I'd like to see a chart that compared the increasing number of sick days taken by teachers with the increasing number of children with behavioral problems and/or special needs students being thrown into classes with little to no support. I suspect they're correlated, as in my experience with friends and relatives who've been substitute teachers it seems the teachers with some of the worst classes take the most days off.
Some teachers are definitely lazy, and there should obviously be more mechanisms for punishing those who abuse things like this, but for most I see it as a natural evolution of cost cutting. If you make an environment more stressful and less bearable for staff then they're going to take more mental health days. What's worse, is that it's not just the teachers that suffer for it but the rest of the students as well.
Though ultimately this is a bit of a red herring IMO. Teachers in Ontario are allotted 10 sick days a year. A substitute usually makes about $240 a day so even if every single teacher in the entire province took every single sick day they were entitled to you're only talking about $2400 extra per class per year. Now obviously a huge number of those days are unavoidable because they're actually sick and there's no way every single teacher uses every day allotted, so the actual marginal cost per class from this is fairly small. That doesn't mean it should be ignored, but it's a pretty minor issue IMO.
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