Yesterday I looked at teacher absence in the developing world, highlighting India where a quarter of teachers may be absent on a given day. Teacher absence isn't that high in the United States but it is still shockingly high. On a typical school day, 5-6% of teachers are absent, i.e. equivalent to an absence once every 20 days!
Bearing in mind that the typical school year is 180 days, add absences to all the school holidays, teacher workdays, staff development days (btw, ever seen a Walmart shutdown for a staff development day?), and other non-teaching days (e.g. in Fairfax, Mondays are half-days) and the number of days of true teachng greatly diminishes.
Teachers probably do get sick more often than other workers but teacher absence rates are three times higher than for managers and professional employees in the private sector. Moreover, are you surprised to learn that teacher absences are most frequent on Mondays and Fridays or that teacher absences are of a duration just short of that requiring medical certification of illness?
Finally, teacher absences reduce student achievement both in the United States and in the developing world.
Alex, you’ve got to be careful. Everyone knows that teachers are impartial agents of pure benevolence, who work harder than anyone else. If you attack them, you are evil.
Anyways, my mother-in-law is a retired teacher. She’s had many student teachers over the years. Though she does actually believe that most teachers are impartial agents of pure benevolence, she does have this complaint: Back in her day, smart women became teachers. Now, dumb students become teachers. The kids who got As in high school and then went to good colleges rarely become teachers, but the B-/C+ students who went to lower quality colleges (and didn’t flourish there) do. I wonder if she’s right.
Why is this surprising? Teachers are underpaid relative to the (excessive) job requirements, and the difference is made up by non-cash benefits, like lots of days off. And students correctly read their instructors lack of focus as a sign that school is not as important as everyone claims, hence the rise of the mandatory bachelor’s.
Don’t forget that children are mobile petri dishes for any illness going around, so a teacher’s workplace risk for illness is probably higher than that of an office worker.
@Trey: Alex thinks that all spells of absense originate from the same distribution. Which is almost as stupid as his P(A|B)=P(B|A) fallacy a couple of months ago. Its far more likely that a small group of teachers are absent all the time (think burnout, like #2), and a large group which is almost never absent.
(btw, ever seen a Walmart shutdown for a staff development day?)
How many Walmart employees are grading papers in their “free time”?
The first comment issued a good warning, as the following comments repeated the myth that teachers are underpaid and overworked. Science and math teachers may be underpaid compared to, say, engineers or accountants. But teachers with degrees in subjects such as history and English tend to be paid better than museum staff or journalists. Total compensation is high when you add in free time, medical benefits and retirement packages, including 403(b)s.
As for the cause of absenteeism, part of the reason in the U.S. is probably the low penalty for the employer. If I don’t show up for my job, there’s no substitute that can be called in to do the work.
All I said is true mostly for high school teachers, by the way. Elementary teachers are paid low wages (underpaid is a subjective term) and burn out quickly. But that’s a positive in some ways. Wrangling seven year olds is probably a job best left to the young.
The 5% number makes sense. Odds are that they’re on a contract that says they get 1 sickday a month. Assuming 20 workdays, that means about a 5% absence rate, since well, if you give a person a sick day every month, they’ll often use it (on a mental health day occasionally..) That sounds like a straight contract issue.
The pay thing kind of bugs me. In a city district, a teacher can easily start at a higher salary than an economist just coming out of college.
I think it comes down to prestige. Teaching just isn’t prestigious. Sure we say nice things about teachers, but it’s not really something you see either the geeks pursuing (computers and engineering), nor the upwardly mobile types (business). Teaching is more of a fallback occupation. I don’t know how you make it more prestigious except for maybe trying something I saw in the economist: Forget class size, make it harder to become a teacher. After a while, people will probably get wind of the fact really motivated people are teachers, and some of them will want to do it to, since on some level, we choose our jobs based on the kind of people we want to be around.
Let’s stop beating around the bush and admit to ourselves that outsourcing teaching to a finely tuned corp like Walmart would clearly be in everyone’s best interest.
Let me suggest a libertarian spirited experiment: offer teachers the choice of 5.2% higher pay with no paid sick days – if you can’t come to work, you don’t get paid – or the current system. See how many choose each option.
Two more versions of the same experiment in behavioral economics: offer to pay for unused sick days at (1)the end of each school year or (2) retirement.
