In 2022, Wes Whitesel was on the road to burnout.
For five years, he’d been teaching multiple sessions of at least two social studies courses a year—including regular and Advanced Placement world history, government, and economics courses—at Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School, a charter school dedicated to preparing first-generation Los Angeles students for college.
His one planning period every other day often regularly got eaten up by departmental meetings.
“Unbearable is the word that comes to mind,” Whitesel said. “Unattainable, unbearable, unrealistic. A lot of the time that work would spill out of my classroom and have to be completed at home.”
Today, Whitesel doesn’t take work home much anymore, and his family relationships and marriage have improved. “My youngest daughter, who’s 4, really doesn’t know what it means to see Daddy work at home,” he said.
The solution? A change to the schedule that cost little, but has paid big dividends for teachers.
Four middle and high schools in the Alliance College-Ready network, including Whitesel’s, have doubled the planning time their teachers get during the school day, without cutting into students’ instructional time.
In the process, they’ve seen both teacher retention and student achievement rise.
The effort is part of an ongoing school scheduling pilot aimed at one of teachers’ most sought-after workplace improvements: more planning time.
American schools don’t offer much planning time, in general
On average, U.S. teachers get about 4.5 hours of in-school planning time each week, according to the National Council on Teaching Quality. Teachers report rising data analysis and administrative duties—above and beyond basic lesson planning—and near-constant distractions squeeze the time they do have.
National surveys from Education Week, RAND, Corp., and other groups find a majority of young teachers with children of their own, like Whitesel, report having to juggle family and work responsibilities.
“It was really stressful and challenging to my ability to be prepared in the high-quality ways that I expected out of myself in the classroom,” Whitesel said, “and hard on my family and marriage.” Over time, a school schedule that pushes teachers to take work home can push them out of the classroom entirely. Lack of planning time is one of the most consistent drags on teacher morale and work-life balance nationwide, according to the EdWeek Research Center’s nationally representative State of Teaching survey for 2026.
The Alliance pilot was sparked in part by a 2022 study from the University of California, Los Angeles, which found that 1 in 5 teachers in the state planned to leave the profession in the next three years, largely because of burnout.
The Alliance charter network had implemented pay increases in 2020. But the intense work pressure Alliance teachers face was scuppering efforts to boost morale, as most students enter the schools performing three years below grade level, said Matt DeFord, the principal of Mohan High.
“There’s an increasing strain put on our teacher workforce, and if we leave it unaddressed, it will have profound implications in our ability to deliver high-quality education for our scholars,” DeFord said.
That’s why Mohan High and other Alliance charters decided to find ways to give teachers more time.
Making room for more teacher time
Alliance has deployed a combination of expanded dual-credit programs, co-teaching, and schedule analyses informed by AI tools to overhaul school schedules at the four pilot schools.
“It’s so much more complicated in high schools,” said Sonja Grant, the vice president of network initiatives at Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, noting California’s complex college- and career-ready diploma requirements and students’ varying needs.
The schedule changes focused on three things:
- Doubling daily planning time (to 8-12 hours per week, depending on the school);
- Providing more staff support for teachers during planning periods; and
- Expanding academic enrichment for students.
At Mohan High, that means students attend an A/B block schedule of seven periods per day—but teachers only cover five of those periods and no longer have supervision duty during periods like morning transition and lunch.
That leaves teachers with two planning periods per day, covering both individual and collaborative prep time. Departmental meetings are limited to every other week. Some, but not all the pilot schools added new teachers.
Whitesel said he teaches larger classes under the new schedule—120 students spread over four periods instead of five, for example. But he says the tradeoff is worth it.
Having ‘more time to think’ leads to better results
Student engagement and performance have improved at the pilot schools following the schedule changes, said Grant, the charter network administrator. Chronic absenteeism fell 2% from 2023-24 in the pilot schools. Also during that time, student performance grew nearly 9% in English/language arts and by more than 36% in math. While the pilot does not have a formal randomized experiment, Grant said growth has been faster in schools in the pilot versus those working under the old schedules.
More than 8 in 10 teachers in the pilot schools reported they have more time to study student data and better work-life balance under the revised schedules.
“A lot of admin. people talk about valuing our work and home-life relationships, but there’s usually not a lot of action,” Whitesel said. “I feel like this pilot we’ve been doing puts a lot of action to the lip service about wanting to help us create and maintain a work-life balance.”
Brenda Corral, a 9th grade Living Earth science teacher at Mohan (the subject is a science laboratory course blending biology and space topics), came to the school this year in part for the better schedule.
In her prior school, Corral had just one planning period for two subject courses of five class periods. “It would be very rare when I actually got to take a break during lunch to have lunch or socialize, versus having to work and prep for the next day or the next week,” she said. She worked an hour or more each night after her 5-year-old daughter went to sleep.
Since moving to Mohan High and getting a double planning period, Corral said, she’s had to bring work home just once. “I started leaving my work laptop at work,” said Corral, now in her fourth year teaching. “That has been very, very nice.”
Corral spends one of her planning periods solo and one collaborating with other science teachers; she feels less isolated and less overwhelmed.
“I am able to focus more on the students that I’m teaching, making those accommodations and making the work more meaningful,” Corral said. “Whereas last year, I remember sometimes I was planning what I was going to teach the next day the night before.”
Teacher retention at Alliance schools has improved 4%, from 87% in 2022-23 to 91% in 2024-25. Middle schools implementing the pilot schedules improved even more; Valera Middle School 4 improved teacher retention by 10 percentage points, to 94%, during that time.
Alliance is expanding the pilot to 11 of its 25 schools by 2027-28 and then will continue to expand by three to four schools a year, Grant said.
Here’s one prototype schedule from the charter network that shows how teachers have two separate planning periods in a day.
