Critics Don’t Understand How Much Teachers Actually Work

In the wake of the recent three-day strike by 65,000 Los Angeles Unified School District education workers, opponents of teachers’ unions and public education are on the warpath.

While the strike was by Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents bus drivers, special education assistants, cafeteria workers, custodians, and other campus workers, some critics are focusing their attacks on their usual target, United Teachers Los Angeles, which struck in solidarity with SEIU.

These critics condemn the teachers union for the 16-month COVID LAUSD school shutdowns, both the 2019 and 2023 teacher strikes, LAUSD's low test scores, UTLA's liberal president and political positions, and UTLA's contract demands, which they say will burden California taxpayers.

But of all of their criticisms, the most corrosive and inaccurate concerns how much we teachers do (or don’t) work.

John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of the popular “John and Ken Show” on KFI-AM 640 in Los Angeles, recently opined that L.A. Unified teachers are overpaid for a job that is only “nine months of work.”

Slightly more generous, Rebecca Friedrichs, arguably American conservatives’ favorite anti-teachers’ union attack dog, claims that teachers make a “pretty nice living for a 10-month job.”

In “Teacher Pay In Perspective,” Larry Sand of the anti-union California Policy Center asserts that teachers’ “counterparts in private industry work ... about 37% more than public school teachers.” 

Other critics emphasize that teachers get out early each day.

What our critics don’t understand is that the final school bell isn’t the end of our workday; it’s just the end of our first shift.

The second shift includes helping students after school, grading essays, tests, and other papers, researching and planning lessons, contacting parents (messages which usually must be sent in both English and Spanish), entering grades, attending meetings, making copies, and numerous other tasks.

Many teachers have time-consuming duties beyond teaching their classes, such as moderating clubs, coaching academic and athletic teams, working at competitions and sporting events, and being part of committees. 

Work continues on weekends, too. During the school year, I work most Saturdays and Sundays, as well as most vacation days, and I average a 65- to 70-hour workweek.

To conclude that our work consists solely of our time teaching during the school day is as absurd as looking at a performance of a Broadway show and concluding that the actors’ workload consists of just the time they’re performing live.

Sand asserts that “[F]ull-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, including time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities.”

There are 180 school days in a year, so by the statistics Sand cites, even if teachers work only on those days—no Saturdays, Sundays, or holiday work—they work 8.28 hours per day.

In LAUSD, contractually a high school teacher must be on campus from 8:23 in the morning until 3:46 in the afternoon—seven hours and 38 minutes. (This is fanciful, anyway—no teacher can get out of his classroom, much less get off campus, six minutes after the bell rings, and nobody can get in and set up his room for lessons in seven minutes.)

We do have nutrition and lunch breaks—14 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively—but these are only marginal break times because we sometimes have to deal with students or other school-related matters.

There are 38 weeks of school in the LAUSD school year. At 65 hours a week, that’s 2,470 hours a year. And this doesn’t account for the work we do during holidays. 

Many teachers use Thanksgiving and spring breaks to catch up on the minutiae that come with our jobs. To pick one example among many: giving a student a failing grade, even if it’s only during the first parts of the semester, triggers a lot of extra paperwork. 

We are required to make several calls and/or send letters to parents and then log each one of these interactions into the tracking system. And yes, it is odd that, even in the last weeks of the semester, after a student’s parents have already received three progress reports telling them their kid is failing, that we must still go through this laborious process.

Teachers also use Thanksgiving and spring breaks for other purposes:

• We often give long essays or open-answer tests right before those breaks, because we know that that’s when we’ll have more time to grade them.
• We do a clinic for failing or struggling students, helping them make up and retake exams.
• AP teachers often hold a class during spring break, in person or online, since the AP exam is only a few weeks away.

During Christmas break, we do take some time off, but we also use the time to plan out the spring semester and to reacquaint ourselves with course material. 

During the summers, many teachers take professional development classes or attend seminars. I go back through all the outlines and PowerPoints I used the previous school year and update them with new information and research.

All told, I work about 2,670 hours a year. That’s 53.4 hours a week. What Larry Sand claims that I work in a 52-week year, I actually work in 28 weeks.

Shannon McLoud, a high school English teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, calculates that teachers work 2,200 hours a year. At 50 weeks a year, that’s 44 hours a week. According to Sand’s statistics, workers in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year.

Our critics ignore many other unusual or unique demands of teaching. For example, for us, taking a sick day or a personal necessity day is a lot more difficult than it is for a normal worker. 

In nine years at my current school, I’ve never taken a sick day and have missed a total of three days. I would love to portray this as fanatical devotion to my students, but much of it is done for a more selfish motive: for teachers, not working ends up being too much work.

At most jobs, if a person calls in sick or takes a personal day, they’re free that day. Not us—we have to arrange for a sub, do lesson plans for all five classes, then grade all the classwork we just assigned. 

Many times, I’ve felt lousy and wanted to stay home but decided it was easier to take some Tylenol, drink some coffee, and stagger through the day rather than deal with all the work of not going to work.

Missing class is also a negative because whenever you’re out, your hold over the class—discipline, work ethic, student attendance—all slip a bit. 

As teachers, we live under the daily pressure of keeping successive groups of dozens of young people in line and on task. Does anybody really believe that this does not take a lot of preparation and work?