Teachers Work a Lot of Unpaid Hours. Can They Just Work Less?
Teachers Work a Lot of Unpaid Hours. Can They Just Work Less?
A new survey finds teachers working 15 unpaid hours per week. But working less means overcoming a culture of self-sacrifice.
Another day another…. “nationally representative survey” on public education by the RAND Corp.
Per EdWeek, this new one is a little more generous toward teachers in that it actually surveyed them. (Last time, not so much).¹
Centered around teacher perceptions of their workload and pay, the survey found 9 in 10 teachers work more than the standard 40 hours a week—compared with less than half of other working adults. According to surveyed teachers, they’re working around 15 uncompensated hours per week on average.
As for pay, only a third of teachers said they were happy with it. On average, respondents suggested raises of about 27 percent—possibly to compensate for all that unpaid time.
Low pay and high workloads are also contributing to feelings of stress and burnout. “The survey results suggest that low pay and long working hours are key reasons why teachers want to quit,” EdWeek says.
One thing I should mention is this is all self-assessed. Surveys such as these are susceptible to exaggeration or miscalculation. Nobody is following you around with a stopwatch after all. Some pre-pandemic research suggests that teachers work about the same as those in other professions, and work part time during the summer too, though I hesitate to use that research authoritatively. We all know demands on teacher time have increased in the past few years, as staff leave and students need more support than ever.
The solutions RAND gives are fine, if a little difficult to implement. Teachers should get paid more. Admins should take things off their plates. More support staff should be hired.
Last year Edutopia ran a story by teaching consultant Michelle Blanchet about simple but effective ways admins can improve teacher wellbeing, by doing things like holding meetings to figure out how to take things off teachers’ plates and using staff development days as catch-up time with no planned activities. The rest of the piece just encourages basic, empathetic leadership.
Neither Blanchet nor RAND hit on the obvious but somewhat more unconventional solution, which is that maybe teachers shouldn’t do so much work if it’s burning them out. Sounds nice, but papers still need grading and parent emails need responses, right?
Yes and no. That grinding mentality isn’t a pass to take advantage of teachers, says educator and Teaching Habits blogger Paul Murphy in a 2017 post, called American Teachers Should Work Less, which I found thanks to some excellent SEO. In it, Murphy explores a sentiment I see suggested on social media every few months: Maybe teachers can and should do less.
It’s less glib than you think. Murphy acknowledges that individual teachers will have a hard time of it, since working hard is a core part of teaching culture. Work less and you open yourself up to criticism that you aren’t being passionate or invested enough in the job. Many are taught that being a teacher requires a certain amount of self-sacrifice.
It’s only when we start to see that line of thinking as a feature of a broken system, not a bug, that radical solutions seem to make sense.
On the other hand, large numbers of teachers working together — in union, perhaps — might move the needle.
If the only way a teacher can effectively do his or her job is to work an extra, unpaid 20 hours every week, then there is something seriously wrong with the system.
And the only way to fix such a system is for teachers, lots and lots of them, to stop working so many extra hours.
I could quote half the post here, which is definitely worth reading, but I’ll let Murphy cook just a bit more.
The belief that teachers have “answered a calling,” as if we were somehow spoken to from some God of Teachers, is damaging. It’s this idea that we’re selfless martyrs who only exist to serve our students that has led to society’s unrealistic expectations for how we should do our jobs.
The need for solutions to reduce teacher workload is obviously great and is of interest to a huge percentage of the teaching population. Naturally, this being America, that means someone has found a way to make money off it. That someone is brand-name Teacher™ Angela Watson who offers the “40 Hour Teacher Workweek” program, which promises to impart nuggets of wisdom like, “The confidence to say NO to things that are low priority so I have time for people who matter more.”
The idea is to create boundaries around time and streamline miscellaneous tasks to reduce overall work. I shouldn’t be so cynical because the program does offer useful things like templates and PDFs that could save time, and it comes with access to a private teacher community dedicated to the topic. Watson & Co. even provide a professional development certificate for good measure, potentially saving teachers time later while they learn how to save time now.
The self-paced course runs $175, but a 6-week expedited course is $39. (The big money, as always, is in institutional dollars: A course for admin teams can run into the thousands.)
Perhaps it’s only natural that teachers need to unlearn ingrained work habits, given they are steeped in a culture that labels them as uncaring if they aren’t practicing self-sacrifice.
Mostly the glowing user testimonials attribute the program working exactly as advertised in that it grows teacher confidence. As a teacher named Erin exclaimed after taking the course, “My conscience is no longer plagued with work all weekend.”
Erin for one is working less. How can you argue with that?
¹ The survey in question — on the topic of teachers and learning loss — was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND.
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