Teachers were outraged by recent legislation of the Ontario Government impacting on their workload 1 . They claimed that this legislation exhibited little understanding of the true nature of the demands on, and worklife of, teachers. This paper utilizes several social indicators to assess conditions, which escalate feelings of stress encountered by teachers in fulfillment of their employment responsibilities.
Public education has traditionally been the single largest item in the budgets covered by taxation at the municipal level, typically amounting to over half (Bollens & Schmandt, 1981). The size and cost of educational operations has made it difficult for municipalities with low tax bases to provide high quality education. Hence, ways have been sought to go beyond local sources of revenue. As more political bodies and levels have come into play in the financing of education, traditional ways of organizing schools and teaching have been challenged, often in an attempt to control costs. These challenges extend to the teaching load of teachers. Can teachers not teach more classes and/or students? More generally, education is perceived as having its own structural logic, and critics ask whether bureaucratic models defining the workday in other types of organization in the private and public sectors should not be extended to public school teaching, with beneficial impact on the cost of education.
The research underlying this paper was inspired by legislation changing the terms of reference of public education in Ontario. A complex bill was passed by the Legislative Assembly through which half the cost of education was assumed by the province—along with 100 per cent of de facto control over educational budgeting and procedures—in return for the downloading of the costs of a number of other functions to the municipalities. School boards were then pressured through budget limitations and specific guidelines to add one class to the teaching load of high school teachers, while preparation time during the school day was cut. The government, in support of its plan, blanketed the media with ads picturing a large clock, with the period between noon and 4 p.m. shaded in bright red. A voice commented to the effect that Ontario high school teachers typically spend four hours a day in their classrooms. The new guidelines were said (as the shaded red area was shown to expand marginally) to add under half an hour to this total. It ended with the rhetorical question as to whether this is too much time to expect of teachers.
One response to these guidelines was a series of political protests and strikes by teachers, whose contracts had been voided as part of the legislation and who had to negotiate new ones reflecting the legislated realities. The idea of having less time to prepare for more classes and to teach more students was the catalyst for teacher fury.
The legislation and responses to it focus attention on a number of empirical questions. Some questions are reasonably objective. What is the duration of paid work by teachers? Of what does it consist? Is it “long” or “short”? Is the workday more or less for teachers than for others? Some questions are more subjective. How stressful is teaching? If stressful, what factors contribute to this situation? What are the implications of extending teaching loads in this context? The subjective aspects do not necessarily follow from the objective allocation of time. Our goal in this paper is to assess what conditions in teachers’ employment situation elicit the subjective feelings that emerge.
There is a growing literature addressing these questions. Hargreaves (1990, 1991), for example, brings in the factors of time and how time is experienced by teachers, though doing so largely theoretically and through observations of elementary school teachers. He cites Larson’s work (1980), focussing on how demands for multiple work activities in close juxtaposition through the teaching day represent a form of intensification which is found stressful. Hargreaves relates this directly to the current situation in Ontario. Drago and his colleagues (1999) in the United States, as part of their “Time, Work & Family” project, have studied the time-use of elementary school teachers in forty-six public schools. Their results showed that time for the various activities in teachers’ days which could be attributed to their jobs (and hence not available for other kinds of activity) averaged 10 hours and 16 minutes—substantially greater than the 4 hours marked in red on the propaganda clock. They found as well that this major slice of the daily time allocation was not the only work done by teachers, as they, like other persons, devote considerable time to their households’ activities and responsibilities, varying according to their family structure.
In Saskatchewan the typical school day of 9:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., 6.5 hours a day, was shown to belie the true workday of 9 hours per day Monday to Thursday and 8 hours on Friday (Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation, 1995). Adding weekend hours brought the total to over 47 hours per week. Both beginning teachers and teachers in their first teaching term, averaging 66 hours per week, and teachers having taught over 20 years (50-53 hours per week) registered well above average.
In a study of teachers’ time-use across four countries (Australia, New Zealand, USA and England) over forty years ago, Ås found, similarly, that, among teachers working on a five-day week, work days were up to about 9 hours ( Ås, 1968). It seems little has changed.
