As Johnson and Bhattacharyya (2014) explain, Gallup polls are considered to be one of the best known national polls, estimating a percentage of popular vote for a particular category or candidate based on a collections of interviews. Gallup polls use sampling of public opinion to compile results, many times boosting public awareness or concern pertaining to the issue or certain subject at hand. A relatively recent Gallup poll taken between January 3, 2013 and September 30, 2014, suggested teachers who do not like their jobs miss millions of workdays, (Klein, 2015).
Accordingly, the poll was conducted using a conversion method by asking over 6,500 full-time K-12 teachers questions about their happiness at work to determine how engaged they felt they were in regards to their jobs, (Klein, 2015). After gathering such information, the answers were used to classify teachers as being engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged. The results seemed to show teacher who were considered to be “engaged” were committed to their work whereas those not engaged were primarily disconnected, adding that those actively disengaged were considered to be completely unhappy most every day, (Klein, 2015).
Additionally, those who reported being bot engaged and disengaged tend to have poorer health, reporting that those not-engaged missed over 780,000 more days of school a year in total than those engaged, (Hastings & Agrawal, 2015). Likewise, 30% of teacher were considered to be “engaged” in work, matching the national average for all workers, 57% were considered to be “not-engaged”, reporting an estimate of 11.3 unhealthy days, 3.5 missed days, per year, using engaged teachers as a baseline,(Hastings & Argrawal, 2015). Likewise, those considered “actively disengaged results were even higher, with 20.4 unhealthy days, resulting in around 6 missed work days per year, (Hastings & Argrawal, 2015).
In many ways, such data suggests the loss of school productivity, especially on days where teachers are unhealthy or absent. Such information provides an illustration of the loss in resources schools have when having to