Since the pandemic, the number of students who are missing class has risen. More than a quarter of students were “chronically absent,” meaning they had missed 10 percent of classes or more, during the 2021-2022 school year. That was a steep increase from the 15 percent of students missing that much class before the pandemic.
In fact, absenteeism has become such a nationally notable problem that it was picked up by the White House in May. And a bipartisan coalition quickly agreed that reducing absenteeism by half should be the “top priority” for American schools. Of particular concern is the effect of missing class on student achievement, along with other notable problems like student behavior. For instance, the White House blamed absenteeism on plummeting reading and math scores for students in the country.
But there’s another potential consequence of the rising number of students missing class: Teachers enjoy their jobs less. At least, that’s what a new study argues.
The core of teaching is instruction and helping kids grow and develop, and anything that pulls teachers away from that purpose is going to make them unsatisfied, says Michael Gottfried, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study.
For the researchers, that means that absenteeism threatens to aggravate the teacher shortage.
Shortchanging Staff
Published in Educational Researcher this November, this latest study, “Do Teachers With Absent Students Feel Less Job Satisfaction?,” claims to be the first to inspect the link between whether students attend school and how satisfied teachers are with their jobs. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education about 2,370 kindergarten teachers from both public and private schools around the country, the study found that when a higher percentage of students are absent from the classroom, teacher job satisfaction trends downward.
Previous research from one of the authors has tried to show that missing class can negatively impact what teachers think about absent students, leading them to view those students as lacking social skills and being less academically capable.
With the staffing shortages schools have been wading through, it’s hardly surprising that adding another challenge would make teachers feel the job is even more thankless and insurmountable.
For public sector education jobs, the recovery in employment from the COVID-19 crisis was slow. It only occurred by October of 2023 using federal relief dollars, according to economic analysis from the Economic Policy Institute. Yet, those public schools still have been unable to meet the demand for teachers, with teaching jobs in high-poverty public schools having proven particularly hard to fill, according to the institute. Plus, with the added complexities of the classroom post-pandemic, the amount of stress teachers felt has also surged.
But the latest report is not just talking about burnout, according to one of its authors. The study revealed that teachers across experience levels felt less job satisfaction when students were absent.
It’s also about demoralization.
Since students came back from the pandemic, teachers have had to spend their time remediating disengaged students, Gottfried says, adding: “Teachers are like, ‘gosh, this isn’t what I signed up for.’”
Other well-known causes of the teacher shortage include low salaries, burnout and not feeling supported. So how does this “job dissatisfaction” rank with other problems with the teaching profession — like low pay? “I’ve got to tell you: it’s a huge downer when half the class isn’t there one of the days,” Gottfried says. While poor compensation and stressful working conditions rank the highest as reasons for teacher dissatisfaction, absenteeism is also up there, Gottfried argues. In his view, that’s pushing teachers away, which is then fueling the staffing shortages even further.
But what would it look like to also support teachers?
When we think about the teacher shortage, people aren’t thinking enough about why teachers want to leave the job, Gottfried says. That means that a lot of focus on absenteeism is on getting students back to class, Gottfried says. A lot of the responsibilities seem to fall on the teacher — to reach out to the family, to send homework packets home — but once students are back in the classroom, then what?
Teachers feel a lot of responsibility for absences and some of the policy attention focused on reducing absenteeism can make teachers feel as though they are under scrutiny, being held responsible for students not attending, Gottfried says.
Instead, scaffolding that helps support teachers, like before- and after-school tutoring, would let students return to class more easily, he argues. Also, greater instructional assistance could take some of the pressure off teachers. “I would think about ways to support absent students that can bring in other staff from the school, and not just a truancy officer to help discipline and address, like, ‘you weren’t here,’” Gottfried says.