This paper utilizes several kinds of social indicators to address both the objective and subjective sides of this problematique. Time-use measures have been shown to provide valid data on what people do on a chosen day—their activities, the locations in which they occur, and the people who are involved (c.f. Pentland, Harvey, Lawton & McColl, 1999). Measures of how stressful or enjoyable activities in the time-use protocols are perceived to have been (Michelson, 1985; 1999), as well as complementary scales of perceived time pressure and “crunch” (Zuzanek & Smale, 1997; Robinson & Godbey, 1997), have been used for a subjective account of how people view their workdays. We apply these social indicators to assess the extent and nature of teacher’s work, as well as to understand how teachers feel about their work patterns – and why.
We did a secondary analysis of subsamples from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey no. 7, collected in 1992. This was well before the current round of restructuring in Ontario. The GSS7 included a one-day time-use survey, many questions on time pressure and stress, demographic and structural information, and more. The complete file contains nearly 10,000 respondents and is representative of the Canadian population.
Although our main goal was to assess what conditions in teachers’ employment account for emergent subjective outcomes, we thought it might be useful to include a comparative perspective. The choice of a comparison group can be arbitrary and subject to differing interpretations. We chose to compare teachers to persons with the same level of education in white collar jobs which are defined structurally more as line than as staff: managers and administrators. We saw this as a direction embodied in the legislation for the future of teachers, as a metamorphosis from staff to line workers, albeit at a relatively low level in the line. Respondents were therefore selected for our main analysis who:
As the advertizing figures citing mean classroom contact time demonstrate, statistics can be chosen to represent different conceptions of a general phenomenon. The definition of work is highly elastic. Classroom contact time is only one of a number of activities that occupy teachers in their daily work. Others include homeroom, guidance, hall, lunchroom, and playground monitoring, extra-curriculars, meetings, preparation, marking, and much more, all falling outside formal teaching in the classroom. 3 The standard, minimalistic category of work activity in most national time-use studies measures “total duration for work for pay at (the) main job” (Statistics Canada, 1993). According to this measure, the mean duration for teachers was 425 minutes in the day studied, just over 7 hours. This is clearly greater than 4 hours (i.e. 240 minutes), and it appears to resemble the classic school day of 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
However, the time logged according to this definition does not include overtime work, interstitial activities during the work day at the workplace, meals, snacks, and breaks (often in the company of students and colleagues), other work activities than those directly mandated (e.g. extra-curriculars), and travel to and from work. All of these are functions of workplace demands and take time that cannot be allocated to household and discretionary activities. It is this conception of hours worked which informed the results by Draco and colleagues (1999), in which teachers allocate over 10 hours a day to their jobs. According to Statistics Canada’s more inclusive category of working time, “total duration of employed work activity codes”, teachers devote a mean of 523 minutes per day to their jobs. This is more than an hour and a half greater than the typical “school day”.
The devotion of time to work by teachers is substantial. It certainly exceeds the image cast by government promoted advertizing. But this does not mean that teachers are unusual in the amount of daily time they allocate to their work. The managers and administrators studied devote even more time to their work on the day studied. According to the minimalistic definition of working time, these people put in about three-quarters of an hour more than the teachers, which according to the logic of one-way ANOVA is a significant difference (sig. = .024). The difference in the more inclusive—and, we think, more realistic—definition is in the same direction, but is not as great, 36 minutes (sig. = .03).
If, however, we pursue the concept of intensification and therefore examine the number of work episodes (i.e. distinct segments when a particular kind of work started and then ended) carried out during the day, teachers are found to have significantly more such episodes than managers/administrators. Using the minimal definition, teachers report a mean of 3.52 episodes of work per day, compared to 2.81 for the managers/administrators (sig. = .000). An analysis of all kinds of work-related episodes from the GSS7 file of episodes indicates that teachers report a mean of 7.5, compared to 6.4 for the managers/administrators. 4 The direction of these results on number of episodes of work per day (especially since they occur within a somewhat shorter working day) supports Larson’s (1980) intensification hypothesis—that teaching involves a potentially stressful juxtaposition of many activities within the day.
As might be expected, subjective reactions to the experience of workdays vary by the focus of the measures. Several ways to assess teachers’ feelings about their workdays are found in the GSS7 survey.
First, after providing their time-use information, respondents were asked which specific episode of activity they had found most enjoyable during the day reported. Teachers were more likely than managers and administrators to choose an episode of work: 22.4 per cent to 14.5 per cent. The work of teachers clearly contains enjoyable moments.
