A teacher helps a student review for her geometry final at Northridge High School in Greeley, Colorado.
Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty
Classes have ended for the summer at public schools across the United States, but a sizable share of teachers are still hard at work at second jobs outside the classroom.
Among all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the U.S., 16% worked non-school summer jobs in the break before the 2015-16 school year. Notably, about the same share of teachers (18%) had second jobs during the 2015-16 school year, too, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This makes teachers about three times as likely as U.S. workers overall to balance multiple jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (Multiple jobholders have made up a small but steady portion of the U.S. labor force since 1970.)
On average, a teacher’s summer job earnings account for 7% of their total annual income, according to the NCES data. Earnings from a second job during the school year make up an average of 9% of their […]
Not sure why this is news. From 1955 to 1974 my dad was an elementary school teacher Not just he, but nearly every other male teacher I knew had a summer job (he worked as a seasonal park ranger and as a tour guide at Hoover Dam). He also worked some Christmas vacations as a department store Santa Claus. Indeed, according to the statistics in the article, it sounds to me like fewer teachers are working summer jobs than when he was teaching. I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t be paid more. But I’m unsure that this is a new phenomenon or a newly-emergent crisis.
It’s news because Pew published hard data. As to your dad, what you are saying is what I have been saying for years, public education in the United States is in a crisis state. The student performance outcome data make that very clear. And now there is long suspected but now firmly established information on the situation of teachers.