In a guest post for Anthony Cody, Katie Lapham calculated that 26% of her school year is spent NOT teaching.
Data inquiry, data analysis, professional development, etc. took time away from teaching.
If you teach, what proportion of your time is spent not teaching?
How much time is devoted to test prep, testing, and data analysis?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
She forgot to add in lunch duty and recess duty. For me that’s about 3 1/2 hours a week right there.
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Recess duty sounds like some of the most important teaching you could be doing.
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This is a high number only if a teacher is not analyzing homework and weekly tests they are not doing their job and should stop complaining or get into another profession, if they can. Enough of complaining about doing your job. Yes, 25% is high. But a large part of this is your job by description. Do your job and fight the craziness at the same time if you are really a professional. Is it any wonder teachers are getting squished with their ignorant attitudes and total lack of knowledge of anything else and many times not even knowing their job. You cannot only know education to fight for public education. You must know politics and policy in fields other than education such as the total close connection between K-12 failures and the criminal justice system and that load on the state and local budgets. Or that arts is the #1 producer of student achievement and reduction in many student problems. Or that if we do not remediate before the 3rd grade we have built in a failure system. Any one want to argue that one? You lose if you do.
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I think you misread, I think she wrote 26% of her in-class time, not time outside of the classroom, or planning time. That number sounds about right to me.
Personally, I never added it up, but I spent about 20-45 minutes a day (which is about how long it took per child) X 18 children X about 45 school days doing Florida’s FAIR reading tests. This is class time that I should spend teaching, but I have to give this test according to the state. Admin refused to allow aides to do this testing. (This does not take into account the regular reading and math tests that I had to do as well, which also ate up an awful lot of class time, but need to be done to guide my teaching. The FAIR test was so useless it did not guide my teaching.)
Also, I averaged about 4-5 days a year being absent from teaching to do professional development, which was mandated by my principal. My students missed out on me for a whole week of the school year for PD, and it was PD that didn’t help me at all.
Teaching was what I did in between tests, and absences for PD. I’m not “complaining” for myself, George. I get paid the same whether I’m giving tests or teaching. Actually, the more tests I gave, the less planning and work I had to do. I’m “complaining” for the kids who missed out on learning. Because I care about that. I guess that’s why I’m an EX-teacher, because I got sick of being a test-giver.
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totally missed the point.
Teacher schedules – lunch, planning time, duties, recess, etc. can drive one crazy but:
1) A majority of teachers by the very nature of the content they teach spend countless, countless hours doing their job outside the bells. It’s Memorial Day. I guarantee you there are teachers across the state grading essays, reading student research papers, reviewing student translations from their foreign language classes, reading science lab write ups, and pouring over geometry proofs.
2) The point is that testing has sucked the life out of classrooms and teachers out of classrooms and parents and educators are not happy… and kids pay.
Even if a teacher did not spend one minute preparing KIDS for the tests except regular teaching (we can only hope), the time spent on training to administer the test, time spent organizing the testing materials (have you heard the word “accommodations?”), days lost to administering the tests, teachers pulled out to score the tests… That is NOT school or assessment the way it oughta be.
AND – if it’s a student learning English – it is compounded by NYSELAT testing that takes more days out for testing and scoring.
AND – worst of all – we test kids to prove they don’t yet speak English well yet, then we give them an ELA test to rub it in.
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I must say that I find it petty and frustrating when people get on someone over punctuation etc. I’d rather talk content. . .
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Fighting the urge to edit this for run on sentences and incorrect punctuation. It undercuts your message when you have so many grammatical errors. I don’t agree with you, by the way.
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What, specifically, do you disagree with? That teachers are working on Memorial Day? That testing takes away from teaching time? There doesn’t seem to be much to disagree with in Jere’s post.
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Sorry, I think I assumed you were disagreeing with a different post than you seem to be commenting on.
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I was wondering if I was the only one thinking this, pidge! It’s exactly what I tell my students– and no, I do not believe in inventive spelling, etc. This is like inventive fingering for the piano: one gets into bad habits that are very hard to break later.
That being said, I despise the fact that I spend in-class time dealing with students who have been repeatedly, chronically absent. It’s not fair to the students who come to class every day. Not complaining– just venting and thinking out loud. I know it’s up to me to make these scofflaws face the music and not take away from the time given to those who do what they’re supposed to!