Second, we examined the values given on the time crunch and time pressure indices. Ten questions were of intrinsic value, as well as forming a “time crunch index”; these were modifications of a previous index devised by John Robinson (Robinson & Godbey, 1997, pp. 236-238). The questions are answered “yes” or “no”; each positive answer contributes one point to a possible maximum of 10 for the index. The specific items are as follows:
Zuzanek and Smale (1997) have devised a second, closely-related 21-point index. After deleting item a, above, they added two items: “How often do you feel rushed?” and “Compared to 5 years ago, do you feel more rushed?”
Teachers show higher scores (i.e. more time crunch and pressure) on both indices. Their mean time crunch score is 3.92, compared to 3.49 for the managers/administrators. For the time pressure index, the difference is 13.16 to 12.13. However, according to one-way ANOVA, a measure which shows whether the differences on a dependent variable between categories of an explanatory variable are significantly greater than the differences within these categories, these differences in the means are not statistically significant (sig. = .181 and .170, respectively).
Third, some of the specific items contributing to these scales appear at face value to pertain more directly to workday feelings of stress than others. They include: “How often do you feel rushed?”, “Do you feel that you are constantly under stress?”, and “Do you feel that you just don’t have time for fun?”. Table 1 shows the results. Although the differences between teachers and managers/administrators are not statistically significant according to chi-square analyses, the teachers show higher stress on each question. Some 60.6 per cent of teachers feel rushed every day. Nearly 40 per cent feel constantly under stress, and 34.3 per cent just don’t have time for fun.
Correlations between the total duration of employed work activities with time crunch and pressure scores are positive but low. Whether in aggregate or for teachers and managers/ administrators alone, no correlation coefficient exceeds +.16. Although teachers put in a respectable workday, it is not the sheer number of hours that leads to elevated feelings of time crunch and pressure. Therefore, we need to turn more closely to the specific daily contexts of teachers to understand the stress in their work and their reactions to changes in their workload.
A first hint at the importance of context comes in when most enjoyable activities are examined by where they take place. Table 2 shows, for those who mentioned work as the most enjoyable activity in the day, where the chosen episode of work took place. For teachers, this is almost entirely at school. Only one teacher (or 5.3%) had this enjoyable work episode at home. In contrast, 21.4 per cent of the managers/administrators were at home for their most enjoyable work episode. This is inverse to the amount of time which the two employment groups spend working at home. Teachers spend a mean time of 58 minutes a day pursuing employment activities at home, compared to only 37 minutes for managers/administrators. In a subsample of respondents whose time-use information was on a weekend day, teachers gave a mean of more than an hour (66.8 min.) to their work on the diary day, compared to 7.2 minutes for the managers/executives. Similarly, teachers devote more than twice the number of episodes to their work at home on a given weekday than do managers/administrators (0.67 to 0.3) and more than five times the number on a weekend day (0.55 to 0.10).
A very rough indication of the stress attached to work outside regular school hours comes from the analysis of episodes of work taking place at school and at home. The survey did not assess the subjective evaluation of each episode of activity, as can be done in time-use surveys (c.f. Michelson, 1985). Only the characteristics of the most enjoyable activity are gathered. However, the mean time crunch and pressure values of the people performing individual episodes can be calculated. We can compare the mean index values associated with episodes of work at school and work at home. This is inexact because the work location reflects episodes as the unit of analysis, while the stress values reflect individuals, a different level. Nonetheless, this analysis enables us to see the levels of stress weighted by number of episodes in the two types of location. For teachers, the mean time pressures index associated with episodes of work at home is 13.29, while, for work at school, it is only 12.64. The same pattern is true with respect to time crunch values: 3.94 to 3.72. The reverse is true for managers and administrators, where time pressure is less at home than at the office by this measure (12.41 to 12.99), as is time crunch (3.53 to 3.80).
Teachers do more “homework” but enjoy it less. Why?
Students of time-use have long since documented the difference gender makes in how people spend their time (c.f. Szalai et al., 1972; Zuzanek & Smale, 1999). In a previous analysis of a different subsample from the GSS7 files, Michelson (1999) found gender a more thoroughgoing explanatory variable than certain aspects of people’s work situation (telecommuting, for instance, concerning time crunch and pressure). Peters and Raaijmakers (1999) documented in The Netherlands how gender relates to both time-use and time crunch simultaneously, with invidious results for women. In societies in which gender differences in everyday life change slowly, we must ask how our social indicators vary by gender, lest we make erroneous assumptions about the daily lives and experiences of men and women based on current ideologies alone.
