Missing in action

Addressing teacher absenteeism

Getting teachers to come to work is a major barrier to improving education outcomes in some developing countries, especially in South Asia. Governments often spend 70 to 90 percent of their recurrent education budgets on teacher salaries, without the most basic of returns.

Excessive absence can lead to sharp declines in student learning. There is often no substitute to fill in for the missing teacher, and sometimes small rural schools have to close for the day.

Until recently, there was little evidence to show how serious teacher absenteeism is, and how policymakers and communities might address it. A World Bank research project carried out surveys of random samples between 2002 and 2003 of primary schools in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda.

The survey teams did not rely on attendance records, which can be inaccurate. Instead, they checked on teachers during surprise classroom visits. The study found that an average 19 percent of primary school teachers were entirely absent. Other findings include:

• The highest average absence rates were in Uganda (27 percent) and India (25 percent nationally, reaching roughly 40 percent in Bihar and Jharkhand). These are far higher than normally-expected reasons like sick leave and training.
• On average, teacher absence rates were much higher in poorer areas. Doubling a region's per-capita income, reduces the absence rates by 8 percentage points (for example, from 25 to 17 percent).
• Better-paid teachers were absent as often as other teachers. Teachers have little reason to fear losing their salaries for poor performance. In India for instance, only 1 in 3000 head teachers has ever dismissed a teacher for absenteeism.
• Schools offering incentives to attend work — such as more frequent school inspections and better infrastructure and equipment — have lower absence rates.
• In India, private-school teacher absence rates are about a quarter less than public-school teachers' in the same villages.

Head teachers suggested that only a few absences were for sanctioned reasons such as illness and official non-education-related duties, such as monitoring elections. Many absences were unexcused or were not acknowledged by the head teacher.

Policymakers need to try a variety of interventions:

• improve working conditions by upgrading school infrastructure and equipment, for example
• reward teachers directly for performance, either through promotion systems or bonuses for accelerated student learning — an approach successfully piloted in public schools in Andhra Pradesh, India
• experiment with increasing local control of schools, for example, by giving Parent Teacher Associations or School Management Committees better information and new tools to support, hire and fire teachers — programmes like El Salvador's EDUCO suggest this may reduce teacher absence
• increase the frequency and consequences of government school inspections
• allow private schools to compete with state schools, especially in rural areas where absence rates are high and government schools are least effective — in Pakistan and India middle-class and poor rural families are willing to pay for private schooling where government schools fail to meet minimal standards.

Halsey Rogers
World Bank,1818 H St., NW, MSN MC3-311, Washington, DC 20433, USA
hrogers@worldbank.org

See also

Absenteeism of Teachers and Health Workers
http://econ.worldbank.org/projects/absenteeism

Getting Teachers and Doctors to Report to Work
Link

Teacher Incentives in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from India, unpublished paper, Harvard University and World Bank, by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman, 2006

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