Hordes of teachers are trading their school lanyards in for other uniforms in the evenings, weekends, and summers to side hustle, or “moonlight,” as they say.
Moonlighting sounds elegant and romantic and nothing like the reality of wolfing down three melty granola bars in your Honda, muscling through the afterschool traffic in order to be on time to check out people’s groceries.
A study reported that over 58 percent of teachers took on some sort of additional income opportunity, whether at school or outside of it.
So why are over half of our teachers side hustling?
Teachers side hustle to supplement low pay
Teaching was listed among the top five careers for millionaires in a 2018 study by Ramsey Solutions. Yet teachers are also joining janitorial staff after school, working retail and driving for Lyft to make ends meet.
So which is it? Are teachers potential millionaires or just scraping by?
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has tracked teacher incomes along wages of other comparable professionals and found a gap– a gap that is widening– that they call the teacher wage gap.
The distance between these wage comparisons is stretching. By 2018, teachers were earning about 21 percent less than comparable workers.
And in another way to think of it, teachers could still be dealing with amounts of student debt similar to other professionals, but with less power to chip away at it.
The EPI also found that average weekly wages of public school teachers had not risen since 1996. Which means I was earning the same amount, two decades later, in a time period with a higher cost of living, than my sweet first grade teacher. The difference between us is largely that she had a rad holiday-themed vest collection, more purchasing power, and probably less student debt.
Meanwhile, as a modern, highly-educated teacher, I had no cache of festive vests to warm and comfort me in my inflationary circumstances.
Teachers face pressures to fund the job out-of-pocket
It’s early August, so your clothes are suctioned to the back of your thighs a bit too chummily, but you’re excited and curious to see your new classroom. You jostle and jiggle the key in the lock, getting a feel for this new entrance, giving the door an abrupt shove open.
You flick on a blinking bank of fluorescents to reveal a jumble of desks piled in the corner, legs pointed up, down and sideways like a dishwasher loaded by forest animals. The bulletin boards are faded but peeled clean, save for the stray staple or paper scrap loosely hanging. The cabinets hold thick stacks of Reagan-era textbooks and, in the furthest, darkest corners, a squad of insects of questionable sentience. At the teacher desk sits a humble assortment of essentials: an unplugged landline phone, a three-hole punch with an arm that creaks for every push, a sand-weight tape dispenser, and dusty reams of printer paper, if you’re lucky.
Welcome to the place you’ll be spending the most of your time the next ten months. For the length of a full-term pregnancy, you can attempt to transform this barren crater of soul-sucking banality into an inspirational refuge of learning.
(But that involves cash, sweat, and each of those things in robust quantities.)
One survey found that 99 percent of teachers shelled out personal funds for school-related purchases.
(The remaining one percent taught Study Hall.)
The survey indicated that teachers felt compelled to provide an “excellent learning experience” to their students, regardless of cost.
I’ll be honest and estimate that part of this is legitimately a response to the sky-high expectations teachers are held to, and part is because of shiny object syndrome within the teacher community.
Teaching to impossible expectations
Teachers are expected to grow their students’ levels significantly, regardless of their complex situations and in particular because of their complex situations. We are expected to help each student make a year’s worth of growth, and also to catch up those behind, so sometimes that’s more like three years of growth. We’re expected to use best practices and the latest technology and social emotional learning and to make everything super ENGAGING! (Sorry, that’s the way speakers at conferences say it, always in all caps) and it is really headscratchingly difficult to attempt all of that with just a whiteboard and some paper.
Keeping up with the pretty classrooms
We now have Instagram to take a peek inside each other’s classrooms, at perfectly curated and themed decorations and trendy signage and cute lamps, etc. I don’t think we fully realize the impact of having regular access to these comparisons. In some ways, Mrs. Smith teaching first grade in an unairconditioned classroom in 1963 had it better because at least she wasn’t subject to sudden feelings of inadequacy inflicted by the Teachergram.
I’ve heard teachers say they want their classrooms to be like home for the students, especially for students who don’t have a great home life. I’ve felt that before, but that’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself, and a bit mistrusting of parents. Plus, it gets expensive.
