Principal Joshua Fine believes helping teachers take time off when they need it can help them succeed in the classroom over the long haul.
“Because our work is so difficult and exhausting at times, both physically and mentally, we have to know when to lay off the gas with our staff,” said Fine, the principal of White Oak Middle School in Montgomery County, Md. He encourages staff to take planned mental health days and to go home when they are sick, and uses a schoolwide update to help teachers plan their own leave and cover for each other rather than scrambling to fill those gaps.
This more holistic approach to staff attendance can ease the stresses and structures that can make teachers take leave and minimize the learning disruptions caused by staff absences.
“If we plan for teacher absences,” he said, “we don’t get to a situation where teachers are just totally burned out and, instead of taking one day that [a teacher] had planned and looked forward to, now taking a bunch of days because they’re exhausted and feeling defeated.”
New data from the U.S. Department of Education provides a big-picture snapshot about teacher absenteeism, finding that it has risen. But the federal calculation doesn’t account for key factors, like how much leave time teachers are given in their contracts.
Teacher absenteeism has increased since the pandemic, with the share of teachers nationwide who were missing more than 10 days of school rising from 29% in 2015-16 to just over 36% in 2023-24, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s long-awaited Civil Rights Data Collection, released last month. (The data sets differ for each successive collection.)
A quarter of public schools in the United States reported that the majority of their teachers missed more than 10 days of school in 2023-24. States’ share of teachers absent that many days ranged from less than a third of teachers in Georgia, Hawaii, and New York, to more than half in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington.
The Civil Rights Data Collection is self-reported and over the years has suffered from data quality problems, which may include the teacher-absence data. For example, more than 40% of Idaho and South Dakota schools reported zero teacher absences, compared to just 1% of Maryland schools.
What does ‘chronic absenteeism’ mean for teachers?
The term “chronic absenteeism” often is used to refer to attendance issues in both students and teachers. But the calculations don’t work the same way, and experts say the term can be misleading when applied to teacher attendance.
Since 2013-14, the Civil Rights Data Collection has defined students as chronically absent if they miss half or more of at least 15 days during the school year, regardless of whether those absences were excused or unexcused. However, the Civil Rights Data Collection did not include student absence data in its release for 2023-24. As a result, the most recent student data comes from state reports to the federal government under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which considers students chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of a school year, or 18 days of a typical 180-day year.
Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia use chronic absenteeism or another attendance marker for accountability purposes under ESSA.
By contrast, no state uses teacher attendance for ESSA accountability. The Civil Rights Data Collection classified teachers as chronically absent if they missed more than 10 instructional days in 2023-24, regardless of the length of the school year.
But “there’s no research establishing it as a meaningful threshold,” said Katherine Bowser, an education policy researcher for the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Still other data suggests most teachers aren’t playing hooky when they’re absent that many days. In fact, they are typically taking leave they’re entitled to under law or labor contracts.
At the time the federal data was collected, 27 states had laws or rules establishing minimum sick and personal leave benefits for teachers, according to a policy and contract database from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Minimum teacher leave ranged from as low as five days in Texas to 15 days for some teachers in Connecticut and Ohio.
The median was 11 days per year, not counting parental leave or additional leave granted under district contracts.
Based on an analysis of 100 of the largest school districts in the country, NCTQ found that those districts, on average, give teachers 12 days of paid sick leave and five days of paid personal days.
Finding the meaning in messy data
That means policymakers should be cautious about using teacher absenteeism data without state and district context, said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign, which works with states on to improve education data.
“It comes down to the problem the [teacher absenteeism] indicator is attempting to highlight and measure: Is it to shine a light that states are allowing too much leave? Or that the school year is too short given allowable leave?” Kowalski said. “Without goals, it’s difficult to put an indicator in context.”
Overall, other studies also find teachers take fewer days off than similar professionals.
That doesn’t mean absentee data is useless, though.
“What’s more meaningful than the [10-absence] threshold itself are the patterns we observe,” Bowser said. “Teacher absenteeism rose during the pandemic and never recovered, which is a signal that something has changed. The causes aren’t fully understood, but it could be increased stress and burnout, disengagement, or to some extent, a shift in mindset toward treating leave as compensation to be fully used.”
To solve attendance problems, school and district leaders should focus on analyzing longer-term trends in absences, rather than getting caught up in short-term attendance issues, according to Bruce Ellis, the director of professional development for the Texas Computer Education Association, who works with districts on data use.
In a report on teacher data use, he found that much like student absenteeism, teacher absenteeism can spike at certain times of the year, such as just after winter break.
Finding better work-life balance
That means improving teacher attendance usually means thinking beyond individual teacher absences to improve overall staff health and wellness. Some districts incentivize higher attendance by paying bonuses for unused leave at the end of the year, but evidence is mixed about how effective these incentives are.
As younger teachers make up a growing share of the teaching force, policies that can help them balance work and family responsibilities become more important to improving attendance, said Kadee Anstadt, the senior vice president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and a veteran district leader.
Teachers are more likely than other professionals to consider their workplace inflexible and intrusive, according to a 2025 RAND Corp. study. Fewer than half of teachers reported that their schools made efforts to help them with work-life balance, RAND found, and they had a harder time handling small personal issues or errands than people in other professions.
Some school districts are trying to address that problem. For example, while teachers often take half or full days off to schedule medical appointments and errands, Anstadt said more districts are developing flexible scheduling that can provide coverage just for one or two class periods.
A little flexibility can reap big rewards in attendance and staff morale, Anstadt said, noting that when she worked in the Washington school district in Toledo, Ohio, it partnered with community health centers to provide urgent care appointments for teachers and their children.
“If I feel like I’m coming down with something, I don’t have to call in sick; during my planning period, I can go over to the health center, do a strep swab, and have my antibiotics delivered to me right there at school,” Anstadt said. “That helped immensely with our staff attendance on campus.”
