<p>English teachers could have a lower class load (4 instead of 5) with no budget impact by simply allowing social studies, gym, music, and art classes to be larger. Freeing up 50 minutes a day substantially expands the English teacher’s time available for grading, and these other subjects don’t have nearly the out-of-class workload for a teacher as does English; AP History classes would be the exception. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, teacher contracts are almost uniformly written as if a teacher in PE has just as much out-of-class prep and grading time as one in English, which I haven’t found to be true. (If anything, PE teachers are often paid additional sums as their out-of-class time is often couched in terms of a coaching assignment.)</p>