Bob Shepherd—author, editor, assessment developer, textbook writer, classroom teacher, and all-purpose polymath, wrote this comment. After a long career in education publishing, Bob closed out his career by teaching school in Florida.
He wrote:
THIS is the most important thing about teaching, at least at the middle- and high-school levels. Teachers have far, far too many students and a laughably small amount of prep time (that is, laughably small to anyone who actually bothers to prepare significant lessons for his or her classes), and literally impossible amounts of add-on work in the form of mandates to watch other teachers’ classes, oversee car or bus line or cafeteria sittings, do test prep, proctor tests, fill out (often in duplicate) ridiculous amounts of paperwork (grades, attendance, IEP and 501 reports, evaluation materials, lesson plans, bellwork professional development paperwork, and so on). If anyone ever bother actually to sit down and sum up the number of hours required of middle-school and high-school teachers, he or she would soon see that these requirements exceed the amount of hours in the day or week, and so, the fact is, that people are fudging the work, submitting bs material whenever they can, thrown together rather than reasoned out. A high-school teacher might have 180-200 students, and he or she is supposed to give each individual, differentiated attention.
Right. MIGHT AS WELL REQUIRE TEACHERS TO FLAP THEIR ARMS AND SO FLY. Or to locate objects by remote viewing. Or make sense of any proposal by Donald Trump. Or enter that parallel dimension and recover the lost ships and airplanes of the Bermuda Triangle. Or bring back a golden apple from the tree at the edge of the world. Or net the Salmon of Doubt.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the 1970s when I taught middle and high school, my class load was about 150 students. We cannot keep adding to the daily teaching responsibilities when teachers have the same amount of time to do the job. Also, technology was supposed to make the job easier, but it is often adds another burden entering data, emailing parents, etc. For English teachers in particular the workload is overwhelming.
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A few minor cxs to this comment left on a thread:
colon after “levels” in the first sentence
laughably small to anyone who actually bothers to do significant lesson planning for his or her classes
no comma after the first set of parentheses
If anyone ever bothered
the number of hours in the day
the fact is that people are fudging
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Thanks for reposting this, Diane!!! xoxoxo
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To be fair to elementary teachers, they have more subjects to teach and grade on the daily than middle and high school teachers, so while their student load may *seem* easier, it isn’t.
My daughter’s district has just created a standards-based report card this year that is three pages long with hundreds of indicators each marking period for elementary school. As a parent, I stopped looking at it carefully because it’s so convoluted, and I’m a teacher in the district. It is an insane amount of work to provide a score for that many items. As well, elementary teachers are expected to provide daily data through a digital platform with a great number of indicators. Teachers have been reprimanded for not completing these forms regularly or in a timely fashion. The union had to step in with a workload complaint despite the fact that our contract has no language addressing workload.
Also elementary related arts teachers have from 400-800 students each week. In my district (same as my daughter’s), we used to grade related arts only for grades 4 and 5 semesterly which amounts to three indicators times 200-250 students per teacher twice a year. They now have to grade all students in grades K-5 on three indicators three times a year for hundreds and hundreds of students.
So, while the middle and high school teachers deserve some sympathy, it would be wrong not to consider the workload of elementary teachers who, in my district, are lucky they get one prep a day while the middle school teachers get two.
It’s wholly unfair what is expected of professional teaching staff these days. My brother is a full professor with a teaching load of four classes and one ensemble. Of course, he’s expected to maintain his status with professional activities (lectures, clinics, even papers—nothing to take lightly), however his teaching schedule is scant. So he does all that other stuff when he’s not providing facetime whereas elementary teachers are all about FaceTime along with the data, reporting, and other record keeping they must do. Couple that with parenting the child—from making sure they have something to eat to supervising them every minute while dealing with parent communication about other stuff such as scheduling, who can’t sit next to whom, why a child is isolated during recess, sickness, broken shoelaces, “my dog ate my study sheet, so can you send a digital copy of it home immediately,” “we’re just keeping him home because he needs a mental health day from school despite him having an important math lesson today,” etc.—then I’d say workload for elementary teachers is horrific. And here’s the worst part: High school teachers in my town make far more than the K-8 teachers.
