"Like the Bad Guy from The Incredibles?" Teachers Reflect on Their Experiences with New Timekeeping System Kronos

On October 29th, all Philadelphia school district teachers were notified that the district would be transitioning to a new timekeeping system. The new system, Kronos, is planned to eventually replace the old timekeeping system tied to teachers’ payroll.

“Once there was the closure in the spring, every school got a Google Form [to sign in daily]. That was another adjustment. If you didn’t sign in a certain number of times, you would be notified by the principal,” reflects Ms. Lerer, Masterman’s Digital Literacy & Technology teacher. The Google Form system continued through October, with frequent technical difficulties and complaints from teachers.

Ultimately, the district announced on October 29th that they would be switching to Kronos, but that it wouldn’t go live until November 9th. “So for those, approximately, 10 days, we would have to do both. So in that time period, and shortly after November 9th, I did get quite a few messages from teachers,” says Ms. Lerer. Kronos introduced a new slew of technical difficulties (according to Ms. Lerer, the mobile app for Kronos “crashes every day” on her phone) in addition to the confusion that comes with a new process. Teachers are not hourly workers; their job doesn’t stop outside of the classroom. According to Madame Heimann, the time she spends working outside of Zoom can vary from “at least half an hour up to several hours for any given class period.” Because of this, many teachers said clocking out was just not intuitive. “If we’re doing our jobs, there’s no need for us to sign in. Doing it online doesn’t make sense, either, because if we weren’t showing up to class, people would know.” According to Ms. Lerer, “some of the sentiment around this is, why implement this new thing when what we’re all going through is new?”

On paper, using Kronos doesn’t sound like it should be complicated. “There are two buttons: one that says ‘clock in’, and one that says ‘clock out’”, said Ms. Lerer. But this hasn’t stopped the confusion from spreading throughout the district, with many teachers forgetting to clock out: even some members of The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) post reminders on their Facebook page for teachers to clock in and out. In the wake of the chaos caused by Kronos, an online forum has emerged, where tech teachers discuss how to remedy the confusion in their respective schools. “Sometimes I think that when people find something that’s unfamiliar to them, technologically or otherwise, and it doesn’t work the way they expected it to….initially, they may be afraid,” says Ms. Lerer. “There’s an apprehension towards messing something up, that someone feels like they could get in trouble if they do not do it correctly. It’s similar to when the new grading system was implemented, there were glitches, and people were getting nervous.”

Mr. Tannen is a member of Masterman’s Building Committee, which among other duties monitors the teachers’ contract for any violations. According to him, the PFT feels the need to address the Kronos system with legal action. “[The PFT] told us that they were going to take it to arbitration, which to my understanding means that they’ll sit down with a third party arbitrator to discuss, because they feel that with the Kronos system we're going to have to sign out, which is not something that we’ve had to do in the past.” The main concern of the PFT is that the clocking out feature of Kronos violates their Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).

Another concern that Mr. Tannen has been hearing about is privacy-based. “When you use the Kronos website remotely, it also asks for your location. There are many people who are more lax about [sharing their location], but there are also many people who don't want to share that information because they’re not necessarily aware of how it’s going to be used in the broader scheme of [the information] being collected.” Mr. Tannen has read online that in order to maintain their privacy, some PFT members have opted to use a virtual private network (VPN) when clocking into Kronos. Using a VPN could allow someone to trick a computer into thinking that they are clocking into Kronos from anywhere in the world.