Built-In Burnout: Charter School Organizational Logics and Teacher Workloads

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Effects of Organizational Structures

Abstract

This study analyzes the ways charter school organizational features contribute to the distribution of teacher workloads. We hypothesize that charter schools assign teachers higher and more heterogeneous course loads than traditional public schools. Moreover, we expect that teachers in market-oriented charters are assigned more onerous workloads than teachers in other charter schools. We use publicly-available California Department of Education data for the 2012-2013 school year and multilevel models to test our hypotheses, and find that teachers in market-oriented charter schools teach one-and-a-half more classes and nearly one more unique class per year than their peers at traditional public schools. This heightened workload may be an important factor driving elevated levels of teacher attrition in market-oriented charter schools.

Authors

• Sean Edward Arseo, University of California - Davis

• Jimmy Ojeda, University of California - Davis

• Jeremy Kidd Prim, Morehouse College

• Darien Waite, morehouse

• Jacob Hibel, University of California - Davis