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well said
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Moronic administrators have for decades added to teachers’ loads “just this one little thing” again and again and again and again without ever thinking about the overall work load. I made a master list on this blog at one point of the long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long list inane, purposeless paperwork that I was required to prepare and submit, but I’m not going to bother to look it up again. Suffice it to say that the number of pieces and the amount of time these took was insane. Some administrator decides, “You know what would be a great idea? If teachers regularly–say each quarter-reflected on their teaching and submitted a report detailing their plans for improving it the coming quarter. Here’s a little ten-page form they can complete with their written plans addressing key elements of teaching. It’s just one little thing.” And ofc, in this era of one-way micromanagement, no one asks teachers is this is a good idea. Administrators have only good ideas. Just ask them.
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Standards-based grading in elementary school has turned planning, teaching and assessing learning into computer program. Garbage in – garbage out.
Kids are pre-assessed.
Standards are identified as “priority” standards – in other words – what’s on the State test.
Teacher writes the standard on the board for the 2nd graders because the administrator tells them to. “Do nows” and “Exit tickets” become all the rage.
Technology allows for “individualizing” – tutorials by standard without context.
And, THEN – they can identify “BUBBLE KIDS” – the ones whose scores matter more because they could move into a higher scoring band so the school gets more points.
And, they call this school. Sad
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“And, they call this school.”
I call it unethical education malpractice. Using students for “data” gathering purposes.
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I need to someday try to write about my classroom teaching experience, high school, History and English classes, but it has always felt so daunting and big. So far there has always been something more pressing to get to first. But when/if I do get to it this is exactly where I would begin.
One prep period for every class section might be more realistic and more closely fit student needs and the teaching workload. Maybe. But one prep period for five class sections, with all the other school demands piled on, is, frankly, absurd and preposterous, and as a matter of fact how we do high school in Seattle during all my years teaching in the public schools.
And because the situation is so established and so far from optimal and so pervasive addressing the subject directly is shunned as unproductive whining. So teachers commiserate about feeling tired and overworked and get by.
Want to improve public high school education? Reduce teacher/student ratios and increase teacher prep time (prep, grading, interventions, etc).
But that will never happen in our public education budgetary reality, ever heard that one?
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To do it well, it takes MORE TIME to plan a class than to teach it. Of course, there are teachers who really don’t know their subjects well enough to be teaching them for whom planning is having the kids open to page x in their textbooks and walking those kids through the lesson laid out in the teacher’s guide. Those people should not be in our classrooms. That’s another problem. We need to pay teachers more so that we can attract and retain the best and brightest.
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In order to get a teaching job in Florida, I had to
–Pay for and take SEVEN tests prepared and administered by the Ed Deform simpletons at Pear$on
–Complete a 20-page online application form
–Submit letters of recommendation, and
–Provide body fluids for drug testing
On the job as a teacher of English, Film, Speech, AP Composition, and Debate, I had to
–Prepare, in the first year, an 800-page binder documenting every aspect of my teaching
–Submit to three formal evaluations and countless informal ones every year
–Complete a yearly Individual Professional Development Plan
–Complete 300 hours of utterly useless online ESL training that seemed, from the factual inaccuracies and grammatical errors throughout the materials, to have been prepared for five-year-olds by people with severe cognitive deficits
–Fill out several thousand 504, IEP, ESL, and PMP (progress monitoring plan) updates
–Prepare Data Walls and materials for Data Chats—exercises in pseudoscientific numerology
–Attend a summer AP English institute
–Proctor absurdly designed, punitive, soul-destroying standardized pretests, benchmark tests, and test tests
–Serve as a crossing guard every morning and afternoon
–Attend parent-teacher conferences weekly, sometimes daily
–Deal with parents who wanted to sue me because I insisted that their 11th-graders put end marks at the ends of their sentences
–Attend ”trainings” (“roll over, sit up, good boy”) for people with IQs of 65 on gang violence, bullying, drugs in school, blood-borne illness, test data, test data, test data, test data, test data, and more test data
–Prepare, for each class, a two-page lesson plan form and have these in binders for review whenever an administrator entered my class
–Keep a log of every parent contact—emails, telephone calls, meetings
–Post my grades and attendance both in a paper book and online
–Coach extracurriculars (speech and debate, theatre)
–Chaperone dances and numerous other evening events
–Prepare materials for and be present at parent nights
–Prepare to teach 22 or 23 classes a week (one year, for FIVE separate preps)
–Print and post reports of my ongoing data stream, in particular formats, with charts and graphs
–Grade, grade, grade, and grade some more. If I assigned my 150 or so students a single paragraph to write, I would have a novella to read and respond to. All day and evening, every Saturday, spend doing this, and often on Sunday as well.
