Teacher absences: Are they excessive and do they hurt students?
Most discussions about school attendance focus on students. Now, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to talk about teachers.
Duncan has made teacher attendance one of the measures to determine which low-achieving schools receive federal improvement funds. So, for the first time, the federal government will collect data on how many days teachers miss classes each year.
The reason is simple: Research shows that students suffer a small, but significant decline in academic performance as a result of teacher absences.
In addition, the nation’s public schools pay a big price — as much as $4 billion a year according to the National Center for Education Statistics — to hire substitutes to fill in for absent staff.
When he was CEO of Chicago public schools, Duncan was dismayed to discover that the system was spending more than $10 million a year on substitute teachers. He tangled with the teacher unions when he added teacher attendance data to school scorecards.
“This is important to parents,” Duncan said at the time. “There’s never been a spotlight on this, and that’s a mistake. I think it’s like any workplace. When people feel good about the work, people want to be there. This is not only important for student learning, it’s important to school culture.”
As one of the leading researchers on the impact of teacher absences on achievement, Raegen T. Miller, associate director for education research at the Center for American Progress, applauds the new emphasis on teacher attendance.
Patterns of high absences within a school can be a marker of deeper problems. “Controlling for age and other factors, there are still wildly different patterns that tell you about the professional culture in the school building. The Department of Education really gets this,” says Miller.
In his research, Miller found that public school teachers are absent between nine and 10 days per year on average.
Between kindergarten and 12th grade, that means a student is taught by someone other than the regularly assigned teacher for the equivalent of two-thirds of a school year, he says.
Every 10 absences lowers mathematics achievement by the same amount as having a teacher with one year to two years of experience instead of a teacher with three years to five years of experience, says Miller.
In his analysis, Miller found that most teacher absences — 56 percent — were discretionary, meaning they were either short-term sick days or personal days.
Those days often fell on Mondays, Fridays and before vacation breaks, suggesting that teachers were deliberate in the days they chose to stay home from work. (Nondiscretionary absences would include a family death, long-term illnesses or jury duty.)
That’s led Miller to advocate for public disclosure of teacher absences so that the public is aware of patterns within schools, patterns that may undermine student achievement.
Miller also says states should look at leave policies that may be overly generous or that encourage teachers to take off time.
“There is no question that a ton of resources are devoted to paying teachers when they are not there,” Miller says. “In some states, the statute provides for 10 days a year. In other states, it is nearly twice as much.” (Georgia gives 12.5 days per year.)
Many leave policies reflect political concessions.
“In years where there is no money for a raise, just to get people to go away from the table, the administration is likely to throw people another sick day . Or it may be the Legislature throwing out another day rather than more money,’’ says Miller. “But when teachers get paid leave for 10 percent of the school year, it’s probably excessive.”
Miller advises local systems to consider incentives to reduce teacher absences.
Teacher absence rates are about three times those of managerial and professional employees, a fact that teachers attribute to the health risks of working with children. Because the profession remains largely female, Miller says absences are often linked to child care needs.
Because teacher attendance data is not published, there’s little information about how often teachers miss school in Georgia. An exception is Cobb County where a school system official recently studied the question.
For her graduate work at Kennesaw State University, Mary Finlayson, investigations manager for the Cobb system’s human resources department, examined absences in the county and the impact on students.
Her 37-page study, “The Impact of Teacher Absenteeism on Student Performance: The Case of the Cobb County School District,” contains these findings:
-While the national average is 10 days, Cobb teachers are out of the classroom an average of 14 days per year.
-Cobb spent $8.5 million to hire substitutes to fill in for 6,800 classroom teachers and clinic nurses in the 2008-2009 school year. The system had only budgeted $4.6 million for subs.
-Students in lower-income areas experienced more teacher absences.
An analysis of third-grade CRCT scores in Cobb supported the national research that higher teacher absenteeism led to lower math scores.
In her report, Finlayson echoes the conclusions of most national researchers:
“From experience, I have learned that if employee attendance is allowed to become a problem in a school, it will affect other employees who also begin to take time off work. There needs to be an awareness of how pervasive this problem might be and consistency among all schools about what is expected from teachers and staff.”
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211 comments Add your comment
Northview (Ex) Teacher
December 1st, 2009
12:19 am
This turned out to be a very interesting discussion.
@philosopher: You are quite right to point out that most parents, the vast majority of parents, are hard-working people who love their children and want them to be educated. I cannot tell you how many times I worked with such parents, and they frequently made my life a joy. Much can be accomplished when good parents and good teachers work together for the benefit of students.
