This is the eighth post in a series entitled Why I Quit Teaching in Private Schools.

I left a varsity lacrosse game last spring at 8:30pm. My son had played in the JV game, but I decided to stay to see the big boys in action. Once the game wrapped up and the parking lot emptied, it was close to 9:30, a fourteen-hour day for the head coach, who is also a history teacher at the school.

During lacrosse season, this is the norm: 60 hour work weeks without any extra compensation for these efforts. Of course, our public school counterparts are compensated for every extra duty, even covering a study hall, per union rules. A family pal of ours earns about twelve thousand extra dollars a year in extra pay as a varsity coach of two sports at a local public school.

Private school teachers and administrators are a busy lot. While our public school colleagues certainly face a variety of challenges in their jobs we do not, one main reason friends of mine have left private ed is because of the increase in the hours per week demanded by the job without additional compensation.

Really, who wants to work 60 hours a week for $40k a year? The answer is this: good, noble people who have committed their lives to educating young people and helping them become excellent adults. People are “called” to this work.

As mentioned, private educators do much, much more than teach the standard four or five classes per day. All of us either coach, run complex clubs and activities, tutor students, direct plays, lead teacher teams, head departments, live with boarders, and work bake sale stands as part of our job description. Many schools call this the “5th dimension” of our job. Most of these add a minimum of twenty hours to our workweek, and can even exceed forty when one coaches a varsity sport.

Those who have been in private education for some time would quickly chime in that this has always been the cross we bear. In fact, it is for this reason that many of us choose working for independent schools; we love to work with students in a variety of settings, especially when it involves our own passions.

But, we are talking about 60+ hours a week.

Dirty Secret: Independent school teachers are twice as likely to leave teaching in the first five years. As time demands increase without additional compensation attached, many educators leave to make more money or find more balance in their lives. Teacher workloads continue to increase as more and more school are “running lean,” cutting costs by reducing faculty and staff (thus, bigger class sizes, more advisees, fewer assistant coaches, heavier course loads, etc.)

Then comes the back breaker. The final brick that has been dropped onto the already heavy load we bear is parent management and communication. If you poll any senior faculty members, they will tell you that the one slice of the pie graph that that has expanded exponentially in the last 20 years is how much time we have to spend managing the parents of our students, athletes, and advisees. The current conundrum: 24-hour communication technology is being aggressively utilized by a parental culture driven a great deal by fear. I have personally spent huge chunks of time after 9pm or mid-Saturday or on the sidelines of a soccer game on the phone or email with an apoplectic parent of a student who just earned his first B-. Simply, there is a lot of hand holding, reassuring, and counseling going on.

Most of us who went into education did so to work with students, not neurotic adults. The reason I left full time administrating was because I found myself spending 85% of my time managing the fringe 15% of parents, not why I chose this career. As suggested in a recent post, I urge you to take a field trip down to the primary wing of any private school and ask a teacher about the parents in their class. Some of the stories are worthy of sketch comedy…or full time therapy.

The answer here is that we must reevaluate teacher and administrator workloads, and make hard choices about what we can and can’t expect of teachers. If a school truly values the student-teacher relationship, the personal touch, and holds community-building as summum bonum (concepts that are somewhat universal to private school mission statements), then they must address this issue and formalize realistic expectation and contract conditions. Research tells us that multi-tasking is a myth; it should be relabeled “continuous partial attention.” When a teacher is juggling so many responsibilities (planning, teaching, grading, mentoring, coaching, leading activities), it is incredibly difficult to do any of them exceptionally well, which is what is expected.

And, that’s the rub: private school parents, adrift in this age of perceived uncertainty and worry, expect excellence in all areas because they are paying for it, no matter what the activity. To many of them, paying for private education is commodity they have purchased: they expect 5 five star service. However, teachers are not given the time, professional development, and space to actually be excellent.

Something has to give.

Next post: Reason #9: Casting the Net Wider: Are Our School Ready to Support All Learners?