TransCanada/Keystone/Alberta oil reading stumbles me upon a new study that finds Alberta teachers work about 48 hours a week during the school year.
I tracked down the Alberta Teacher Workload Study (Dec 2015) from Education Alberta and found it includes numbers they may help us understand just how much work teachers do year-round, including in the summer. The study found that Alberta teachers put in about 17 hours in July and 56 hours in August (remember, up in Alberta, June is a regular school month).
I do a little math (math for me isn’t just breakfast; it’s a way of life) and find that if we add those relatively easy summer months (work, for sure, but not 40-hour work weeks) to all those overtime school weeks, then distribute those hours evenly over an entire work-year, Alberta teachers work the same hours as a year-round worker who puts in 40.3 hours each week and gets two solid weeks of vacation.
During this year’s debate over raising South Dakota’s teacher pay, Governor Daugaard and the Blue Ribbon K-12 panel did a good job of tamping down the traditional and specious excuse we hear from some anti-teacher folks who say low pay is fine for professionals who only work nine or ten months a year. Such complaints are disrespectful and, as the above figures from Alberta show, ill-informed.