My daughter is a teacher of the deaf, and my wife was a special ed. teacher. They do get vacations for sure, but they also put in typical 10 to 12 hour days and get paid (barely) for 8. For the dedicated ones, it is a burn-out proposition, 10 years, tops. For the 9-5′ers it’s an o.k. life. What do you want for your kids? That’s why merit pay would go a lot further than tenure in securing a good education for all the “yoots” out there.
Teachers do not get 14 weeks off per year. They are paid based on 9 months but have the choice to distribute their paycheck over a 12 month period. Most prefer this as it is easier to budget.
This does somewhat undercut the underpaid argument.
I should point out that teachers get sick a lot for obvious reasons.
Interesting topic, here are a few issues:
1) Pay is a REAL issue: In NYC a public School teacher cannot afford to live anywhere “decent”. Relative to most jobs, the hours required to do it well and right are tremendous ( I come from a family of educators). Also, those that do it right get no additional income; for many, the best approach is to do the minimum not to get fired.
2) Unions are an issue: It is hard to fire a teacher. Very. (Mom was a principle and was TOUGH on union teachers who would/could not perform; most who were not up to her standards either left, or renewed their commitment to education.
3) Organizational Culture is an issue: Like above, leadership and vision can make a difference. I am sure a microscopic (A macro stat is not very informative to draw inference from) look at the data would show differences between school districts (maybe pay across district is a good factor to look at; socioeconomic status of students? Neighborhood?), and then within school district differences between schools.
My sister is a high school teacher, a strong performer, and libertarian. Her rationale for taking sick days is that it’s “use it or lose it” and there is little incentive not to take the days as teacher salaries are more closely correlated to tenure than performance in her district.
Her previous experience was working for a hedge fund, so I trust her when she says that teaching is more difficult than people expect. She agrees most teachers are overpaid relative to their performance. The average compensation isn’t the issue, the small variance is.
I was a teacher (high school) and am now a lawyer. I constantly joke with my fellow associates about the plushness of teaching. Remember, 184 days is .5 the year — which means that teachers get .5 the year off.
I was paid well, in the low $50′s, by the time I left after 7 years. I had enough money to buy a house on my own, pay off my student loans, and not want for the latest electronic gadgetry.
One of the most surprising insights I developed while teaching was the myth of more time in the classroom = better learning/more learning. Teaching in the Northeast, the school year did not coincide with the A.P. (Advanced Placement) year. The reality was that AP teachers typically had about a month less teaching time than normal classes as a result. So take off another 20-25 days from the 180 and you get 155 — 47 minute sessions. Despite this, performance in A.P. classes far out-paced non-AP for all the obvious reasons. But the biggest reason was that like college, law school, etc. — most learning in AP classes takes place OUTSIDE the classroom. Homework, at every level (my first grader regularly has an hour or two of homework!), is so much more serious than it was even 20 years ago.
Oh, dealing with opposing counsel is infinitely harder than dealing with teenagers — although I must say that I was better trained for the immaturity I encounter daily — thanks to teaching.
Exactly Phil. I believe one French professor at Columbia or NYU noted that US professors are more productive than their European counterparts (for research) not because average US faculty pay is so much higher but because variance is larger. At the university level, Europeans (esp. France) has more even pay distribution and the inability to fire even non-performing junior faculty. The US system has more job uncertainty (prior to tenure) and more pay variance (big rewards to stars like Sargent).
Thus the US high school mirrors the European collegiate pay system. The fact that US professors are considered more productive (in research terms only)reflects the greater competitiveness of academia.
If high schools were to fire more of their weak teachers, there would both be more money to reward the best and more meaningful threats in the event of non-performance.
@ joe
i’m not sure what you mean when you say that pay is a “REAL” issue for NYC public school teachers. i made 30K/yr (about 35k with overtime) at my first job out of college. that’s significantly less than what a NYC public school teacher made at that time. marketing, PR, journalism, publishing… these are all professional jobs in new york with much lower starting salaries than teaching in a public school. their present starting salary is $45,530; that is competitive for a bachelor’s degree with no prior full-time work experience. figure the hourly wage (even including extra time spent grading papers and the like) and it most likely becomes extremely competitive.
all that being said, teaching (especially in an urban public school) is a ridiculously tough job. it gets a little easier after the first couple of years, but you have to make it that far. i knew seven people my age who started teaching in new york, and after two years all but one had quit.
the real lesson i take away from this post, and from the comments, is that it’s generally better to have a situation where compensation is determined by a well-functioning market and not by politics or by random thoughts on what people ‘ought to’ make. that applies to teachers and it applies to financial executives.