But, alas, there is also the other side. The truly difficult parents are few in number, but each encounter with one of them is memorable. For teachers, the problem quickly becomes that you do not know whom you are dealing with in any encounter. What happens in practice is that many teachers simply dread any parent contact at all because the unpleasant contacts are so extremely disturbing.
You also should consider the lack of support from administrators. I decided to leave teaching in the middle of a parent conference in which I had to sit silently and be berated by a parent whose child was just basically a pain-in-the-butt, and dishonest on top of that. What we should have been talking about was how we could get help for the kid so that he does not develop into a full-blown sociopath, and what we were talking about was my deficiencies in meeting their dear child’s needs. I was told that I had it in for their child, that I was overreacting to plagiarism, and that it was all my fault. When I pointed out that his academic record suggested that he had simply been passed along year after year, that was further evidence that I had it in for their boy. The administrator in attendance did nothing to disabuse the parents of their ideas, and I left teaching. It was a painful decision, and I miss the classroom almost every day.
Please consider that teachers have good reasons for what they say, though you may not think so. Many teachers are literally victims of abusive parents and administrators, and I hope that we will begin to discuss that topic openly in the future. I can tell from reading your posts that you are one of the good parents.
Soccermom: Boy, do you illustrate what is rotten about the suburbs. First, I challenge you to rethink your ideas about who is responsible for the poor state of education in Georgia. You claim that the Dems would have done the same as the repukes, but I simply cannot imagine that Zell Miller or Roy Barnes would have looked to cutting education as a first resort, as Sonny done. Please also get your facts straight before spewing forth more of your ignorant vitriol. If you would do some research, you would quickly learn that the Dems in the state legislature last year wanted to go after uncollected tax revenue to boost funding for education; furloughs would not have been necessary if competent people were running the show. Want to guess who refused to collect delinquent taxes last year?
Kathy Cox has been a miserable failure by any measure, and education in Georgia is basically stagnant in spite of her so-called GPS. Again, you would do well to do some research to see what profs at UGA said about the GPS before it was implemented. Like you, Ms. Cox simply assumes that she always knows better than people in a position actually to know something, so nothing positive has happened in all these years. Kathy Cox is an idiot. I once had to sit through one of her stupid speeches at Northview, and it was embarrassing to think that this person was leading the charge in Georgia.
Further, if you would do research on, say, Ashley Widener (look up Widener Associates on the net), you would find that she is a right-wing ideologue who truly wants to destroy public education. So, Ms. Soccermom, there is every reason to bash repukes.
Why don’t you stick to talking on your cell phone while driving around in your SUV? Better, why don’t you shut up until you have something intelligent to say?
just browsing
December 1st, 2009
2:09 am
Some of this discussion on useless- everyone does not live the same type of life or lifestyle. While teaching provides its own sets of challenges, personal challenges can also cause one to be distracted on the job. Unlike a private sector job where you are pretty much accountable for your own productivity, teachers are accountable for everyone else’s! Please- I will take them as needed. It is not the time logged in the classroom setting, it is the quality of the instruction provided when they are present. Good teachers being out 10 days will never ever negatively impact students like 180 days with a poor teacher. It can never be standard business as usual like the private sector- if so- may I have an hour lunch and eat wherever I please?
jim d
December 1st, 2009
2:32 pm
Nearly 200 whiney ass blog comments from teachers while they were being paid??
Talk to the hand folks cause i ain’t listening.
wow, jim d - nice
December 1st, 2009
4:04 pm
I guess you think you’re trying to be funny, but first, not all the comments are from teachers – I’d say it’s 50-50. Second, Maureen posted this over the weekends, and the bulk of the comments were before Monday. It’s ignorant comments like yours that get teachers riled up and feel the need to explain themselves – that so many others perceive as whining…whatever. No wonder teachers want to leave this stupid state in droves.
teacher
December 1st, 2009
4:10 pm
Were days we spend out of the classroom but with students included? Substitutes are employed when teachers accompany students on trips for academic, club, & athletic events many of which extend far beyond the teacher work day.
How were days counted when substitutes were employed while you attended required meetings with parents & students (IEP meetings or tribunals)?
I echo the difficulty in finding a sub for a half day when you try to schedule a dr appointment early in the day or late in the afternoon to minimize your loss of class time.
Teacher
December 1st, 2009
6:40 pm
Jack’s Mum:
Union? What union? There are no teacher unions in Georgia. In fact, except for Teamsters, airline workers and auto workers, there are NO unions in Georgia. This is a right to work state, which means that when I was sick with bronchitis for a month (yes, a MONTH!) I was at work every day. Why? Because it’s more work to be out than to just drag in. And hide behind my desk. Is that the kind of excellent instruction you want for Jack?
