Re-envisioning the Teacher-Coach

Key Takeaways:

• Men are underrepresented in teaching (23% of all teachers) but overrepresented among teacher-coaches (56% of all teacher-coaches). Lifting up coaching as a valued pathway into the profession could be one of the most practical strategies for male teacher recruitment.
• There are fewer male teacher-coaches today than 20 years ago, and about half of school coaches are now non-teachers.
• Coaching stipends are low: $2–14 per hour, compared to $40–66 for classroom teaching.
• Teacher-coaches are valuable in the classroom and on the field.
• Three policy approaches could help, all building on infrastructure that already exists:
  • “Extra for extra” – bringing stipends for afterschool activities more in line with hours worked in the classroom
  • Job redesign – making coaching part of the teaching assignment, not just an add-on
  • Perception shift – treating coaching and extracurricular leadership as serious professional work, and recruiting accordingly
• These lessons apply beyond athletics — to band, theater, debate, and other intensive extracurricular roles — and to women as well as men.

Introduction:

Men make up just 23% of K-12 teachers in the United States and remain sharply underrepresented across the profession. Only a handful of state and local policies have sought to systematically address this gap. 

And yet one of the clearest recruitment channels exists in plain sight: extracurricular leadership, especially coaching. While men are less than a quarter of public school teachers, they are more than half of public school teacher-coaches. Many men who enter and remain in teaching are drawn, at least in part, by athletics and other student-facing roles beyond the classroom. 31% of male teachers coach sports, compared to 7% of female teachers. And 62% of male teachers said that opportunities to be involved in sports were important for their career decision. For many men, especially former athletes, the extracurricular role is clearly an important on-ramp to the profession.

The Teacher-Coach Today: Central, but Sidelined

The teacher-coach has long occupied an awkward place in American schools: relied on, but rarely treated as a key function. Schools routinely hire for coaching capacity and depend on it for student engagement and school culture, yet compensate and schedule the work as an afterthought. Many schools, educators and families highly value these professionals, but the role is also shaped by stereotypes that the teacher who coaches is less academically serious, or somehow secondary to the “real” work of instruction. Schools need strong classroom teachers and adults who build relationships with students outside class. A well-designed teacher-coach role can do both.

While sports coaching is our main example, the same logic applies across a wider range of extracurricular roles — band, theater, debate, robotics. Professionalizing and better supporting this work could strengthen a pathway into teaching for some men while creating more viable opportunities for women and others to take on leadership roles beyond the classroom.

The value of the teacher-coach

In the classroom: There is a long-standing concern that coaching detracts from classroom teaching. Literature documents time pressures: teacher-coaches work more during season and may reduce their teaching preparation during that time. But the only rigorous study of actual student outcomes tells a different story. Egalite, Bowen, and Trivitt analyzed seven years of Florida administrative data and found no significant difference in math or reading achievement when students were assigned to teacher-coaches versus non-coaching teachers. Teacher-coaches face real time pressures, but it doesn’t appear that this split impacts student outcomes, though we should continue to study it. 

On the field: Teacher-coaches appear to bring something to the coaching role that community coaches often lack. The National Coach Survey found that teacher-coaches reported significantly greater confidence supporting student-athletes experiencing mental health challenges than non-teacher coaches. As schools increasingly rely on coaches without backgrounds in education or child development, that gap matters.

Beyond both: The value of the teacher-coach may be less about either role in isolation and more about what happens between them. Kraft, Bolves, and Hurd find that one of the most important ways school personnel affect students’ long-run outcomes is through relationships that form outside their traditional roles and responsibilities — the kind of mentoring relationship teacher-coaches are positioned to build. Their study estimates that informal mentoring by teachers, coaches, and counselors increases college attendance by 9.4 percentage points, with the largest effects for low-income students. These relationships depend on daily proximity and trust built across multiple contexts.

Teacher-coaching is declining among men

Despite its value, the teacher-coach model appears to be weakening. In the 2022 National Coach Survey, only half of school-based coaches reported being teachers in the school where they coached, and in Ohio, one recent study found that 70% of school coaches were not licensed teachers. The absolute number of teacher-coaches has declined, as shown in the figure below. 

An important nuance here is that male teachers should not be expected to coach. Many do not want coaching responsibilities, and schools should not turn this into a gendered expectation of “we have a male teacher, so he has to coach”. But the fact is, coaching remains a powerful draw into teaching for many men, and making it more visible and sustainable could help make these roles more appealing to women as well. 

Directions for Policy and Practice

If coaching and extracurricular activities are a means to attract and retain male educators, schools should take more seriously how that work is structured, and supported. We propose testing three policy directions that treat coaching and similar roles as a more intentional part of the profession.

Pay reform: extra for extra  

The most immediate reform is bringing coaching compensation more in line with actual hours worked. These changes would work largely within existing structures but treat the work as professional labor and a more highly valued part of the job. 

The scale of the gap is not widely understood, in part because no national dataset on coaching compensation exists. The figure below is compiled from a sample of public district compensation manuals across regions and district sizes and should be treated as illustrative.