“Back in her day, smart women became teachers. Now, dumb students become teachers. ”
All of those smart women have moved into better paying, more interesting careers. Sandra Day O’Connor was not offered a job as a lawyer, despite graduating 3rd in Stanford Law School. She was offered a job as a legal secretary.
Now, SDOC is one of the most motivated and talented women of her generation. You can easily imagine the thought process of a smart woman in the 50′s. Go become a teacher – it will be easy and I get months every year off, plus when I graduate I will get a job.
The older baby boomers were taught by the women who now are high powered lawyers, doctors and Investment Bankers. No wonder education has seemingly fallen in quality. We as a society put a pay cap on women and did not allow them to compete in the free market. Essentially, we were getting extremely high value education for well below market rates due to discrimination.
I’d rather have a great teacher 80% of the time than a lousy teacher 100% of the time.
Wow, let’s not be too hypocritical. How many of us pretend to be sick on mondays and fridays, take really long lunch breaks, and work on personal items during business hours? We love to whine and complain about teachers, but few ever offer support or are willing to help.
jonathen
I think quite a few people work in jobs where you’re there not to generate TPS reports with coversheet, but for the few truly good ideas you’ll generate each year. If you’re generating more than that, you’re pretty productive regardless of how much time is spent on long lunches, personal projects, and thinking.
I know that’s been the case at several of the jobs I worked.
Most executives take off far, far more time than teachers – plus has anyone here ever taken a vacation at their desk?
You know, a 3 day break where you don’t really do anything but mess around. Be honest! Teachers never have that option.
Sigh. The problem isn’t the teachers. It’s the system. And if the problem really is the teachers, then it’s still the system.
Having been, and worked with, the professions that supposedly have low absence rates, I can assure you that the if the criteria is showing up Monday through Friday during the regular business hours were the criteria, managers, engineers, and field engineers and sales reps, would have really really poor attendance records.
The jobs that are classed as “exempt” in labor law are for those who are largely self supervised and what is the practice in most of these jobs is for time to be taken as required for the errands of life without any reporting of those absences. A manager or engineer schedules his doctor appointment during the day, and then makes sure to keep his schedule free of meetings and appointments, so at the end of the, the reported hours is as always, 40 hours. To get away early for the weekend, clear the Friday afternoon schedule, work late on Thursday and come in early Friday, report 40 hours and take off early.
In my experience, the people who are the least present during the “work day” are college and university professors. You look at their schedules and they have 10 hours of class time scheduled, 5 hours of office hours, 2 hours of meetings, and nearly professor disappears as soon as possible Fridays.
Perhaps Tyler can tell us how many hours of the 8 to 5 40-hour work week he is at his job. Does he report time off when he goes to the doctor or leaves early for the weekend or leaves early to take his kid to the game?
Let me be clear, I took lots of “days off” in my engineering career, and a common complaint was I wasn’t very good at being around during work hours, but I, like many of my pers, found that to be a coping mechanism so I had rime to do my job.
I’ve no doubt that some take sicks days when they may not be sick. But are professors, who teach, at best 8 months a year (not when the weather is nice), and rarely on Fridays (unless you are junior faculty), can use multiple-choice tests or have TA’s (who are begging for expereince) do their marking really raising this issue?
I have twelve session of each class each term. My prof misses, cancels or has a sub (while they are at a conference) once a term and thats an 8.5% absence rate. It’s happened all three terms of my grad life so far. Compare that 5-6% against public sectors workers in general, most who don’t spend their days surrounded by dirty children and teenagers and Ill retract. Get over yourselves.
Most union employees think of sick days as vacation days.
The first poster got it right: teachers today tend to be stupid people.
I know several teachers in the Fairfax County Public School System (considered one of the best in the country) and while I don’t want to get into their personal habits, I will definitely never send my kids to a public school. I only just graduated this past May, and it seems the recent trend has been for students that couldn’t hack it in a real major to become teachers. In college, I was once paid by a friend to take a math 108 exam (basically math for retards) and was blown away by how easy the exam was. I took harder exams in pre-calc… junior year of high school. Irony is he is now a high school math teacher. I’ll probably get guff for the first part of my comment but it’s the truth. Out of my friends in college, the dumbest all became teachers.
