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. […]
— Read More: www.libertynation.com
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