With schools in East Falmouth, Mass., closed for a few days thanks to a late February blizzard, Natalia Berrios tutored students in reading across six different states and taught English as a second language classes online, all while she kept an eye on her own kids—ages 7, 10, and 13—making the most of the nearly three feet of snowfall on their day off.
“I don’t have a lot of family help,” Berrios said, “If I did not work from home and have these little breaks throughout the day where I can feed them, check in with them, and make sure they’re keeping busy, then ... I don’t know what we’d do with them on a snow day.”
Berrios is one of a growing cadre of teachers moving to online instruction and away from an education workplace they say is far less family-friendly than popular perception. They mirror broader trends in the growing popularity of telework.
K-12 teachers face significantly less flexibility and more work intrusions into their personal lives, such as availability outside of contract hours, than do other similarly educated professionals, according to data from the research think tank RAND Corp.
Berrios started out as a classroom teacher a decade ago, but for the past six years—since her youngest child was an infant—working from home has been “pretty nonnegotiable.”
She works roughly 25 hours a week for Ignite Reading, a multistate virtual tutoring program, and another 10-15 hours a week teaching English as a second language independently, making roughly $55,000 a year. That’s lower than the average annual teacher salary in her state of more than $90,000 but a bit above the average starting salary of $53,000. And in a region where teachers can spend an hour to 90 minutes a day commuting, the time and money saved by working from home can make virtual teaching tempting, particularly for teachers with young children of their own.
Young mothers who are teachers, in particular, report significantly more stress and burnout risk than their peers without children. They spend, on average, 40 hours a week on chores and caregiving on top of teaching and other education work, RAND found—the equivalent of a second job, and 10 hours more on average than teachers who are fathers, RAND found. Schools’ strict daily schedules and broad requirements for teacher availability can limit teachers’ flexibility to manage these family responsibilities.
“Women historically and typically report spending more time on household and caregiving duties than men, but these differences are much larger than expected for teachers,” said Elizabeth Steiner, lead author of a 2025 RAND study of teacher work-life balance. “And we did find job flexibility matters for teachers’ well-being and retention.”
Online, the flexibility of “just not having to spend the time, effort, and money to have a job outside of the home and also deal with everything inside of the home that I need to do,” Berrios said. “That’s really the biggest thing right now, with having kids.”
Building one-on-one connections with students is ‘pretty remarkable’
Berrios typically greets her first student of the day from Massachusetts at 8:15 a.m. and then works with two more students back-to-back from Florida and Georgia before 9 a.m.
After her morning lessons, Berrios monitors other tutoring sessions, helping other teachers with tech support and student data, and sometimes steps in to teach if a colleague is late for a session.
“There could be hundreds of sessions going on at a time, but I might be watching 30 or 40 and only need to jump into maybe three or four,” she said. Berrios also continues to tutor other students throughout the day in different time zones, and sometimes, she picks up evening shifts to help students on the West Coast.
The intensity of the lessons makes up for the challenge of engaging students in an online format, Berrios said. “Reading is hard, and so it can be frustrating, but it’s only 15-minute blocks, so the different activities are very short, and I have little reward systems built in,” she said.
While she doesn’t have much direct contact with her students’ main classroom teachers, Berrios does get a virtual window into many physical classrooms during her virtual tutoring.
“I can see that there’s not a lot of help and that the teachers are struggling for more help in the classrooms,” she said. “And if the teachers are struggling a little more, it can be a little harder for the students as well, because there’s so much more going on in the classroom, it’s a little more difficult to focus. So it becomes obviously a larger issue.”
Due, in part, to those observations, Berrios said she is less inclined to return to in-person instruction once her children grow up, unless she could find local teaching that is as personalized and flexible as the online teaching she is doing now.
“I get to build a one-on-one connection with the kids and ... see the progress from the beginning of the school year to the end, which is pretty remarkable,” Berrios said.