This is highly germane to the current analysis. The teachers in the study group, as in the Canadian population of teachers at large, are about two-thirds female, while the managers/administrators studied are about two-thirds male. Furthermore, while about two-thirds of the men in both occupational groups live with a partner, the women differ greatly in this regard according to occupation; 72 per cent of female teachers do so, compared to only 34 per cent of female managers/administrators (of whom nearly half are separated or divorced). The household demands that accentuate broader gender differences are very different in the two occupational groups.
Jobs and time pressures occur in the larger context of everyday life, reflecting a greater set of relationships and responsibilities. Breaking down aspects of time-use by occupation and by gender in a 2-way ANOVA design shows that gender has a profound impact on many aspects of behavior and that, once controlled by gender, relatively little is explained by occupation alone and nothing by the two in interaction. Table 3 summarizes these results.
Gender is highly significant, all else equal, in explaining, for example, how much time people devote to essential activities. As has been shown repeatedly by studies of time-use, men typically spend more time than women do on paid employment and employment-related activities, even among persons with full-time jobs. The differences between teachers and managers/administrators in this regard virtually disappear once gender is controlled. Male teachers, for example, put in the same working day as male managers/administrators, and the women are close. What differentiates the two occupational groups is the gender mix.
As also seen in Table 3, women put in much more time in domestic activities and shopping than men, regardless of occupation. Aggregating the amount of daily time given to domestic work, caregiving, and shopping, the female teachers exceed the men by 168-108 minutes, while among the managers/administrators, the difference is 142 to 84 minutes. In contrast, men spend about twice the amount of time as women on sports and hobbies, regardless of occupation. As we have seen, this reflects not only gender but also household structure. Plus ça change.....
The occupational groups remain significantly related to the amount of daily travel and to the number of episodes of work for pay at the main job, after the effect of gender is controlled. Teachers, both men and women, spend more time travelling in the day than do managers/administrators. And the greater intensification for teachers, as measured by episodes of work, applies equally to men and women.
Thus, when teachers are threatened with more classes and students and less time at school for preparation, this goes into a daily context in which a large majority of them, in part as a function of gender and household composition, already have substantial time commitments outside school hours not only for an existing level of homework but for household activities and commitments. How, then, does gender relate to occupation with respect to time crunch and pressure?
Familiar gender-based time pressures and stresses are evident as two-way analyses are conducted on our measures of stress. Given the gender breakdown in teaching, they cannot help entering into how many teachers evaluate their situation. Table 4 summarizes findings using the time crunch and pressure scales. Gender is a highly significant factor in these types of stress, with values for women well above those of men. Once controlled for gender, however, occupational group differences narrow from near significance to a very low level (sig. = .822 and .945, respectively).
Table 5 breaks down the three individual questions dealing with stress by occupation and gender. In this case, gender remains of utmost importance, but, in addition, there is a nonlinear interactive effect. We noted in Table 1 that stress levels on these questions is somewhat higher among teachers than among managers/administrators and in Table 4 that women score significantly higher than men. However, the cross-tabulations in Table 5 show that the differences reported by men and women are much greater among the managers/administrators. Female managers/administrators score higher than teachers of the same gender in terms of feeling rushed and constantly under stress, while male administrators are lowest of all (i.e. less than male teachers) on all three items. 5 Male and female teachers report stresses more equally than do male and female administrators, though the women have higher levels, as is typically found.
Time-use and other social indicators from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey 7 (1992) show that teachers have a working day at school which is much longer than the class contact hours referred to in government advertizing and that teachers are much more likely to put in time on their work in the evenings and weekends than a comparison group of managers and administrators. Data on enjoyment, time pressures and stress suggest that it is the time outside school hours which teachers find most problematic. They have to work outside school hours and at home, but they are more likely to face time pressures then and there in view of the other commitments that they have in the limited time available. The level of obligations and time pressures at home in the evening has traditionally been great for women in particular, and women constitute a major proportion of teachers.
