America’s Woeful Public Schools: Too Many Teachers Out of Classrooms

April 18, 2011 12:27 pm April 18, 2011

9

The average number of days teachers are absent during the school year. This equals out to five percent of the 180-day school year. The average professional misses only three percent of their days at work, or seven days out of a 240-day work year.

5.3

The average percentage of teachers absent each day during the school year, according to a 2008 Center for American Progress analysis of 2003-2004 federal School and Staffing Survey data (the latest available). That’s 170,631 teachers out of the classroom every day, often for reasons that have little to do with illness.

11.2

The average number of days teachers in Camden, N.J. were absent during the 2008-2009 school year, according to a report by the Courier-Post. Each day, the district spent $8,748 for 81 substitute teachers to fill in for absent teachers.

11

The average number of days missed by teachers working in the Lawrence Township school district in Indianapolis, Ind., in 2009-2010, according to a report by WISH-TV.

5 hours, 50 minutes

The average time students spend in classrooms learning, according to a Dropout Nation analysis of 39 school districts. The average teacher in those districts is contractually obligated to work 6 hours, 16 minutes each day.

3 hours, 30 minutes

The average time in class spent by a third-grader in the Anoka-Hennepin Independent School District outside of Minneapolis. An average teacher in the district, by the way, works a 7 hour, 40-minute day.

Teachers are critical to student success. But they can’t be of any help if they are absent from classrooms or spend too little time with kids to help them learn. And this is a major problem in American public education. Thanks to generous sick day policies written into teacher contracts and state laws– including 10 sick days throughout the school year and the ability to bank as many as a full calendar year of days — there are too many incentives for teachers lacking commitment to their work to skip out on classroom duty. As a result, far too many kids either spend their days with substitute teachers — who are often not qualified by any measure to teach — or end up being shipped around to other classrooms so they can get some sort of time. In Indianapolis, for example, 5,500 students a day in the Indianapolis Public School District went without a regular teacher. As a team of researchers led by Harvard University professor Raegen Miller pointed out in a 2007 report, teacher absenteeism contributes to lower student achievement.

But even this would be easy to deal with if the time allotted during the school year for teaching was better-managed. Contracts and state laws often limit the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom and the number of hours students get instruction. Teachers also don’t get time to actually prepare for the next instructional day. And the use of school days for low-quality professional development means that kids are robbed of even more time for learning. This is particularly true in urban districts that serve our poorest and minority children; the absenteeism and low quality of instruction, along with the dysfunction of the districts themselves, lead to kids being left behind in school and in life.

Reforming the traditional system of teacher compensation and evaluation will help. So will putting an end to the dysfunctional bureaucracies that are a feature of traditional districts; the latter would also help teachers, who often feel shunted aside by central offices (and in the worst urban districts, don’t also feel as if they can be kept safe by them). Improving how we recruit new teachers would also help; the need for entrepreneurial, driven, hardy teachers with strong subject-matter competency and empathy for all children in their care is critical. But it will also take a rethink of what instruction should look like, especially in an age of strapped budgets and in a time in which we know that current methods of teaching are often insufficient for improving student achievement. Online learning and DIY school models could help more kids get the high quality teaching they deserve.

RiShawn Biddle

Editor of Dropout Nation and Co-Author of "A Byte At the Apple: Rethhinking Education Data in the Post-NCLB Era". Conttributor to The American Spectator and Labor Watch. Author of "Left Behind: A Star Editorial Board series" and longtime editorialist on education and economic affairs.

3 Comments

Jake says:

April 18, 2011 at 4:06 pm

I love how you mention the percentage of time a teacher is out in a year, crunch some numbers and switch topics without explaining why it happens.

Not the teacher’s fault that they work 210 days in the year, wheras other professionals work all year round.

The teachers have to deal with the same use or lose vacation time that other professionals have to do, only the teachers have stiffer penalties if they do not use them.

Maybe what you should do is encourage the schools to stop punushing the teachers for not being sick. You should also do more research on this issue before blaming the teachers.
RiShawn Biddle says:

April 18, 2011 at 4:27 pm

Actually, Jake, in most states, sick days are accrued over time and can be banked for future use. In fact, sick days can often be used for purchasing pension service credit, which means that the average teacher gets a sweet perk that doesn’t generally accrue to private-sector workers. (By the way, Jake, teachers also generally work 180-to-190 days a year, not the 210 you have mentioned.)

And, if you read closely, I’m not necessarily blaming teachers for using sick days. Those teachers who abuse the privilege are blameworthy for avoiding their responsibility to their students; if they are suffering from burnout, they should leave the profession, period. Even then, teachers aren’t necessarily at fault for using their benefits.

The fact of the matter is that their NEA and AFT affiliates either negotiate for those days or have them mandated through state laws. School districts and state legislatures, who originally gave out those days because it was one of the ways they could compensate teachers, are also to blame. Neither have pushed for alternative models of compensation that would reward teachers for good-to-great work and keep them focused on classroom work. Districts and states are also responsible for not standing up to NEA and AFT affiliates and striking different bargains.

