Dive Brief:

• Gallup has released a new brief that examines how teacher engagement affects attendance — and as one might imagine, it's not looking too good for unhappy teachers.
• To conduct the study Gallup interviewed 6,500 full-time K-12 teachers about their happiness at school, with unhappy teachers classified as "disengaged" and happy as "engaged." From there, Gallup explained that disengaged teachers were more likely to report poor health that kept them from school.
• The report found that, over a year, disengaged teachers were likely to miss upwards of 780,000 more days of school all together than engaged teachers, and that "actively" disengaged teachers missed a total of over 1.5 million school days than engaged, happier teachers.

Dive Insight:

Ultimately, the report found that the combined total of unhappy teachers (both actively disengaged and disengaged) missed 2.3 million more school days than their engaged counterparts.

So what does this all mean? Well, quite a lot, actually. Disengagement affects attendance, which in turn affects both student learning and a school's budget. As Gallup explains, it saps a school's productivity. "School 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."

So just how many teachers reported feeling engaged in their work? 30%. While a frighteningly low number, Huffington Post reiterates that that number is about the same as the overarching number of Americans who report feeling engaged with their job. That said, teaching isn't just any office job where one could get away with staring at a computer screen all day. Polling only 30% when asking about teacher engagement should be something of a worry. If a teacher polled her classroom and found only 30% of her students were engaged, this would be an issue and solutions would ideally be brainstormed soon after. What can schools do to better to engage teachers and make them happier? Perhaps administrators can start first with this list of what not to do: