What Are Good Jobs In Education Outside Of The Classroom? A Teacher’s Real Guide
The rain streaked the window of our local coffee shop last month, and my sister Lainey pushed a crumpled, coffee-stained 4th grade lesson plan across the table to me. She’d just turned in her notice that morning, and her hands were still shaking a little. “Everyone keeps asking what I’m going to do instead,” she said, stirring her oat latte so hard it sloshed over the edge. “Like if I’m not standing in a classroom every day, I must be leaving education entirely. But I don’t want to leave. I just don’t want to be in the room all day, every day.”
I left my 8th grade English classroom five years ago for a non-classroom education role, so I get the confusion. Most people outside of schools only see the classroom teachers that work directly with their kids every day, but there’s a huge range of education-focused jobs that keep the whole system running, and let people who love education work in ways that fit their lives. I walked Lainey through the roles I’ve seen former colleagues take that still count as education, just with different boundaries and priorities.
One of the most common shifts I see for former special education teachers is independent IEP advocacy. My old coworker Sarah, who taught 7th grade special ed for 12 years, does this now. She charges families a sliding scale fee, meets them at their kitchen tables or over Zoom, helps them organize their concerns before IEP meetings, and walks them through what their school district is required to provide by law. She told me the best part of the job is that she only focuses on one family at a time, instead of juggling 32 IEPs, lesson plans, and daily behavior interventions all at once. She works 30 hours a week instead of 55, and she hasn’t graded a paper at 9pm on a Sunday in three years.
For teachers who love developing learning experiences but don’t want daily whole-group instruction, museum or zoo education coordination is another popular fit. My friend Jake, who was a high school biology teacher for 10 years, now runs youth programs at our city’s zoo. He develops overnight camp curricula for middle schoolers, trains volunteer docents to lead school field trips, and gets to talk about animal adaptations standing in front of the giraffe exhibit instead of a whiteboard. He still works with kids, but only when the kids are there because they want to be, not because they’re required to show up for class. The constant behavior management that drained him? It’s almost non-existent now.
I work as a curriculum writer for a nonprofit that creates free learning materials for after-school programs, and that’s another path that uses the skills teachers already build in the classroom. I write reading lessons for kids learning English as a second language, I test out activity ideas with my neighbor’s kids once a month, and I still get to build things that help kids learn. That’s the whole reason I got into education in the first place. I just don’t have to answer 50+ parent emails after dinner or deal with last-minute schedule changes for standardized testing every spring.
The biggest myth I’ve encountered is that leaving the classroom means abandoning education. Lainey told me she felt guilty for months before turning in her notice, like she was wasting her teaching degree and letting her kids down. But the truth is, all of these non-classroom roles support kids far more than most people realize. If a burnt out teacher leaves the classroom to do work that lets them stay engaged with education without draining them, that’s a win for everyone. A great IEP advocate can help dozens of kids get access to services they would have missed otherwise. A great curriculum writer can create materials that reach thousands of kids across the country. That matters just as much as leading a daily class.
If you’re a teacher thinking about making a shift, the first concrete step I recommend is pulling out a notebook and writing down just three things: the three parts of your current job that make you lose track of time, and the three parts that make you want to leave early on a Friday. For Lainey, her favorite list was: helping parents break down confusing education jargon, working one-on-one with kids who struggle with reading, and problem-solving for kids who don’t fit the standard classroom mold. Her least favorite list was: grading 28 spelling tests every Friday, morning drop-off chaos, and constant unplanned policy shifts that don’t actually help kids. That exercise made it clear pretty quickly that IEP advocacy was a good fit, because it checked all of her favorite boxes and none of the draining ones.
The next step is to reach out to one person a week with a job you’re curious about, and ask for 15 minutes of their time to talk about what their day actually looks like. Most people in non-classroom education roles are former teachers, so they’re happy to help. Lainey connected with a local advocate through our state teachers’ association, met her for coffee, and learned she only needed a 6-week online certification course that cost $300 to get started. She’s staying in her current role part-time this semester while she builds her client list, so she doesn’t have to take a huge pay cut right away.
Lainey just got her first three clients last week. She met one of them at this same coffee shop, helped them write down their concerns for their 7-year-old’s upcoming IEP meeting, and said it felt good—like she was still doing the work she cared about, just without the extra weight that was breaking her. We don’t know how it will go long term. She might decide to go back to the classroom in a few years, or she might shift to another role down the line. That’s okay. Education doesn’t only happen between the four walls of a classroom, and it doesn’t only look like one job.
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