Reforms that put additional classes and students into a teacher’s school day and remove preparation time create disproportionate increases in the work that will have to be done at home and outside normal working hours. For many teachers, this is like pouring water into an already full cup, particularly if, as is likely, they are women. The ads asked if this is too much. Teachers think so, and our data suggest that the reason has to be found outside the tight logic of minutes inside classrooms with students. The old saying, “Man may work from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done” extends unfortunately well to the context of teaching and the lives of teachers, not least in view of the gender of so many teachers. 6
Table 1.-- Positive Responses to
Three Questions on Stress, by Teachers and Managers/Administrators
|
Teachers
|
Managers/ administrators
|
|
|
How often do you feel
rushed? (Daily)
|
60.6% (n = 99)
|
51.4% (n = 109)
|
|
Do you feel that you
are consistently
|
39.4% (99)
|
34.5% (110)
|
|
under stress? (Yes)
|
||
|
Do you feel that you
just don't have
|
34.3% (99)
|
25.5% (110)
|
|
time for fun? (Yes)
|
||
Table 2.-- Where the Most Enjoyable Work Activity Takes Place, by Teachers
and Managers/Administrators
|
Place
|
Teachers
|
Managers/ administrators
|
|
External workplace
|
94.7
|
71.4
|
|
At home
|
5.3
|
21.4
|
|
Another place
|
0
|
7.1
|
|
_________
|
_________
|
|
|
100
|
99.9
|
|
|
19
|
14
|
Table 3.--Mean Minutes per Day in Selected Activities (and occurrences of work) by Occupation and Gender (held constant by each other) and the Statistical Significance of the Contribution of Each and in Interaction
|
Selected Activities:
|
Teachers:
|
Managers/administ.
|
admin.:
|
Significance of:
|
|||
|
Men
|
Women
|
Men Women
|
Occup.
|
Gender
|
Interaction
|
||
|
Total duration for work
for pay
|
472
|
399
|
480
|
422
|
***
|
||
|
in main job
|
|||||||
|
Total duration of employed
|
579
|
491
|
575
|
501
|
***
|
||
|
work activities
|
|||||||
|
Total duration of domestic
|
44
|
82
|
44
|
76
|
***
|
||
|
work activity
|
|||||||
|
Caregiving for household
members 49
|
38
|
19
|
42
|
||||
|
Shopping and services
|
15
|
48
|
21
|
24
|
*
|
||
|
Sports and hobbies
|
47
|
24
|
43
|
22
|
*
|
||
|
Media and community activity
|
105
|
113
|
123
|
100
|
|||
|
Total travel
|
97
|
103
|
73
|
81
|
*
|
||
|
Occurrences of work for
pay at
|
3.686
|
3.444
|
2.889
|
2.588
|
***
|
||
|
main job
|
|||||||
|
35
|
64
|
75
|
35
|
||||
|
Significance levels:
*** < .001, **<.01, *<.05
|
Table 4.-- Mean Time Pressure and Time Crunch Index Values by Occupation and Gender (held constant by (hand the Statistical Significance of the Contribution of Each and in Interaction
|
r (held constant by each
other)
|
stant by each other)
|
||||||
|
Indices:
|
Teachers:
|
Managers/admin.:
|
Significance of:
|
||||
|
Men
|
Women
|
Men
|
Women
|
Occup.
|
Gender
|
Interaction
|
|
|
Time Pressure Index
|
12.371
|
13.508
|
10.819
|
14.706
|
**
|
||
|
Time Crunch
|
3.371
|
4.19
|
2.986
|
4.529
|
***
|
||
|
35
|
64
|
75
|
35
|
||||
|
Significance levels:
*** <.001, **<.01, *<.05
|
Table 5.--Positive Responses to Three Questions on Stress, by Occupational Group and Gender
|
Teachers
|
Managers/ administrators
|
|||
|
Men
|
Women
|
Men
|
Women
|
|
|
How often do you feel
rushed?
|
65.70%
|
57.80%
|
47.30%
|
60.00%
|
|
(Daily)
|
||||
|
Do you feel that you are
|
31.40%
|
43.80%
|
21.30%
|
78.70%
|
|
constantly under stress?
(Yes)
|
||||
|
Do you feel that you just
don't
|
25.70%
|
39.10%
|
21.30%
|
34.30%
|
|
have time for fun? (Yes)
|
||||
|
35
|
64
|
75
|
35
|
Bollens, John, and Henry Schmandt, 1981. The Metropolis (4 th ed.). N.Y.: Harper and Row.