No matter how you slice it, Jake, the problem is that traditional teacher compensation doesn’t work, especially for kids. They are the ones who suffer. Let’s not forget that.

Thank you, Jake, for reading and commenting.
Lorraine Richardson says:

April 18, 2011 at 8:36 pm

Reformers, education stakeholders, and free market enthusiasts are all weighing in on how to “fix” or repair our “broken” schools.

Fire teachers! Eliminate tenure! Get rid of unions! Implement merit pay! Jail Parents!

Attempting to address the crisis is comparable to trying to assemble the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without first seeing and understanding the picture on the box cover.

Schools are not “broken.” The mission is far greater than that. The real challenge REINVENTION of an educational system dismantled by the forces of technological change and the unruly winds of globalization. It is an educational civilization created during an economic and social context (industrialization) in which schools and teachers were not required nor expected to educate ALL children equally and well.

The Industrial Era of Education

Designed to prepare the majority of students for an industrial economy, schools, especially high schools from where I hail, taught an overt curriculum of basic skills and a covert curriculum of rote memorization, physical quietude, punctuality, and obedience. A factory-based model of education prepared the masses for a pot of gold at the end of the high school rainbow: a life made prosperous by taking orders without question from a foreman, or through repetitive tasks in an office, or a reasonable facsimile.

Unfortunately, “gone” are the days where high school graduates purchased homes, drove insured, late model cars, took vacations, and dined in upscale restaurants. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, unleashed billions of new capitalists, new competitors, and new consumers who aspire to the same standard of living they view on American television and in our movies. Now students see their parents jobless, helpless, and sometimes hopeless as they mourn the death of a comfortable way of life. Hence, the term drop-out factories is coined as students drop out in record numbers because they foresee of no future or hold any vision in their hearts or spirits of what life can be like if they play by the old, covert rules. Students desperately need a new vision of themselves and who they can be.

Customarily, public schools have been least successful educating minority children, the children of the poor, and children of the single, underemployed parent. For the cognitively or economically privileged, we created private schools, examination schools, honors programs and provided them with an elite curriculum based on critical thinking and problem solving. They, too, were recipients of a covert contract; graduate from college and a seat at the table of status and/or power is yours for the asking. That contract is also “gone.”

Nevertheless, public education is now expected to serve ALL children equally and as well as were middle-class, white children from stable, two-parent homes during the industrial economy. Educating ALL children equally and well is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Another Covert Contract

Teachers, too, were co-opted into a covert contract. Punctual teachers with effective classroom management skills, (quiet students) low failure rates, positive rapport with parents, peers and especially the principal earned tenure, a pension plan, and the good life. And, too many administrators in our schools promoted not necessarily because of exemplary teaching but because they too were beneficiaries of the same covert contract and are now challenged to support teachers with the new world order of teaching critical thinking and problem seeking to ALL students. Both groups will need a new vision of themselves.

Parents: Missing in Action

Michelle Rhee and other so-called reformers want to point the finger at teachers for the present crisis without bringing to the table the responsibility of parents. An industrial economy begat a wider middle class that also provided more opportunities for women and for minorities. A by-product of the new economic prosperity has been latchkey children, unsupervised time after school, and missing homework. Parents lost their way and found few reasons to give their children for existence beyond more and more material comforts. Tempted by cable television, shopping malls, cell phones, video games, they substituted the curriculum of a spirit-fed life with one spawned of materialism. Inner assets or inner resources were replaced by “affluenza.” A television in every bedroom replaced the human connectedness of the dinner hour, the appointed time for sharing the joys and disappointments of the day and providing the uplifting words needed to navigate a complex world. The industrial era has given way to generations of undisciplined, unmotivated students who have been reared without pain or responsibility. And we blame schools. However, families, too, will need a new vision of themselves.

Game Change: Holding Teachers Accountable

Globalization necessitates all professions move the needle from tenure and a defined pension to merit and a 401K. Now educators must perform like workers in profit-making industries, and their bottom line is the results of students’ test scores. According to the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who has proclaimed Detroit Public Schools as operating at Ground Zero, “It’s all about the talent.” Teachers are now viewed as accountable talent who should be held responsible if their students don’t perform on assessments, should agree to layoffs and pay raises based on merit in place of seniority. Unfortunately, whether unions and teachers like it or not, their job description is being reinvented, re-imagined, re-conceptualized.

A New World Order

The uncompromising and irrevocable forces of globalization are sweeping aside and breaking down old power structures, social contracts, and a way of life.

Thus, an entire educational and economic civilization is gone, “gone with the wind,” and we must begin to give birth, much like during the era of Reconstruction, to a new educational and economic civilization. Experience teaches us that birth – a symbol of hope – is often a long, slow and painful process and there are no guarantees. But to prepare our students to become contributing and prosperous members of a new world order, we must begin, and we must keep a persistent spirit in the face of the formidable challenges that lie ahead.

Lorraine Richardson

Dropout Nation