@lostinwebspace What do you mean by teachers not producing results? School quality (and student engagement levels) vary widely from place to place, but the US is still pretty much average when it comes to PISA scores, and American Asians and whites are among the best performers in the world. Ghetto schools are shit and most of the students there aren’t interested in learning, but non-ghetto students are doing pretty good, relative to the rest of the world.
And how are you going to finish all of the work in a regular 8 hour day? Maybe a math or science teacher could fit lesson planning, meetings, and grading coursework into 40 hours per week, but anyone teaching a writing intensive course would not be able to do it. For instance, an AP Lang teacher at my high school probably had to grade multi-page papers for 100-150 students every week or two, and AP history teachers also gave out at least one big assignment every week, and they had to grade tests every month or so and two large finals per year, and some of the teachers offered study sessions over the weekend before the AP test. And it wasn’t like they just checked for completion, either, as they read through everything and criticized all your mistakes. And while college professors have TAs to help grade, high school teachers have to grade every assignment themselves. During the school year, many or most teachers are absolutely working over 40 hours per week.
I don’t get why you keep emphasizing 7 hours each day. Yes, teachers get an hour off every day for lunch. Most people do. I work 9-5, which is 7 hours of work and 1 hour for lunch, but it is still counted as 8 hours per day, and pay is still divided by 8 instead of 7.
I would not say that most teachers work significantly less than your average worker. Like, at 36 weeks per year and around 50 hours per week (highly plausible for a language arts or history teacher), that is around 1800 hours, about the same as the median American worker (~1810 hours). Yes, they can work during the summer, but irregular jobs likely don’t pay that well for someone who‘s not a hot-shot programmer who can get some sort of contracting gig. Some probably teach summer school, but there is less demand for that than regular school, and many likely just end up doing unskilled service work.