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I didn’t know neatness counted. Sorry – grew up on e.e. cummings and Buckminster Fuller so dashes and ellipses and parentheses are just all part of the tone. Or – as Vampire Weekend exclaims, “Who cares…. “
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Wow, you sound rather vitriolic. Are you an educator, or have you had a bad experience with one? You must consider yourself quite informed, where else would your self righteous attitude come from?
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He is quite informed as a Superintendent of a school district in NY. I have to agree with Jere and Ex-teacher. I am a retired teacher as of June, 2011. I spent a great deal of my time with test prep, meetings about data with the 3rd grade team and program coaches. I also get where George is coming from. I do think many Title I schools are a pipeline to prison. With all of the funding being taken away by the state legislators, vouchers, and charters, there is no funding to hire more social workers or counselors for our Title I schools. The school I left had one social worker and one counselor for over 800 students. We were K-8, so they spent a great deal of time with the upper grades. The lower grades were pretty much on their own. I had students who needed testing for LD services and students with emotional/behavior problems. It is frustrating not to be able to get these students the services they need. I fear I will read about one or more in the newspaper some day going to prison. The politics of all of this is that the money is going elsewhere–charters and vouchers. If more money would be put into public schools, especially the Title I schools, teachers could make a difference. Do we need to change some of the ways we do things? Absolutely!! First, we are going to have to vote out our current District board members that go along with privatizing and then vote out the legislators who also want to privatize.
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I don’t regret one minute of “extra time” I gave my students in 43 years of teaching. Shopping for all those books, prizes, motivating games, stickers, costumes, posters, large calendars, name tags, decorations, label cards, games, etc. Or working on weekends to develop special ESL lessons that were appealing and were NEVER found in dull textbooks. In meeting with parents to share ideas and to motivate them to motivate their kids. Or staying late at school to collaborate with my colleagues and parents. I figured that was what I signed on for and I enjoyed it. What I resent is the drilling in preparing my kindergartners for reading tests and math tests and language tests, and tests to prep for other tests because it’s important that 5 yr. olds can read long lists of nonsense words. The meaningfulness is gone, for the kids and for the teacher. And I don’t feel vitriolic, just sad.
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I can’t speak as a teacher but as a parent I’ve started collecting the following information about my 6th grade NC student these last 10 weeks
1. 2 benchmarks – math, English consuming 4 days of instruction time each in core classes for a total of 16 hours.
2. More than 27 Language Arts one hour+ assignments in class/home designed not to teach but to assess multiple choice test taking abilities for a total of 30 hours.
3. 6 – 2 hour assigned multiple choice practice tests in science to prepare for the NC science final which will be used solely to ‘grade the teacher’- it will not be used to measure my son’s skills, placement or needs if any.
4. 2 – 2 hour multiple choice in social studies for same reasimon above.
5. 11 hours total testing time during this upcoming week on the above.
So, in the last 10 weeks, my 6th grade son has spent approximately 11 hours in state testing, and 59 hours in preparing for those tests out of 65 hours of instruction on those core subjects (including homework in that time) and not learning anything new. He is not even receiving feedback on what/why he got wrong for improvement – it’s just prep’d, graded, and thrown in the grade book.
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I want to clarify that I do not view this as a ‘teacher’s fault’ but a result of the systemic obsession with standardized test scores hurting our kid’s education. In NC, a law was passed prohibiting devoting more than 2 days to practice tests but since teachers are being evaluated by them – it makes perfect sense they would work the law loophole and assign practice tests as classwork and homework.
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Advanced Placement teachers regularly give practice exams too. It’s not the notion of practice exams that is the problem, but rather the quality of the exams that are being practiced. The NECAP exam given in my state is bizarre. I remember one year, our (rural!) HS kids were tested on reading a TRAIN SCHEDULE as part of the so-called ELA test. Oy.
From year to year we NEVER know WHAT is on the NECAP test. So practice testing for this is indeed be a waste of time
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NC does not limit the days to practice tests, rather limits field tests to 2 per year. Link to information: http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2013/FiscalNotes/Senate/PDF/SFN0361v2.pdf.
