For teachers, every empty desk is a drain: on class time, energy, and ultimately their enjoyment of the job.
More than 1 in 4 students nationwide chronically misses school. Now, new research links that phenomenon directly to teacher morale: Teacher satisfaction drops steadily as absenteeism increases, according to a study published this week in Education Researcher, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
“The core of being a teacher is instruction and helping kids grow and develop,” said Michael Gottfried, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “Absenteeism pulls teachers away from that core purpose.”
The research is the latest to show that teacher morale and student attendance, two things typically studied separately, are deeply linked.
In fact, student absenteeism can damage the teacher-student relationship. In a prior study, Gottfried and his colleagues found teachers feel less close to chronically absent students, and perceive them as being more socially withdrawn and performing worse in class than students who attend regularly—even when objectively, the students are performing fine and behaving normally.
And both absenteeism and teacher well-being are pressing problems in K-12 education.
Chronic absenteeism sat at about 15 percent nationwide before 2020, but spiked to 28 percent by 2023. Sixteen of the 19 states that have released data for 2024 show declines in the rates of chronic absenteeism compared to last year, but all of them remain significantly higher than in 2019, according to the Return to Learn Tracker, an ongoing project by the American Enterprise Institute think tank and the College Crisis Initiative (C2i) at Davidson College to track chronic absenteeism.
“We’re so group work oriented, and we spend a lot of time in collaborative learning, so when a student is not there, and then when they show up after a day or two, it is really, really striking,” said Lindsey Paricio-Moreau, a science teacher at Cherry Creek High School in Cherry Creek, Colo., where 29 percent of students were chronically absent as of 2023. “They don’t have the same relationships that have been built over multiple class periods working together, so I think they then feel more awkward, and it just adds up.”
Meanwhile, Education Week’s annual State of Teaching project found in a 2023 survey that, on a -100 to 100 scale, teacher morale came in at -13—suggesting that on average, teachers are feeling more negatively than positively about their jobs.
Teachers feel responsible for students, even when they’re absent
Gottfried and his colleagues’ latest study uses data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks students who started kindergarten in 2011, along with their teachers. They analyzed job satisfaction levels for about 2,370 teachers in kindergarten, historically one of the grades with the highest levels of student absenteeism.
Researchers found teachers who had higher absenteeism in the fall semester rated significantly lower on measures of their job satisfaction, feelings of usefulness, and belief in the teaching profession as a whole. While the study focused on kindergarten teachers, teachers in upper grades said the results mirror teacher stress more broadly.
Anecdotally, teachers say economic and mental health problems that rose for students during the pandemic remain high, pointing to more students missing school due to anxiety or exhaustion from after-school work. Many students and families haven’t regained the academic habit of attendance, they said in interviews.
Students miss for a variety of reasons, but “the No. 1 is, ‘we’re going on vacation,’ or ‘I just didn’t feel like coming,’” said Sarah Hager, a visual-arts teacher in Albuquerque, N.M. public schools, where chronic absenteeism has more than tripled since 2019 up to 37 percent of students in 2023. “That’s really frustrating as a teacher to hear, because we’re not only responsible for when they’re here, but also when they’re not here. ... We want kids to feel the same way about school that we do.”
“You learn to be very flexible as a teacher,” Hager added, “but it sometimes feels like we’re just treading water.”
Make-up work adds to teachers’ load, too
There was no tipping point at which absenteeism suddenly became serious enough to affect teachers’ job satisfaction, Gottfried found. Rather, each absence added to a growing “chaos” as a handful of different students missed school or returned each day.
Teachers, he found, kept up instructional practices, but their job enjoyment, belief in the profession, and feelings of usefulness all declined.
“It’s just an endless cycle because so many kids are missing all the time,” he said.
Teachers Hager, Paricio-Moreau and Jeff Swisher, who teaches history in the Griffith, Colo. district, all said helping students make up work drains their time and energy. For one student missing a day of lecturing, Swisher said he might only need five to 10 minutes to prepare make-up material—but if a student misses a group project, it could take an additional 45 minutes to create an alternative version of the lesson.
Paricio-Moreau, who started teaching in 2020, said she has come to see absenteeism as her “new normal.” With two to three students regularly absent in every class, she has spent hours each week moving all of her lessons online and changing group projects to other assignment to limit the damage to missing students.
“We work so hard to scaffold everything day to day,” she said, “and when students miss elements or steps of that, they feel thrown into the deep end, and all my careful planning and everything we’ve done feels kind of useless.”
One of Swisher’s classes has not had a single missed student so far this year—and that class is now almost a week and a half ahead of the others.
He is grateful for the reprieve.
“Thankfully it’s my very first hour, so it starts me on a very good day,” he said.
