مشوق ها و تلاش در بخش دولتی: آیا اصلاحات آموزش و پرورش ایالات متحده ساعت کار معلمان را افزایش داده است؟

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers’ hours are largely chosen at the worker's discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in US public schools over the past two decades. Total weekly hours of full-time teachers have risen steadily since 1983 by about an hour, and after-school instructional hours have increased 34 percent since 1987. Average hours and the rate of increase also vary widely across states. However, after accounting for a common time trend in hours, we find no association between the introduction of accountability legislation and the change in teacher hours. Education reforms are, however, associated with an increase in student test scores, presumably due to other types of changes in school and teacher behavior.

Among salaried workers, the decision to supply weekly work hours beyond some nominally contracted amount is generally left to the employee's discretion. Thus, salaried workers’ weekly hours play a role analogous to that of effort in principal-agent models: an increase in the strength of performance incentives in the employment contract should raise the equilibrium level of hours worked. In recent years, partly in response to concerns that public schools and their teachers faced inadequate incentives to improve student performance, states have passed a variety of accountability and school choice laws. These include mandatory testing of students with scores publicly reported by school, sanctions for schools with low student performance, rewards for schools with high (or improved) student performance, and charter school laws. States introduced these education reforms asynchronously, thus providing a promising “natural experiment” for evaluating their effects. The goal of this paper is to ascertain whether these laws increased the hours worked by full-time public school teachers. Understanding the effects of reforms on teacher hours adds an additional perspective to the burgeoning literature examining their effects on student performance.1 Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1983 to 1998, and the Schools and Staffing Surveys (SASS, waves 1987 through 1999), we show the following. First, the usual weekly hours worked by full-time teachers and after-school instructional hours increased steadily over this period of expanding educational reform. Second, long-term increases in neither of these variables are well explained by changes in the composition of the teacher work force. Third, while pooled regressions across years and states suggest positive effects of accountability and choice reforms, common time trends in hours and reforms drive these results. After including either year fixed effects or state specific time trends, we find that observed hours increases were no greater in states that adopted reforms than in states that did not. Finally, to help interpret these findings, we connect our state-level reform measures with information on test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). While this may not be the ideal way to study the connection between reforms and student performance, we find that several of the reforms studied are associated with improvements in students’ test scores in our data. This suggests that the reforms may have increased the efficiency via which teachers transform their work hours into students’ test performance.

The average weekly work hours of teachers have risen steadily since 1983, with an overall increase of about an hour per week. The hours teachers spend after school without students increased even more, rising about two and a half hours per week—a 34 percent increase. Considering these trends in the light of the explosion of education reforms across US states, it is tempting to conjecture that greater “incentivization” in teachers’ employment contracts induced by these reforms induced America's teachers to put in a few extra hours, especially grading papers or preparing better lessons after school. However, after adjusting for a common time trend in teacher hours across all states, we can detect no association between the adoption of any of four distinct types of reforms—charter schools, incentives, sanctions, and testing—and changes in teacher work hours. The lack of an effect of education reforms on teacher hours may be due to the weak connection between individual teacher effort and rewards that characterize most of the reforms that have been implemented: when examined closely one would not necessarily expect these reforms to have much of an effect on individual teachers. While reforms with more high-powered incentives might of course be more successful in increasing teacher effort, it is of course also worth noting that high-powered incentives may have other disadvantages that would need to be considered when adopting such policies.21 Finally, it is possible that US education reforms have caused changes in teacher behavior that are beneficial to students, or at least raise school performance indicators, without affecting teachers’ work hours. Teachers could have intensified their work effort per hour without increasing the number of hours worked, or could have changed the mix of activities during their day towards activities that are rewarded. Indeed, we find some preliminary evidence that student test scores have increased in states that adopted reforms despite the lack of an effect of reforms on hours. Understanding exactly what this means for the quality of education experienced by students requires further research on the precise ways in which teachers, students, and parents allocate their time, and on how this is affected by school reform policies.