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NC Public Schools act of 2012 (and again proposed in 2013) does say the following:
Schools shall devote no more than two days of instructional time per year to 8 the taking of practice tests that do not have the primary purpose of assessing 9 current student learning; 10
(2) Students in a school shall not be subject to field tests or national tests during 11 the two-week period preceding the administration of end-of-grade tests, 12 end-of-course tests, or the school’s regularly scheduled final exams; and 13
(3) No school shall participate in more than two field tests at any one grade level 14 during a school
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Thank you Lolita for pointing out the absurdity of the current “education” environment. Teachers teaching is enforced in a highly top-down manner from a corporate “ed reform” agenda and unfortunately feels far removed from the real learning! Katie Lapham is definitely pointing out the reality! Parents should get upset at the policies that create this environment she is forced to follow! If enough parents react, let us hope there will be changes.
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Here is a number: Our district gave “online” assessments over 13,000 times last year…about 3 or 4 per student plus other surveys plus state tests plus non-online tests…and now it may increase????
How can they possibly use all this to inform their day-to-day instruction! It just creates this frenzied, mechanical environment.
The words “conform or be cast out” come to my mind!
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And now there are student surveys that take class time. I had to have students do a counseling center survey this year, which took about 20 minutes, including travel to and from the computer lab. Next year, students will be required by state law to survey EVERY one of their teachers as part of our evaluations. Great time waster!
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and a great way to collect data…which can then be misused for whatever suits their purpose. It has become a lesson for my own children. I tell them they do not have to answer anything non-academic at school.
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25 percent is about right. Special Ed teachers seem to have a much higher percentage that is climbing.
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American teachers are overworked –and take it for granted. Talk to any teacher from Germany or China who’s done an exchange with an American teacher and they’ll tell you how crazy our workload is. A recent NYT Op-Ed pointed out that Japanese and Korean teachers spend only about 60% as much time in front of kids as we do. Humanely, their systems give teachers time DURING the work day to grade, plan and collaborate. Imagine that! American teachers, rise up! It’s not OK that we sacrifice family and personal time for our jobs. Doing family life WELL takes time and energy; we shouldn’t be ashamed to demand limits to work.
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HERE HERE!!!!
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My son’s sixth grade teacher in NC is paid 32,000 a year to manage 90 students in both language arts and math 6th grade. I wasn’t a big fan of this particular teacher, until a public database took to further humiliating her already ridiculously hard job by posting her personal salary and all other teacher salaries for all to see. So she must spend 50% of her time test prepping across 2 subjects, manages grading 90 kids, and has to offer remedial intervention to the ones who may fail. I am embarrassed by my frustration with her…no wonder she had little time left for truly assessing my son and ‘teaching to him individually’ and I can’t believe she is paid $32,000 to teach two subjects with the highest stakes tests to over 90 students. I’m not very pro union – and NC does not allow collective bargaining of teachers – but with the pervasive underfunding, under staffing, underpayment and humiliation of then having that in a public database for all to see, and now being rated on how kids do on standardized tests – even I can be persuaded to understand that a union in NC might help level the playing field for these already overly abused teachers.
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Glad you’re seeing the other side!!!! Spoke with a college kid the other day who felt perfectly justified in saying that unions are no longer needed… . I disagreed, simply due to the fact that although TIMES change, PEOPLE don’t… there will ALWAYS be those in power who will take advantage of those who are not. Unions are not perfect, but there HAS to be checks and balances somewhere.
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Frame this percentage from the perspective if the child’s day and more empathy will be conjured up. Are children spending 26% of their time being tested?
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I have a new post on my blog; http://www.ellenbennett.blogspot.com . If you think it is worthy of your blog, please pass it on. After I wrote the part about Orwell’s 1984, I googled it with school reform comparisons and brought up Chris Gilbert’s excellent essay. I couldn’t embed the address in my post. I saw that you had it on your blog, so reposting that would be excellent and time worthy!
Rosemary Schimmel
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I’ve taken an extended leave of absence from teaching after my third child. I figured when more of my time was spent on meaningless data collection, (How many periods were used in a paper correctly,) labeling of kids, etc., I had to get out and fight from the outside for awhile. And I couldn’t do the double work of pleasing the higher ups and doing best practice.
It’s hard to collect all of this stupid stuff and still try to implement best practice and best assessments. (When I wanted to bring student’s portfolio assessments to my “data” meaning with my principal, she said no. We only look at MAPS testing. . . ) What bogus.
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People keep referring to East Asian countries in their lamentations about American education. Such comparisons such Bill Gates recent TED talk tend to be one dimensional and ignore all the hay as they seek the needle.
