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122 Monthly Lab. Rev. 31 (1999)
New Estimates of Working Time for Elementary School Teachers

handle is hein.journals/month122 and id is 367 raw text is: New estimates of working time for elementary school teachers Data from a time diary survey suggest that the average elementary school teacher works almost 2 hours more than the time required by contract, however, findings show that the choice of measurement substantially affects time estimates Robert Drago, Robert Caplan, David Costanza, Tanya Brubaker, Darnell Cloud, Naomi Harris, Russell Kashlan, and T. Lynn Riggs See authors' Identification on page 38. ow 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 pres- sures 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 ad- ministered by the Institute for Survey and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwau- kee, during the 1997-98 school year. In the analy- sis 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 determin- ing time pressures placed on teachers is to gener- ate an accurate estimate of how teachers spend their time. The accuracy of such estimates is criti- cal 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: Contractual working time (in our sample all teachers are covered by collective bargaining agreements) * Standard time diary measure of working time Face time or physical presence at the work- place Work invasiveness or the amount of time work invades an individual's time Housework time * Total hours of housework and teaching-related activities The article also explores the relationships be- tween the measures of working time. For ex- ample, we find a systematic relationship between standard diary time and face time, such that as diary time increased, so does face time, but by a much smaller amount. (See the appendix.) Background Recent interest in working time stems from the assertion that, due to a variety of structural changes in the nature of employment and its re- lationship to the family, the American workforce has become increasingly overworked. This argu- ment has sparked intense debate.' Two argu- ments are offered for why American society is overworked and time pressured. One is that fami- lies are increasingly characterized by having dual earners-a phenomenon currently applying to 78 percent of all married employees.2 Dual-earner families are largely the result of married women entering the workforce. For those women in par- ticular, this shift has likely created pressures to Monthly Labor Review April 1999 31

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