What Are Good Education Jobs Outside of the Classroom? A Teacher’s Real Breakdown
Last month, I stood in my brother-in-law’s backyard at a family barbecue, swatting mosquitos away from my plate of potato salad, when my cousin Lila leaned against the fence next to me and twisted the label off her lime seltzer. She picked at a loose splinter on the rail, then said she’d spent her prep period covering a class for a sick coworker that day, then stayed an hour late filling out incident reports after two 4th graders got in a fight over a fidget spinner. She’s been teaching seven years. “I love working with kids,” she said, staring at the charcoal grill where the burgers were burning. “But I don’t know if I can do this classroom thing for another 20 years. I don’t want to leave education entirely, though. What else is there even?”
By the end of the barbecue, half a dozen current and former teachers had wandered over to weigh in, all of them asking the same question. It’s a question I get all the time: from burnt-out classroom teachers, from parents with education degrees looking to re-enter the workforce, from new grads who don’t want to lead a full class right away. There are way more education jobs outside the four walls of a classroom than most people think, and I’ve gotten to see most of them up close through friends and former coworkers.
Mia, who I student taught with back in college, was a high school biology teacher for 10 years. She always loved designing hands-on lessons—she even built a whole school garden for her students to test soil samples and grow native plants—but she got sick of grading 180 lab reports every two weeks and dealing with admin breathing down her neck about standardized test scores. Five years ago, she took a job as an instructional designer for a non-profit that makes free K-12 science curriculum for public schools. Her days now are split between testing new lessons in a handful of local classrooms, meeting with teachers to hear what’s not working, and revising activities to fit the needs of kids with different learning styles. She doesn’t have a homeroom of her own, and she’s never had to answer a parent email at 9pm. She still gets to work on the part of education that drew her in the first place: making learning feel fun, instead of just another box to check.
Raj, my old coworker from when I taught middle school, left the classroom three years ago to be a student support coordinator for our local district. He still works in public education, keeps his same pension and benefits, which was a non-negotiable for him with two kids in college. His job is to coordinate after-school programs across 12 elementary and middle schools, and check in on kids who’ve had repeated disciplinary referrals to connect them with counseling or other support. Last year, he helped launch a free weekend snack program for kids who don’t have access to enough food when school’s closed. He still sees kids every week, but he doesn’t have to plan daily lessons or grade stacks of math homework. He told me last month that the best part of his job is that he gets to fix problems instead of just working around them.
Sarah, a former elementary art teacher I know, left the classroom 10 years ago to run school programs at our city’s natural history museum. She develops field trip itineraries for visiting classes, trains volunteer docents, and leads weekend workshops for homeschool groups and kids with disabilities. She gets to interact with hundreds of different kids every month, but she goes home at 4pm sharp and rarely checks work emails on the weekend. Last spring, she told me she got to lead a hands-on fossil dig for a class of 2nd graders who’d never been to a museum before. That moment was the whole job for her, and she didn’t have to hang 30 different lopsided clay art projects on the cafeteria wall after that.
Kara, a former special ed teacher I went to grad school with, got burnt out after 8 years of carrying a caseload of 22 kids, way over the legal recommended limit. She now works as an IEP advocate for families of kids with disabilities through a local non-profit. She knows the special education system from the inside, so she helps parents prepare for IEP meetings, understand what services their kid is entitled to, and push back when districts try to cut necessary support. She sees a handful of families a week, sets her own schedule around her kid’s therapy appointments, and still gets to directly help kids who need it most. She didn’t even have to go back to school for a new degree—she just got a short state certification that took three months of night classes.
A lot of people assume if you leave the classroom, you have to leave education entirely, or start over with a whole new career. That’s just not true. Most of these jobs rely on the skills you already have if you’ve worked in education or have an education degree: knowing how kids learn, how schools operate, how to talk to parents and teachers. Lila had no idea that her experience building her school’s early literacy intervention program made her a perfect candidate for a district-level literacy coordinator role, posted right on the district job board she’d never even bothered to scroll through.
If you’re curious about what’s out there, there are three small, low-effort things you can do this week to start. First, pull up your local school district’s job board and filter for “non-instructional” roles. Districts hire for all kinds of education roles that don’t require standing in front of a class every day: curriculum coaches, assessment specialists, program coordinators, family engagement liaisons. Most of them still come with the same benefits and pension you’d get as a classroom teacher. Second, find one person on LinkedIn who has a job that sounds interesting, and send them a short message asking for 15 minutes of their time to chat about what a regular day looks like. Almost every former teacher I know is happy to talk—we’ve all been stuck, and we all want to help. Third, check job boards for local non-profits and cultural institutions like museums or youth clubs—they almost always prioritize hiring people who already have experience working with kids and schools.
I talked to Lila a week ago, and she’d just finished putting in her application for that early literacy coordinator role. She hasn’t heard back yet, and she’s still nervous about leaving the classroom she’s worked in for seven years. But she said just putting the application in made her feel like she doesn’t have to stay stuck in a job that’s draining her, just because she has an education degree. There’s more than one way to work with kids and love what you do in education, you just have to look past the classroom door.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Are Good Education Jobs Outside of the Classroom