–And somehow find time actually to interact, one-on-one, with my unique students, each with their enormous, unique needs, proclivities, interests, and potentials
And that’s only a partial list. I worked FAR, FAR harder as a teacher of high-school English than I did as an Executive Vice President at a billion-dollar-a-year publishing company.
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That’s why Florida can’t fill teaching jobs
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I came so close to saying, “Forget this.” But I was intent on getting the opportunity to use in the classroom material I had developed over a 30-year career in educational publishing.
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You were in it for the money and bonuses, right Bob???
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Yes. I had always wanted a helicopter and helipad and a private island in the South Pacific, so I taught only as long as it took to get these.
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Yeah, but teachers have summers off. Egads. One night I was in my classroom nearing midnight. I needed to get work done because of some future things I needed to do. At the time, I would listen to KGO radio talk show out of San Francisco. They were talking about teachers and what not. Some were saying they take off as soon as school ends and other BS. I worked weekends to prepare because I also had two other jobs. By the time I was in my car heading home, the talk show host said (I sent him and email stating that I was in my classroom) he was reading my email dispelling any myths about “yeah but they get summers off.” Tell me about the worthless meetings that had to be 75 minutes when ALL of it could have been handled in an email. Numerous times when I was told, “You are doing it wrong” I asked for the admin expert advice. They could not give me solid examples and basically said, “Double up on your standards.” What? I had to suck it up. I think the only presenter I remember to this day was one on the hemispheres of the brain (ADD/HD) and the police who showed us all the shanks and crap that kids carry in their (at that time super baggy pants) mostly knives, pipes, and other weapons. Bob is right, in order to give a child the best possible education, one HAS TO put in the time and nearly all the time it does not equate to any more money. But, I always did what was best for a student no matter how unorthodox it was. By the way, my mentee (all the way from 8th grade) just graduated from GECA (Gavilan Early College Academy) with more than $20K in scholarships and and not only his high school diploma, but an AA as well. We talked nearly every night to make sure he could navigate and extremely intense educational journey. Now, he is off to UC Riverside. So proud of a young man who lost his father to a hit and run driver that summer after 8th grade; brother incarcerated, mother vying for citizenship (she just got a social security number!) and at 13 was the man of the house. He said he wanted to be the change for a better world. Yeah, it’s like that.
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Blessings on you, Brother Charvet!
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It must warm your heart to know that DeSantis has reduced to qualifications so much that some schools have people with associate degrees in long term sub positions. Former military are also being recruited as well. They have to meet some minimum standard of training, but they can be in the classroom while they qualify.
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Yes, to all of Bob’s comments. And it has been so for at least decades. I started teaching in a small city in Ohio–moved to a large city in Ohio–finished my teaching career in another small city–represented thousands of teachers as a teacher-union officer. YES, “reduce class size,” and “reduce teacher workload” came back at the top of many surveys over the years. At Columbus E.A. we were able to negotiate some class size restrictions, especially for lower grades. We also eliminated some of the busy-work requirements like taking tickets at the game, collecting donations for United Way, etc.
But it’s a constant struggle for teachers and their representatives. So, yes, everyone who cares about kids and teachers, don’ t overlook the need to reduce the workload to reasonable levels.
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“If anyone ever bother actually to sit down and sum up the number of hours required of middle-school and high-school teachers…”
I used to say this like a mantra. Every time someone came up with a new idea for us to try, I would ask what duty we were going to throw out. The stare would begin, indicating that the person who had presented this new idea had no idea how it fit into pedagogical reality.
One solution I came to was the individual wage grade. It was a grade that was roughly weekly grade assigned in full, 100 percent of possible points, given like a paycheck for completing tasks and attending class. My only task was to decide if each student had done the best possible work for each individual. I was still swamped.
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“The stare would begin, indicating that the person who had presented this new idea had no idea how it fit into pedagogical reality.”
Ah, the infamous adminimal blank stare!
And many times they would walk away because they had no clue how to answer the question.
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Bob,
Your essay is exhausting because you captured the days (and nights and weekend) of teachers which are exhausting – and the teachers are exhausted. Brilliantly, objectively exhausting. In the qualitative world you tell a heck of a participant-observer story.
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I can say this much more succinctly:
Here’s the most important fact about teaching K-12: There is not enough time to do the job as it needs to be done.
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Not enough time to do the job as “THEY” say it needs to be done nor how it really should be done!
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Exactly
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My response as a teacher is not having time to respond.
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ha!
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The ideal teaching scenario is one-on-one tutorial. Everything else is a falling off. Obviously, we cannot afford to have a teacher for every student, so the question is, what is the ratio that is acceptable? Hint: It’s nowhere near current class sizes. Have a look at expensive private schools for an idea of what a good ration might look like.
