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New estimates of working time for elementary school teachers
Robert Drago and others
How much time do schoolteachers devote to work? Although a variety of answers to this question exist, our expectations are that teachers would experience time pressures that would lead to a spillover of schoolwork into family life. Motivated by an interest in time pressures and how workers deal with such pressures, we draw upon the Time, Work and Family project. This project collected data using surveys, time diaries, and telephone interviews which were administered by the Institute for Survey and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, during the 1997–98 school year. In the analysis presented below, we use time diary data for a sample of full-time, elementary school teachers in four, urban, public school districts in the United States.
The first and most important task in determining time pressures placed on teachers is to generate an accurate estimate of how teachers spend their time. The accuracy of such estimates is critical to understanding how policies and practices both at work and at home function to alleviate or exacerbate such pressures.
This article sheds light on the working time of teachers by comparing six estimates of working time, mainly focusing on work for the employer, but also considering work performed for the household because such tasks also require time and effort.
This excerpt is from an article published in the April 1999 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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