Brennan, Richard, and Louise Brown, 2000. “Harris to teachers: ‘You will stay after class’: Premier eyes law on extracurricular activities this fall”, The Toronto Star, March 11, 2000, pp. 1,28.
Drago, Robert, et al., 1999. “New Estimates of Working Time for Teachers,” http://www.uwm.edu/~drago/worksum.htm.
Hargreaves, Andy, 1990. “Teachers’ Work and the Politics of Time and Space,” Qualitative Studies in Education 3:303-320.
Hargreaves, Andy, 1991. “Time and Teachers; Work: An Analysis of the Intensification Thesis,” paper presented to the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois.
Larson, S.M., 1980. “Proletarianization and Educated Labour,” Theory and Society 9(1):131-175.
Mallon, Caroline, 2000. “Ontario teachers’ battle looming: Classroom time crackdown could spark labour unrest”, The Toronto Star, March 10, 2000, p. 1, 24.
Michelson, William, 1985. From Sun to sun: Daily Obligations and Community Structure in the Lives of Employed Women and their Families. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld.
Michelson, William, 1999. “Time Pressure and Human Agency in Home-based Employment,” Society and Leisure 21:455-472.
Pentland, Wendy, Andrew Harvey, M. Powell Lawton, and Mary Ann McColl, 1999. Time Use Research in the Social Sciences. N.Y.: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Peters, Pascale, and Stephan Raaijmakers, 1999. “Time Crunch and the Perception of Control over Time from a Gendered Perspective: The Dutch Case,” Society and Leisure 21: 417-433.
Robinson, John, and Geoffrey Godbey, 1997. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use their Time. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (1995). The Workload and Worklife of Saskatchewan Teachers. Saskatoon: Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation .
Statistics Canada, 1993. The 1992 General social survey – Cycle 7: Time Use. Public Use Microdata File Documentation and Users Guide. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.
Szalai, Alexander, 1972. The Use of Time. The Hague: Mouton.
Zuzanek, Jiri, and Bryan Smale, 1997. “More Work – Less Leisure? Changing Allocations of Time in Canada, 1981 to 1992. Society and Leisure 20:73-106.
Zuzanek, Jiri, and Bryan Smale, 1999. “Life-Cycle and Across-the-Week Allocation of Time to Daily Activities,” in Wendy Pentland et al. (eds.), Time Use Research in the Social Sciences. N.Y.: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, pp. 127-153.
Ås, D (1968). Distributions of Teachers Activities. Paper presented to the Education section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, Dundee, August 21-28.
1. An earlier draft of this paper was presented to the American Sociological Association, Session 231 ("Social Indicators and Social Well-Being"), August 8, 1999, Chicago, Illinois. The research was assisted by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This paper is one in a series of analyses on this topic by the authors, individually and together.
2. Managers and administrators were grouped together in each of two codes in the GSS7 data file. They represent a large number of people who have responsibility, at varying levels of scale and prestige, for particular functions. Teachers are likely to be elementary and secondary teachers, but not university teachers, in view of our sample's characteristics: most do not have a university degree higher than the bachelor's degree or teaching credential, and two thirds are women. Other occupational codes that include social sciences and life sciences are more likely to represent university teachers.
3. We also presented a separate paper on the expansion of work in space and time to a roundtable during the same annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
4. The structure of the data in the episode file, in which the individual episode is the case, precluded ANOVA calculations.
5. The marginal position of female managers/administrators is supported further by a major difference in the income of men and women. Men in this sample earned significantly more. This compares to relative equality by gender in teacher income. And given the differing household composition of female teachers and managers/administrators, the teachers' incomes help boost household income much more than is the case for female managers. The degree of stress reported by female managers/administrators may well reflect a tenuous situation.
6. The issue of increased workloads is very much alive as this paper is revised for publication. The Toronto Star reported on March 10, 2000, that the Ontario Minister of Education announced the tightening of rules on official teaching time beyond what had been operationalized by school boards after the original legislation. The minister "also warned teachers to participate in extra-curricular activities or else they would be forced by law to do so." (Mallon, 2000, p. 1) A spokesperson for the teachers immediately predicted, "the result will be strikes or work-to-rule campaigns." (Mallon, 2000, p. 1) The Premier of Ontario retorted the next day, "I'm telling you that the people of this province want their kids to have extracurricular activities and so does the government and that will be the law of the land." (Brennan and Brown, 2000, p. 1)
© Radical Pedagogy