Monique Cox’s work day, like those of most teachers, doesn’t end when the school bell rings.
Cox teaches early education full time at the Epiphany School outside Boston. She also delivers meals for DoorDash several hours each day after school, runs her own personal training business at lunch and on weekends, and is raising a 4-year-old son. She’s hoping to save up for a house, and said she’d need to make another $15,000 to teach without taking additional work.
“With the economy, you know, gas is expensive, groceries are expensive—I do have a picky eater—so little things really do help,” Cox said. Driving seven to 15 hours a week pays about $200 on average per week to supplement her $45,000 annual teaching salary.
Teachers have been working to supplement their classroom pay for decades. But a new study suggests there are tradeoffs depending on the type of work they seek. Opportunities to add additional education duties for pay can improve teacher retention, but work outside the K-12 system can increase teachers’ risk of burnout.
“Teachers do seem to find opportunities that align well with their jobs, and they’re able to use their expertise in ways that build out and advance,” said Christopher Redding, an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Florida and lead author of the study. “But on a societal level, it highlights the longstanding concern of teachers being underpaid, if they are seeking opportunities to supplement salaries that are not adequate.”
Redding and his colleagues analyzed federal teacher data from 1994-2021. They found nearly 60% of teachers pick up at least one extra job outside of their primary teaching work—a share that’s held fairly stable, regardless of changes in the overall economy, during that time period. On average, educators who took on additional work made on average $1,000 less in base salary than those who only teach.
Educators have earned less over time from extra work, however. Teachers earned on average more than $4,000 a year after adjusting for inflation from an extra job before 2008, but since the Great Recession they have earned steadily less, to just $3,250 a year in 2021, Redding found. Teachers with multiple extra jobs earned on average more than $6,000 extra a year, or about 11% of their base teaching pay.
But only 1 in 10 K-12 teachers work outside of their school district.
Teachers feel pressure to supplement their income
Jason Crighton, a 16-year veteran middle and high school family and consumer sciences teacher for the Freeport Area public schools in Pennsylvania, is one of them. Crighton makes about $90,000 a year as a teacher, and $24 to $50 an hour as an electrician, which has allowed him to add $10,000 to $20,000 a year to his salary.
“I was getting to the point right before COVID that I felt like I didn’t have to do it to be able to pay the bills and support my family, but then I had a kid and the price of everything went up,” Crighton said. His wife also works as a hairstylist, but their combined salaries weren’t enough to make ends meet.
Crighton, who comes from a family of construction workers, said he always wanted to be a teacher but started doing electrical work with his father while working his way through college. Sixteen years into teaching, Crighton still does electrical work full time in the summers and freelance on weekends or on-call during the school year.
“As an almost 40-year-old, I would gladly stop doing manual labor tomorrow if I didn’t feel like I had to supplement my income,” he said.
Cox, the Boston-area teacher, started delivering for DoorDash during the pandemic, as a way to supplement her income while keeping her infant son with her.
Additional jobs add to teachers’ already full plates. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, which has analyzed teacher contracts, nearly 9 in 10 teachers in the nation’s largest school districts report that their teaching workload creeps up, from 41 to more 80 hours a week, once they take into account lesson planning, grading, and other non-instructional work.
Cox said she typically wakes at 5 a.m. to dress and feed her son, work on nutrition plans for her fitness training clients, and prepare for class. She squeezes in virtual fitness training during her lunch break. After school, she picks up her son and chats with him as she makes DoorDash deliveries, then puts him to bed and stays up until 11 p.m. or midnight to work on lesson plans.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled from multiple directions,” she said. “Time management and having a plan really, really helps. I’m trying to be the ultimate multitasker. I have no choice. It’s rough out here.”
Staying in the “education wheelhouse” also can ease the transition between teaching and outside work, according to Demetria Richardson, a 26-year veteran 2nd grade teacher at Henry Walsh III Elementary School in Richmond, Va. In addition to classroom teaching, she teaches adult education classes on nights, weekends, and during the summers.
“I know sometimes we take part-time jobs working at the grocery store or things like that, but it can be more taxing and stressful to deal with that kind of job and to come back into a school and work with students,” Richardson said.
Building on teaching knowledge
Most teachers get extra work within the district, from after-school tutoring and extracurricular coaching or advising to curricular development or administrative work, Redding and his colleagues found.
Crighton said the number of teachers who take on additional work in general has risen steadily since the pandemic, and a majority at his school now have at least one additional job. He advised teachers to “cultivate friendships with people who do work that’s interesting to you.”
Working as an electrician has also given Crighton broader perspective for students in his career-readiness course.
“I tell my students, I grew up in the generation where everyone was expected to go to college,” he said, but “you should match your education to your job, and there are a lot of jobs out there—where you can make good money and have good quality work—that don’t require a college education.”
However, the study found secondary teachers and those in science, math, and technology subjects are also more likely to have additional jobs, in part because of more outside job opportunities in STEM fields.
Richardson started teaching computer science to adult learners in 2007 during a state salary freeze. She now teaches adult classes online or in person for two hours a night, two to three nights a week, and four hours on weekends. In the summers, she spends about 50-60 hours a week training teachers around the state in implementing computer science courses.
All told, the additional teaching adds another $10,000 to $12,000 a year to her $75,000 annual teaching salary.
Building work-friendly district policies
District policies generally don’t prevent teachers from picking up outside work unless it affects their classroom performance, but also don’t give much guidance for teachers who do need to work outside of class.
Richardson said taking outside work is “kind of frowned upon,” but that doesn’t stop many of her colleagues from doing so: “If you do have an outside job, you just don’t tell.”
As an almost 40-year-old, I would gladly stop doing manual labor tomorrow if I didn't feel like I had to supplement my income.
Administrators can think about how to use teachers’ appetite for additional work strategically, Redding said. They can set rules for employees working outside their primary job responsibilities, and use district-provided work opportunities as a retention tool.
“Lots of teachers are going to be seeking out additional employment,” Redding said. “Districts should be thinking carefully about how decisions are being made to make [in-district second jobs] more available for beginning teachers.”
Teachers who found extra work in school had lower turnover rates than those without a second job, he found, while teachers with outside jobs were more likely to leave the classroom. Teachers in their first two years in the classroom, in particular, were both more likely to pick up additional work and to work outside the district—probably because of low starting salaries, and also because proportionately fewer at that age have child care responsibilities.
Most teachers in other surveys also say that higher salaries that keep pace with inflation would help keep them in the classroom, and prefer that form of compensation to bonuses or other improved benefits. But such raises are costly for cash-strapped districts.
Cox advises teachers to plan how to manage time and goals for their additional work.
“Whether it’s ‘I’m going to be doing this for six months,’ or ‘I want to be doing this until I reach this amount of money,’” she said, “make sure you have a plan so that you’re not feeling like you’re doing it without the vision of what you’re doing it for.”