Matt Fulmer
December 7th, 2009
8:50 am
You know what? we work so damn hard that we deserve our days off. Heck it’s hard for ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM teachers (and ONLY US) to be off anyway. Hey, you don’t want us to take our days, don’t give them to us.
People Like You
December 7th, 2009
5:05 pm
Just as I thought. I stand to be corrected but reading about Maureen, she has NEVER taught in a public school before!!! Teaching college classes? Please, try your hand in a K-12 setting for a few years. It seems ironic how people who are not teachers try to tell the public what’s wrong with the education system and somehow the majority of the time points back to teachers. As a veteran teacher who has actually been on the front line rather than reading books and looking at data about the profession, this article serves no validity.
Maureen Downey
December 7th, 2009
5:32 pm
People Like You, I am not sure why national researchers – including Dr. Miller who has studied the impact of teacher absenteeism on student performance – should be discounted because they aren’t K-12 teachers. Many medical breakthroughs come from researchers who are not medical doctors seeing patients. (In fact, doctors seeing patients can’t devote years to researching cures because they are in medical practices.) A friend who was instrumental in developing a better diagnostic test for lung cancer has never seen a cancer patient or any patient in his life; he’s a physicist.
Yes, teachers can tell you what they are doing in their classrooms and what is working for them. They can’t speak to what is working for the teacher down the hall or for hundreds of teachers across the country.
That’s the role of researchers who collect reams of data and who spend years on their research questions.
I think teaching and medicine and virtually everything else would suffer if there weren’t research specialists looking at these big issues on a large-scale.
Maureen
AG
December 7th, 2009
9:09 pm
I remember when my husband was diagnosed with cancer and some idiot parent called to complain that his time out of the classroom to have surgery might adversely affect her child. Gee, I guess he just should have died rather than miss a day of school. This article is seriously being published the same year everyone is being admonished to stay home when they have flu symptoms? Especially teachers, who work with the population most likely to suffer complications from swine flu–namely, little kids?
I’m sure there are teachers who take time off they don’t need. Just as I’m sure there are doctors, mechanics, priests, bank tellers, civil servants, and repair people who call in sick when they want a day off. I’m willing to bet that crime rates are connected to police attendance at work, and patient recovery to how many sick days nursing staff take. If we’re going to put teachers under the microscope, kindly do the same for everybody on the public payroll–police, town employees, etc. Even the Secretary of Education has to stay home when his young kids are sick!
Lesley
December 29th, 2009
10:21 am
Yes, I am constantly amazed at the number and frequency of substitutes in my building, and wonder, as you do, how quality teaching is going to happen in that situation.
Then, I also see special education teachers running around, chasing their tails, trying to keep up with students they don’t have in class, and also keeping up with the volume of special ed paperwork that can burn up an entire conference period and still not get done.
I personally try to use time at home in the evenings to complete the myriad of special ed forms that we have, IEPs, BIPs, tracking forms, rosters, projections, all manner of personality and psychological evaluations on students, testing, interviews, more testing, and the list goes on.
Even though I burn up at least 10 hours per week of my own time in the evenings and weekends in order to keep up with the volume of special ed paperwork, it still grows! I do this work at home just so I can focus on students in the classroom……then I get hit-up to sign up for MANDATORY training (and hire my own sub!!!), or I have to attend ARD meetings, disciplinary hearings, and all other manner of meetings that occur during my classtime. I often have to sit for up to 20 minutes waiting for diagnosticians, counselors, special ed directors and other so-called professionals who do not have responsibility for teaching and learning to arrive!!!!!
Look around in our schools sometime, I estimate that less than 50% of our personnel in our schools are actually classroom teachers. We have added so many clerks and paper-pushers and yet the volume of paperwork for teachers is not going down….it’s going up!!!! I keep running into our counselors and clerks all going en-masse to the coffee machine on break together. Teachers don’t get breaks.
So to sum up my rant, I will say that on the surface, it appears that there are a lot of teacher absences, it appears to me that there are a lot of reasons that teachers are spending so much time out of the classroom, and even when we are in the classroom, the phone never stops ringing, emails keep popping up (I use my laptop and projector for instruction…..who has time to send emails in class?) and all manner of clerks and aids pop their heads in to disturb MY students during MY classtime!
Folks, I am WAAYY past frustrated….I’m furious now.