More than half of all teachers in the U.S. are working without pay, and the number of Americans who are working part-time or unemployed has reached record levels, according to a new report.
More than 4.4 million teachers have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2017, according the report released Monday by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The average teacher lost an average of 6.5 months’ pay last year, the report said.
The most common reasons for teacher unemployment include leaving a job that is too demanding, leaving school to take care of family responsibilities or becoming underemployed, the analysis found.
The report was conducted by the Center for Workforce Education, a nonprofit research organization based in Philadelphia that is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The analysis included more than 200,000 teachers across the country and was based on responses from a representative sample of teachers and their schools.
The study found that more than half (54 percent) of all the teachers who were unemployed were working part time or on temporary contracts.
Only one in four (24 percent) were working full-time.
More than a quarter of the teachers surveyed were working more than 20 hours per week, compared to 14 percent of the general population.
The survey also found that the number working part or full time declined to just under 7 million teachers last year from 10 million in 2016.
In 2018, there were nearly 5 million full- and part-timers, the most since 2009.
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