I agree with Phil. The problem is one of incentives within the school system. This or something similar happens to most unionized jobs unfortunately.
One component of this is vacation. Though teachers do get a lot of days off, many districts do not offer teachers any discretionary vacation days in the way that most private companies offer their professional employees. So what does a teacher do when his best friend is getting married in Bermuda on a Saturday? He takes Friday as a “sick day,” his wife takes it off of her private sector job as a “vacation day,” and they go enjoy the long weekend.
Of the vacation days I’ve taken this year, about half were planned by me, but I was at the mercy of others for the other half (weddings, reunions, etc.). Teachers can’t plan their lives around the school calendar.
Around here, “all the school holidays, teacher workdays, staff development days” are added to the 180 days of state mandated “instructional time.” Most teachers find them useless and would be happy to get rid of them and get off earlier in June.
On the other hand, there are three allowed “personal days” that most teachers feel are use-it-or-lose-it mental health days.
The district does have a $500 perfect attendance bonus but the all or nothing quality of the bonus means it does not have much effect.
if you don’t teach, and you write about something like this, your opinion doesn’t matter. do you know what us teachers do on staff development days? WE GO TO WORK. we go to teacher trainings and workshops that are usually unpaid. we don’t sit around getting wasted in our classrooms.
also those that have brought it up are right, we work a hell of a lot more than usual (i work 70-80 hours a week even though i only get paid for an 8 hour day) and deal with the most unsanitary people outside of hospitals there are (elementary school children). long hours+germ-filled working conditions=a major potential for illness.
plus there is the burnout degree. you simply have no idea how difficult it is to manage a classroom unless you are in one. period. it’s brutal, and it’s everyday. are there teachers that abuse sick days? sure. is it detrimental to student achievement for the teacher not to be in the classroom? definitely. but i know i only get 4.5 days off this year (usually it’s 12 but i’m contracted for a bonus that involves attendance), and at some point i’ll be taking all of them.
and i attended one of the top rated colleges in the world and one of the best high schools in the country, i’d hardly refer to myself as a “dumb student”.
The American School System makes a very big deal out of student absenteeism. Regular absentees are punished quite severely, and they are sometimes banned from graduation. Why should teachers be treated any different?
Seems like you need to adjust your frame of reference to make the 5% absenteeism rate meaningful. On any given week, how many people in a given office are taking a personal day, are out for a doctor’s appointment, leaving at noon to pick someone up at an airport, etc? I would not be at all surprised if it is at least 5%.
Given that teachers have no say in *when* their vacation occurs (even if they do get more days off than other professions), regular life intrusions must be met by taking personal days.
I am sure some of these days are for Steelers’ games, or long weekends, or whatever. But I would bet a majority of them are for doctor’s appointments, family matters, getting a car fixed, and other such annoying life errands that can only be done from 9 to 5 on a weekday.
Hmm, why would my comment have been deleted? It certainly was not spam (no urls involved) and it was perfectly relevant to the discussion.
On behalf of all the teachers out there – Shame on you! Do you have any idea how many kids come to school with germ infested snot and drool hanging from their noses and fingers. also, why aren’t there more men in teaching? Because the pay sucks, parents are insane, and it’s a thankless job, no thanks to posts like this. I’ve dedicated 15 years to teaching and have inspired thousands of kids. I donated over $2000 and THOUSANDS of hours to GettingBoysToRead.com. Teachers deserve more respect.
Tony, your comment, which was a good one, has not been deleted.
Newsflash, it is more work for a teacher to be absent than it is to suck it up and go in.
In what other jobs, does the absent worker need to prepare material for the substitue worker coming in which details: classroom policies and procedures, seating, attendance, curriculum, maps of the school, emergency contacts, emergency drills (e.g. fire, tornado, intruder, lock down) medical information of the students, etc.?
When you walk in our shoes as teachers, then you would know what you’re talking about. Parents NEVER keep their kids home, so teachers get far more ill than in any other field. You NEED the sick days because you get sick all of the time, especially when you work with younger students. It’s a miserable occupation. I hate know-nothings who think teachers are screwing around on sick days. Until you’ve done the job, shut up.
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