When to Be Sick, When to Be Well

New Jersey teachers have an absentee rate three or four times as high as workers in private industry. Annually, it forces the public schools to spend millions of dollars extra to hire substitutes. It limits student achievement. It causes students to copy the teachers in truancy. Newark spent 4 million dollars on substitutes in one year; Jersey City spent 1.5 million. All of this according to a survey by the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. Strangely, or not so strangely, “most teacher absences occur on Mondays, Fridays, the days before and after holidays and the first warm days of spring. . . . There were two days each month when absenteeism was nil: paydays.”

Stung by this evidence that indicates sick days are often play days, an irate person from Syracuse University responded in the “Letters” section of the magazine that published the results of the survey. The letter explained: “Absence may be a coping mechanism. ‘Illness’ in the many nonspecific forms it can take is an individual’s way of reacting to an abrasive environment. Sickness and absenteeism must be viewed as withdrawal phenomena, not dereliction of duty.” Another letter writer could not cope with this explanation and offered a remedy: “There is a very simple solution to the high cost of absent teachers. Pay them only for days they work!”