Second jobs are fun! Right?
Oh, those overpaid teachers. They get their college degrees and they go out and get jobs educating our nation's children and hearing all the time about how lucky they are to have that big summer vacation that people don't seem to understand is unpaid, and life is cushy, right? So cushy, in fact, that the number of teachers working second jobs is rising, from about 11 percent in 1981 to about 20 percent now. That's nationally.
In Texas, for example, the percentage of teachers who moonlight has increased from 22 percent in 1980 to 41 percent in 2010. [...]
In North Carolina, a survey conducted in 2007 found 72 percent of teachers moonlight, whether it's an after-school job or summer employment.
Summer employment is a different thing. That may be two jobs in the course of the year, but at least it's just one job at a time. Too many teachers, though, are being forced to go from their job teaching—a challenging, exhausting, and important job—to hours more work in the evenings or on weekends or both, to make ends meet. The AP's Christine Armario talked to middle school history teacher Wade Brosz, of Florida, who works as a personal trainer three nights a week. Michelle Hartman, a Florida elementary school teacher, works as a church organist and a janitor. Albert Ochoa, a Texas middle school teacher, works five hours a night at UPS.
Another thing proponents of the "teachers are overpaid" theory always conveniently forget is that the job of teaching doesn't stop when the bell rings at the end of the day. So if a teacher goes from school to UPS or to clean an office, when do they grade tests and papers or plan lessons? "One study on teachers who moonlight in Texas cited the case of a teacher who ended up grading papers at the restaurant where she worked." It's not just that, either. Those second jobs make themselves felt during the day, too, as "a majority said moonlighting was detrimental to their work in the classroom."
Doubtless the authors of the recent Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute report claiming teachers are overpaid because they're stupid would take the view that a really smart person could support a family on the already-bloated salary of a teacher. In the real world, when 20 percent of the teachers in a country need to work second jobs to make ends meet, that's pretty solid evidence that country not only doesn't care about its teachers, it's not investing in education.