The Decline of Public Education: Even Teachers Are Cutting Class

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, not counting 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.

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 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.

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. 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.”

1. Both students and teachers across the country are missing school at an alarming rate.
2. Students need two things to learn at public school: They need to be there and they need to have teachers there to teach them.
3. Despite making more money than most teachers in America and being chronically absent themselves, Chicago teachers are pushing for school districts to increase pay and benefits.