Where teacher hours go, and why we quote no number
By The Corra team · · 2 min read · Teaching
Almost every product sold to teachers opens with a statistic about hours lost to paperwork, and almost none of them cite a source you can check. We are not going to add another one. What follows is the honest version: the sources that actually study teacher time, what they consistently find, and why we will not put a precise figure in our own marketing.
Why the numbers you see are usually unusable
A statistic needs three things to be worth repeating: a named source, a described population and a date. Most teacher-hours claims in edtech copy have none of them, and the ones that do are frequently a vendor’s own customer survey, which measures the people most enthusiastic about that vendor rather than teachers in general.
- No named source means nobody can check it, which is usually the point.
- Vendor surveys sample their own users, not the profession.
- A figure from one country, one grade band or one decade gets quoted as if it were universal.
The sources that are worth your time
Several bodies study teacher workload seriously and publish their methods, which is what makes them checkable. If you want a number for a grant application or a staff meeting, take it from one of these and cite it properly, rather than from a product page.
- The RAND Corporation’s American Teacher Panel — repeated, methodologically documented surveys of US teachers, including working hours and wellbeing.
- The US National Center for Education Statistics — the National Teacher and Principal Survey, the federal baseline for how teacher time is spent.
- The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) — international comparisons of where teaching time goes versus everything around it.
- Your own state education agency, which often publishes workload and retention data specific to where you teach.
What they consistently show
Read across those sources and one pattern is durable even though the exact figures differ: a substantial share of a teacher’s working week is spent on activities that are not instruction and not planning instruction. Documentation, communication, meetings and administrative reporting take real time, and that share has not been shrinking. That is enough of a finding to build a product on. It does not require a decimal point.
What this means for how we talk about Corra
Corra keeps an hours-reclaimed ledger, and it is built from actual actions you took in the product rather than from an industry average applied to your account. When it eventually has something to show you, it will show its working — which task, which day, and on what basis the estimate was made. Until then it says nothing, because a fabricated time-saved number is exactly the thing this post is complaining about.
Common questions
- So how much time will Corra save me?
- We do not know, and any product that tells you a specific figure before you have used it is guessing. Corra’s ledger reports what it actually observed in your account, with the reasoning visible.
- Where should I get a citable statistic?
- The RAND American Teacher Panel, the NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey, or the OECD TALIS study. All three publish their methodology, which is what makes a number quotable.