This is the most important consideration that almost never enters the minds of politicians and bureaucrats setting education policy. In fact, it rarely enters the minds of education bureaucrats and administers setting policies for their own schools. The level of cluelessness about this matter is extremely high–it’s at Trump or Musk or MTG levels.
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cx: a good ratio
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cx: administrators
I really need to slow down with my typing AND proofread more carefully before hitting the Send button.
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Workload and schedule. Two topics that can physically damage a person.
I read with interest how some middle and high school teachers have only five classes a day with one prep. Insane. The class blocks must be extra long. In my time teaching elementary, I have always had six classes but our middle school teachers all had only five with two preps a day, every other day one being a non-teaching duty period. In my first year, I was scheduled to teach five classes in the elementary and then I had to go over to the middle school to teach the sixth class because the middle school teacher already had five classes and he would have to be compensated for the sixth. I did not have to be paid extra to teach six. NJ just passed a law where teachers who are normally scheduled for five can get additional pension credit for teaching the sixth class—except elementary teachers are exempt from this. Horrible disparity.
I just read an NEA article about the lack of time for teachers to take bathroom breaks, and how “holding it” or simply not drinking water so you don’t have to go can be detrimental to your health. Twice a week, I teach the first five of my six daily pre-k classes over the course of 3 hours and 45 minutes straight without any passing time between them. My inclusion classes have upwards of 18-20 students each. One class literally ends when the next one begins, and for some of these, I have to travel from classroom to classroom setting up materials and taking down materials while the students watch me because it’s the homeroom teacher’s prep time when I’m scheduled to be there. I don’t want a bladder condition because of this schedule, but my association can’t ever seem to win any contract language that guarantees no more than two hours of teaching time before a natural break. And really, when they tell you that you can call the office anytime to get someone to relieve you, what do you do with a self-contained autism class of seven aged 3-5 students while you’re gone? Tell them to read quietly to themselves? These children cannot transition without a great deal of emotional and mental duress, and I’m going to have them sit there for two minutes while I run to the bathroom? I laugh when I’m absent and subs who just got out of college take my job only to be disillusioned at the rigor of the schedule. What an education for them, who have just invested four or more years of their lives to work in this profession and to have to work a schedule like that. Hope they don’t give up. Some of these pre-k students cry throughout the entire class because something triggered them. It’s like teaching in a war zone with artillery going off all around you for three hours and 45 minutes straight—then there is one more class at the end of the day. I always joke that you can get government spies to talk by putting them in a public pre-school and making them teach music all day. On top of this, I run a completely separate program in three other schools where I am constantly trying to get all my students in for lessons because of events that change the schedule. It’s a major churn of clerical work. So they want me to complete SGOs, PDPs, take copious notes, write differentiated plans, re-work my schedule every time there is a school event, constantly communicate these changes with parents, monitor home practice entries in the evening, create new specific lesson presentations for each class and school, teach yet a seventh class during homeroom when I can’t fit all my students in on the limited schedule they provide, attend useless staff meetings on data platforms I’m not even using, provide and facilitate my own report card, and volunteer for committees and school events, and volunteer for our district foundation events on nights and weekends. I have a different schedule on the other days so my body doesn’t know when to eat, when to go to the bathroom, when to wake up due to different start times, etc. Workload is erratically off the charts, but scheduling can mess with your health.
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This. Is. Horrific.
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Indeed. The contract only stipulates that they must give us one prep and one lunch per day with required 1) staff meetings twice a month whether we need them or not, 2) one Back to School Night, and 3) three Parent Conference days which, while part of early closing days, the hours amount to a longer time period than what it takes to complete the full day. The Danielson eval instrument has professional requirements under Domain 4 which equate to “What volunteer work for the school have you done?” In other words, we are expected to serve on committees and plan and volunteer to work school-wide events for no additional pay.
We also pay through the nose for benefits, but we do get family sick days, so I guess we should be happy.
Nobody said teaching would be easy, but the amount of professional requirements is over the top. Imagine if we were attorneys and were paid by the hour for all these extras?
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Imagine if we were attorneys and were paid by the hour for all these extras?
Exactly. But in my experience, administrators consider it their God-give right to extract these freebies.
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Well they are beholden to elected boards of education where, in many communities, they are elected officials who have to answer to the taxpayers. When the bill of budgets go toward paying employees, it looks to the public like we are getting far more than we deserve.
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