers who find themselves in need of self-care call in sick. That’s their option.
Principals are petrified of the candidate pool. All that federal COVID relief money led to a nationwide hiring spree. As positions were created - some in so-called “destination” schools that are seen as especially desirable - teachers from higher poverty schools were quick to pursue them, leaving vacancies in their former schools. To remain staffed, principals then hired out of desperation, reaching for educators they would not normally have selected. Those reach hires are now more likely to be struggling - and to need more days off to recover from the daily grind they are enduring.
Holding teachers accountable for poor attendance patterns is seen as impossible. You won’t get a lot of on-the-record quotes to this effect. Superintendents are known to burst into flop sweats when asked whether teachers are taking advantage of pandemic-era leniency by using more sick days. But teachers and administrators brought this up a number of times. Policies legitimately changed. Districts didn’t count days spent in COVID quarantine as sick days. They discouraged teachers from showing up to work while having a mild cold. Missing more days was normalized. Principals are now hesitant to confront new attendance patterns for fear that teachers will leave.
There’s a vicious cycle. When teachers are absent and there are no subs, everyone in the building is drafted into additional responsibilities covering classes, supervising lunch, and monitoring detention. Teachers hate this. It’s a real burden. Some are exhausted to such a degree that they may use sick days of their own to decompress. Which means someone needs to cover their classes. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So there you have it, right? Teaching has been turned upside down by stress and shortages. Cue the usual task force recommendations to elevate the status of the profession and modernize teacher prep. We can all pretend it’s 1994.
Wrong.
The drivers of teacher absenteeism are interwoven with a passel of other pandemic-era problems. I doubt we can solve any of them in isolation.
In part two, coming soon, I’m going to argue that our schools are reeling from a lost sense of purpose that seems to show up everywhere one looks. That’s where we need to focus our attention.
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Teacher attendance data is published regularly by the Illinois State Board of Education, which does a very commendable job making information about schools accessible. States get too little credit for the hard work they do in this area. Good job, Illinois.
It’s absolutely possible that my searches of the two newspapers were not exhaustive. If you have seen pieces about Chicago teacher absenteeism in either outlet, send them my way and I’ll post them. I found numerous articles from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. Nothing from recent years.
There are exceptions that warrant mention. Jay Greene and Jonathan Butcher from The Heritage Foundation were on the case with a deep dive in summer 2023. Sarah Sparks from Ed Week noted higher teacher absenteeism rates alongside higher student rates in 2022. I am sure there are others. But to get some context on this, I recommend searching your local news market for coverage of teacher absenteeism since March 2020 and comparing it to coverage of student absenteeism. It’s striking.
The one reason you have very wrong is that teachers liked remote teaching. I don't know of one teacher who could stand it, never mind liked it. It was truly an awful experience. The districts provided no materials so we were left scrambling to find materials we bought with our own money, we couldn't see what the students were doing or not doing, and it took triple the time to plan a lesson. Then somehow teachers were blamed and excoriated for a decision we had no part in making. Parents called us lazy, on vacation, and worse. I spent hours online trying to get an appointment for the vaccine, but despite all the criticism of teachers, we were not prioritized. No surprise there. I danced back into my classroom the first day I was able. As a result of this abuse, most teachers can tell you exactly when they can leave, and that's the real problem.
It takes a village to raise a child and our schools no longer have enough people in the village to deal with the increase in students who disrupt a class, are violent to classmates and the teacher. Are you aware that classrooms often need to be evacuated so a team of adults can subdue an out of control student? Do you know the term "runner"? Just 10 years ago, the term didn't even exist.
I note that you reached out to districts and school leaders, all of whom have doors they can shut (and they do), and have little to no contact with educators. They do what's called "walk throughs" - they literally walk down the hall twice a year and wave at you. These people NEVER ask the educators who do the actual work what's going on, what they need to be effective at their jobs. When I say never, I mean never and it's killing this profession.
I urge you to dig deeper, because we've read a lot of articles like this one that scratch the surface. Public education is in a crisis right now, and it's about to get a whole lot worse. The drop in applicants for graduate schools of education is 30% over ten years. When the current educators leave, there will be very few people in the pipeline.
I, a teacher, feel very guilty reading this from bed while a sub is “teaching” my students. 😰😰😰😰