U.S. teachers who are unhappy with their jobs miss significantly more days of work than their happier peers, a new survey finds.
A recent brief from
Gallup looks at how teachers’ level of engagement impacts their attendance.
Last year, Gallup asked a group of over 6,500 full-time K-12
schoolteachers questions about their happiness at work to determine how
engaged they felt with their jobs. The answers were used to classify
teachers as engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. Engaged
teachers were committed to their work, while not engaged teachers felt
emotionally disconnected from their jobs and actively disengaged
teachers felt completely unhappy on a day-to-day basis.
Gallup
determined that teachers who reported feeling less engaged with their
work were more likely to report that poor health kept them from their
usual teaching routine. Based on data about the number of full-time
teachers in the country, the study estimated that "not engaged" teachers
missed over 780,000 more days of school a year in total than engaged
teachers. Actively disengaged teachers missed over 1,500,000 more days
of school than their happier counterparts.
In total, these groups of teachers are estimated to have missed 2.3 million more days of school than teachers who were engaged.
“Absenteeism
associated with a lack of teacher engagement creates a drain on school
productivity," the Gallup report says. "Schools districts must foot the
bill for classroom replacements. And when substitute teachers are relied
on to execute a regular teacher's lesson plans, often with limited
advance notice, it can easily create a suboptimal learning environment
for students."
According to Gallup, about 30 percent of teachers report feeling engaged with their work, which is
about the same as the overall number of American workers who say they feel engaged with their jobs.
Gallup
arrived at its conclusions by asking teachers how many days in the past
month poor health kept them from participating in their usual
activities. Using a conversion method established in previous research,
the polling organization estimated how many workdays teachers missed per
year, based on the number of days they reported feeling unhealthy.
In a previous Gallup study, based on the same polling, about half of teachers reported feeling daily stress,
although they tended to report feeling happy with their lives overall.
“The
problem is that when teachers are not fully engaged in their work,
their students pay the price every day,” Gallup said in a report based
on that survey, published in April 2014. “Disengaged teachers are less
likely to bring the energy, insights, and resilience that effective
teaching requires to the classroom. They are less likely to build the
kind of positive, caring relationships with their students that form the
emotional core of the learning process.”