As for time, to prepare for the massive university entrance exams which test a battery of subjects larger than the SAT or ACT would ever hope to, a student’s last year in High School is typically exclusively devoted to test preparation. No new learning takes place as the entire High School curriculum is usually squeezed into the first 2 years of High School (HS is 3 years).
To prepare for the High School exam, typically the Middle School program ends after the Fall term and the Spring is all test preparation.
How do you squeeze that much material into 2 1/2 years in Middle and 2 years in High School? The typical school day is from 8 AM to 10 PM and most kids are boarders that live at school.
Americans need to ask if this is what they want?
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At least 50% of my time is spent on testing, gathering data, and data analysis. As an example, 3xs per year we benchmark students in reading. This is done individually, using class instructional time and takes 6 weeks each time, Do the math- 3×6=18 weeks devoted just to reading benchmarking. This does not include the month we spend teaching to the state test, or the time spent taking the state test.
Math is similar. A minimum of one week of pre-testing and post-testing students for each of the 11 units we teach. And the additional time spent prepping for the state test, taking the state test- oh- I forgot- the time we spend taking the MAP Tests. We have one computer lab for the school and it is used solely for testing. Forget the Common Core requirement for use of technology. There are no technology resources available for any of that creativity.
We have been reduced to teaching only scripted Reading, Writing, and Math. Maximum of 10 minutes on the playground each day, and our PE grade comes out of that. There is no time for bathroom breaks in the schedule. And you better follow the schedule EXACTLY- teachers who have gone over or under a scripted part of the lesson a minute or two have been put on Improvement Plans, ridden hard, and fired.
We no longer teach handwriting, much less cursive handwriting, as that is not part of the Common Core. Students will be keyboarding. On non-existent computers using non- existent technology.
Our Math and Reading Coaches are exhausted from all the test coordinating and no longer coach us.
Just let me teach! Even with the limited amount of time I do get to guide instruction, my students make phenomenal gains and the principal and coaches have referred to me as a Master Teacher. My demographics include 98% poverty, 0% Caucasian, 80% immigrant, non-Hispanic. My kids’ make 2 years’ progress, on average, with only 50% instructional time. Can you imagine where they would be if I was allowed to teach?
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I would like to add that I put in a minimum of 10 hour days at school, then bring work home for correcting and data entry. Add to that the 8 hours per day I put in on weekends- and Memorial Day.
I have no life during the school year. The summer is spent recuperating and taking coursework to maintain my license and help me grow as a professional- paid out of my own pocket.
And my husband, patient man that he is, is fed up with it, and the negative press that teachers get. He works with top CEO’s and political figures. One politician expressed her condolences and said that teachers were being used as scapegoats to distract the populace from the actual problems in society- specifically bankers and Wall Street types who were destroying the economy and getting away Scott free. “Just sayin’ “
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I haven’t added it up, and I would probably be very depressed and angry if I did, but I spend a good chunk of my time collecting data on children. District assessments at my grade level (2) are the worst. We give pretests and post-tests for each math unit, although we do nothing with the pretest data. My school is so small we do not have the ability to compact students out of units, nor are we given the flexibility to skip lessons or units if children show mastery. (It seldom happens, anyway, that ALL kids will show mastery of ALL concepts on a pretest, especially when so much is new for them.) Then we have writing prompts, the dreaded DRP (which I referred to once before), plus all the other district reading tests, including one test so poorly written and so challenging that most students do poorly on it. It gets so bad that sometimes the kids will ask as they enter the room in the morning if they are going to have another test.
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I think the 26% figure alone is not alarming particularly if the time were used by teachers for their self-identified professional development. And I would argue that a teacher is nearly constantly analyzing data such as when she/he is interpreting student responses and making decisions based on those responses.
Teaching is a highly intellectual job. The problem is how little input the teacher has in pursuing professional development that would be helpful for her/him. Furthermore, many teachers I have worked with don’t understand the principles of testing and assessment. I have to wonder if this isn’t on purpose as teachers are quite capable of understanding but someone has ensured they don’t “worry their pretty little heads” with such nonsense.
I believe that if teachers put their political efforts toward performance, recognition, and treatment as a body of professionals some of the other absurdities would disapate. This is of course, easy for me to say–I am not facing the physical, emotional, and mental toll of working in an environment where disrespect and illogic are status quo. But I do think this approach might pay off in ways that other responses to pressure have not.
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