Two things must happen for children to learn in public schools: They must attend their classes, and teachers must be there to educate them. Yet 43% of teachers at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were “chronically absent” during the 2023-2024 school year, an issue recently highlighted by the Chicago Tribune. Of all the problems currently affecting education, this might be one of the most troubling. It’s bad enough that schools are having a difficult time hiring enough teachers, but now some can’t even get their staff to show up every day. Is this an isolated issue or a problem that stretches beyond the Windy City?
Education Takes a Backseat
“Chronic absenteeism” means a teacher has missed ten or more days in a school year, excluding vacations and paid holidays. CPS isn’t the only district in the Chicago area to experience this trend. Nearly 43% of teachers at Evanston-Skokie School District 65 were chronically absent, the same as CPS, and 38.5% at Oak Park-River Forest District 200. The issue is not new, though. Since the pandemic, numerous schools nationwide have had an increasing number of chronically absent teachers.
In New York City, during the 2022-23 school year, almost a fifth of public schoolteachers missed 11 or more days, slightly higher than the previous year. Each week in the 2023-2024 school year, nearly 15% of Michigan teachers were absent. Last September, Springfield High School and Junior High in Ohio were forced to close for a day because too many teachers had called out, and, like many public schools across the country, not enough substitutes were available.
“The shortage of substitutes has grown more acute since the pandemic,” said Sarah Mervosh, an education reporter, writing in The New York Times. “[F]ewer people are entering the teaching profession compared with a decade ago, and there has been more teacher turnover in recent years.”
An important factor that many media outlets somehow seem to overlook is that “[t]eacher absences can result in significant learning loss and can have negative impacts on nonacademic and behavioral outcomes for students,” explained The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
After the remote-learning experiment, chronic absenteeism has also been a problem among K-12 students. “Roughly one in four students in the 2022-23 school year remained chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year,” explained the Associated Press in August. “That represents about 12 million children in the 42 states and Washington, D.C., where data is available.” Before 2020, “only 15% of students missed that much school.”
Are students expected to put forth more effort than their teachers? And it’s not like kids are doing so well in school at the moment, anyway. They’re still struggling to catch up from the learning losses they suffered when school closures were rampant.
Are Students Now an Afterthought?
Nearly 80% of the CPS’s eighth-grade students are not proficient readers. “In spring 2024, 30.5% of CPS students in third through eighth grade met proficiency standards in reading and 18.3% were proficient in math,” explained the Illinois Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank. Eleventh-grade students in Chicago remain “below pre-pandemic levels” in math and reading. Meanwhile, CPS teachers want a 6% salary increase, down from the initial 9% demanded. Guess what the average salary for CPS teachers is? The yearly median is a whopping $95,000, among the highest in the nation. For that much money, most people would crawl on broken glass to get to work.
Of course, the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) has been trying to get Pedro Martinez, the CEO of CPS, to agree to a long list of demands in contract negotiations since April. It previously called for $50 billion in funding. Aside from the wage hikes and other requests, the union wanted the money “to provide fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBTQ-related requirements and training in schools,” noted Fox News. CTU has since shrunk its proposal to an estimated cost of $10 billion, including $5.5 billion for 13,400 new staff, 7,000 of which the union wants to be teacher assistants. That’s great, probably the smartest thing it could ask for, but it seems nobody wants to work in public schools anymore, and those who do take the job seem unconcerned about the decline in children’s education.
“A survey of schools across the country,” as The Heritage Foundation puts it, “found that 72 percent of public schools had higher teacher absenteeism rates than before the COVID-19 pandemic.” If the country ever stands a chance of reforming education and getting kids back on track, states will probably need to find more teachers, ones who will show up to work and who care more about the kids than their unions.
