The bottom line on deciding on compensation is whether you’re paying enough to get a sufficiently large supply of sufficiently good employees. Some jobs are especially rewarding (say, working with kids) and some jobs are especially stressful (say, working with kids). Asking about the number of hours a job requires, or necessary degrees, or other sorts of qualifications and abilities of employees is interesting but not dispositive. Given that we have an answer to the original question, let me tell you why to an economist the question isn’t all that interesting. The data gives a clear conclusion: While there are some teachers who put in way above the expected number of hours and while there are also some teachers who shirk, that’s equally true for other workers. There’s just no important difference between the two groups.įor those who prefer numbers to pictures, we’ve calculated the number of work hours at the low end (10th percentile) and high end (90th percentile) for both groups. It’s worth remembering that a large majority of teachers are women while a majority of the nonteachers workforce are men-this is why the aggregate numbers suggest teachers work fewer hours, but that effect disappears once you control for gender.Īverage weekly hours during the school year, excluding holidaysĮven if average work hours aren’t much different between teachers and others, do we find teachers more than others working unusually long hours while another set of teachers work notably fewer hours? The quick pictorial answer is “no.” Here’s a picture of the distribution of weekly work hours for both teachers and nonteachers. Women teachers work (a little) more than women nonteachers and men teachers work (a little) less than men nonteachers. We also found an interesting (but not substantively terribly important) switch when you control for gender. We found teachers work an average of 42.2 hours a week as compared to nonteachers working 43.2 hours. (Following West’s lead, I use the broader ATUS definition of “work related activities” for both teachers and nonteachers.) When it comes to average work during the school year, we found the same substantive answer as West. I went back to the ATUS (with the help of my research assistant) and, following West’s methodology, drew a newer and somewhat larger sample, all for full-time workers with college degrees. Teachers are no more likely to work long hours than those in other occupations and also aren’t more likely to give work short shrift. Average work hours may not be much different but some teachers put in exceptionally long hours, while others really shirk. Given West’s findings, I’ve believed for some time that the answer to the two arguments above should be both. (Perhaps think of this as more like a half-time job than like “summer vacation.”) West reports that teachers work 21.5 hours per week during the summer. During the summer, teachers do work noticeably fewer hours. During the school year, her calculations show that teachers work 39.8 hours per week while nonteachers work 41.5 hours. For most practical purposes, teachers and nonteachers work about the same number of hours per week during the school year. Good academic research on the question appears in an article in Education Finance and Policy by Kristine L. ![]() The data collected there lets us compare hours worked by teachers to the hours worked by other college-educated, full-time workers. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) asks thousands of people to keep just such a diary for a 24-hour period. Time diaries are believed to lead to pretty accurate reporting. Keeping a time diary doesn’t highlight any particular activity, thereby avoiding a good deal of conscious and unconscious bias. ![]() The right way to track how people spend their time is to ask them to keep a “time diary,” where every 15 minutes they write down their current activity. Measuring hours worked for large groups isn’t easy because if you ask people, they tend to exaggerate the number of hours they put in.
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