Teachers spent an average of $478 on their classrooms, not reimbursed, in the 2015-2015 school year. I can only imagine what the average is close to now.
Teaching consists of skills also used in starting a business
Teachers are like the mayors of their own little towns, the CEOs of their companies (minus the CEO salaries, of course). In addition to their other tasks, they manage several groups of stakeholders, including the students, the parents and caregivers, and any staff or admin involved in their classroom.
I know I said CEO, but it’s more like teachers are the CEO, manager, receptionist, customer service rep and janitor rolled into one– whatever that all-encompassing position may be. Educators regularly juggle a wide-ranging swath of tasks from administrative and data work to planning to connecting with students and families.
All of these skills transfer well to building a business, so to me, it’s not an improbable leap from teaching to self-employment.
I actually think skilled teachers are ideally poised for starting their own businesses, whether through contract work or selling a product. The amount of planning and adept execution of tasks and self-motivation needed to run a thriving classroom can transfer to self-employment.
That’s a part of why, I think, we’re seeing so many educators (now more popularly called teacherpreneurs) side hustle and start their own businesses. They’ve already got the skills.
Educators are likely passionate creatives
Just as teaching lends itself well to starting a business, the profession also attracts plenty of creative, talented, passionate individuals with expertise outside of education.
Having a proficiency outside of the field is a great basis for branching out and earning extra income tied to that interest.
A food and gardening blogger recently halted my flinching finger from scrolling on through posts. Her Instagram photos of cakes that somehow were decorated like idyllic, fantasy world gardens with edible flowers and mosses and toad stools sat glowing on my feed. The blogger was a teacher when she started Must Love Herbs, a beautiful intersection of food, plants and her Appalachian heritage. Her website reveals that she offers food photography and recipe testing services.
My own blog has grown out of a passion and training in writing. I started Chocolate for the Teach while teaching, so I didn’t have much time to dedicate to it. But I somehow kept the account on life support through the years to resume and dust off once I finally quit.
My theory is that education is a magnet, drawing participants willing or unwilling, to creative people.
Think of all of the English and journalism and poetry majors that didn’t write novels or lucrative articles or award-winning poetry. (Life has a way of getting expensive before these things can be done.) Did they end up in the classroom?
The trope of the English degreed lover of words holed up in a stuffy Honors English room by day, typing his next great American novel by night is more than a fiction. Stephen King did just that.
The combination of teaching being an easy-to-enter job (some schools just require obtaining a certificate) as well as being, by nature, a creative profession, is something of a perfect storm for Liberal Arts graduates desperate to pay their bills.
Teachers are planning their exits
In an illuminating 2023 article on teachers-turned-Airbnb hosts, CBS News Baltimore reports that teachers are “five times more likely than other full-time employees to have another gig.”
Teachers take on side hustles to make ends meet or as an outlet for creativity, but I think another reason is this: teachers are building their exit ramps.
The challenges of teaching have been studied– those who work in K-12 education report a burnout rate higher than any other industry in the U.S.
Miserable teachers can use a side gig as an experiment to see if that change is right. They can work on building a business while teaching until that business is earning enough. They can hustle on the side to oget their feet in the door somewhere else.
Tutoring is my favorite cushion for the teacher that plans to leave. Generally, teachers already have the skills necessary for the gig, and it can bring in good earnings. The job can be a bridge to some other profession or adjusted to accommodate a full-time load. That’s one of the beauties of self-employment.
The side hustle as a fixture of U.S. teacherdom
As depicted in the based-on-a-true-story film, Freedom Writers, high school teacher Erin Gruwell sold bras in a department store to help pay for classroom supplies.
My friend used to joke that his weekend gig as a real estate agent funded his “hobby” of teaching second grade.
The teacher stories and statistics, as well as my own experiences with side gigs point to some concerning trends within the profession of teaching and our education system.
For now, I guess I’ll say you shouldn’t be surprised to see Mr. Brown outside the classroom, taking dinner orders or shuttling you around in a rideshare.