The legal backdrop compounds the problem. A 2018 Department of Labor opinion letter confirmed that coaches qualify for the FLSA “teacher exemption,” meaning they are exempt from minimum wage and overtime protections. Several reform models have emerged at the state-level:

• New York City pays teacher-coaches through the UFT-negotiated “per session” system at $63.04 per hour, with a set number of sessions. NYC also restricts Public School Athletic League coaching to “certified teachers, pupil personnel providers, or supervisors”. This model, built through union bargaining, shows that coaching can be compensated at something closer to parity, even if the official hour allotments likely understate the time many coaches actually spend.
• Chicago’s 2024-2028 CTU contract increased coaching compensation and reworked stipend structures.
• New Mexico’s SB 490 2023 proposed a one-time bonus to coaches of $5,000, but it did not pass. 
• North Carolina proposed a compensation floor in the 2025-2026 legislative session. SB 657/HB 937 would establish a $3,000 minimum for teacher-coaches funded through sports betting revenue.
• Florida’s SB 538 passed the legislature in 2026 and moved decision-making on coach pay to the district-level. The final bill gives permission to pay more, but no obligation and no funding. The introduced bill included minimum-wage-based floors for high-hour coaches and extracurricular leaders; those provisions were stripped.

Of course, pay reform costs money. If districts compensated 300-400 hours of coaching at something close to the teacher hourly rate, the cost would rise – roughly $10,000-$20,000 per coach per season. For a district with 30-40 coaching positions, that could mean $300,000-$800,000 in additional spending. While this would be an additional investment, it is likely to make a big difference for teachers, coaches and students.

Integrating Roles More Closely

A more structural approach is to make coaching or other intensive extracurricular leadership part of the teaching assignment itself, not just an add-on. Schools already do this for other responsibilities. Department chairs teach reduced loads. Instructional coaches split time between their own classrooms and peer support. Deans of students carry lighter teaching loads to handle student affairs. Athletic directors often do as well. We have models of split-roles/time relief, but it hasn’t been systematically tried for standard coaching or extracurricular leadership. This pathway might be particularly effective, since there is research showing that teacher-coaches’ top choice among incentives to recruit and retain teachers as coaches would be time compensation (reduced duties or fewer supervision assignments).

Restructuring teacher-coach roles will require careful implementation. Much of coaching is after school, and release time will not work for every coach or every season. Districts would need to decide which roles qualify, how much time they receive, and how to cover the resulting staffing costs. Collective bargaining agreements may also need to change, since coaching is generally classified as supplemental work outside the core contract. 

Still, more integrated models are possible, and we should experiment. The exact structure would vary by school, district and union. In some cases, that could mean teaching three sections instead of five during the season; in others, it could mean a lighter load of non-instructional duties or a schedule that shifts more teaching into the off-season. Coverage could come through team-teaching, strategic use of long-term substitutes, or other forms of schedule balancing. Many forms of extracurricular leadership are substantial enough to justify compensation through time and role design, not stipend alone. 

There are a few examples of creative role redesign in other types of shared roles we may be able to learn from:

• Iowa’s Teacher Leadership and Compensation system created formal teacher-leadership roles with reduced teaching loads tied to mentoring, co-teaching, and peer-observation. 
• Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture has done something similar through Multi-Classroom Leader roles that combine direct teaching with broader leadership responsibilities, while using staffing redesign to limit the budget impact.
• Private schools have long relied on teacher-mentor-coach roles that incorporate broader student life into a single educator role.
• Roles like department chair and athletic director often are blended between teaching and other duties; there are models for splitting roles already at many schools.

A related possibility involves Career and Technical Education, a field facing acute teacher shortages nationwide, with two-thirds of states reporting vacancies in at least one specialty. The problem is especially pronounced in rural and small districts, where specialized programs may not generate enough enrollment to justify a full-time position – and where losing one teacher can mean canceling a course entirely. Pairing a partial CTE teaching load with coaching could make some positions more viable and more attractive, especially for career changers or former athletes entering through other credentialing pathways. CTE also has a dedicated federal funding stream for the instruction side via Perkins V that might make integrated positions easier to sustain.

Positive Framing in Recruitment 

A third approach is recruitment and positioning. Districts and preparation programs should be more explicit that teaching can include coaching and other extracurricular leadership. For many prospective teachers, that is part of the draw. Recruitment materials, residencies, and alternative pathways should say so plainly: this profession includes the chance to teach, mentor, coach, and shape students’ lives beyond the classroom. Public job postings already hint at this; Abilene ISD, for example, explicitly frames their teaching roles as “Teacher/Coach“. 

But messaging should not outrun reality. Schools should absolutely say that teaching can include coaching and other extracurricular leadership. But that message is much stronger when those roles are supported in practice with meaningful time, pay, and professional respect.

Where to Start

Schools and states do not need to pursue every reform at once. A practical starting point would be to test one or more of these approaches in a small number of willing systems: higher stipends for hard-to-fill roles, a limited number of split-assignment positions, and more explicit recruitment around teaching plus extracurricular leadership. Existing teacher recruitment funding – including Title II-A formula grants and state teacher residency programs – could support some of this work without requiring entirely new appropriations.

These reforms should be treated as pilots, not just promises. If schools and states try them, they should measure whether they attract a broader pool of applicants, including more men, while also improving recruitment more generally. They should also track retention, job satisfaction, role sustainability, and whether better support for these positions reduces turnover and vacancy costs over time. If these reforms make extracurricular leadership more viable while improving recruitment and retention, they may help pay for themselves in part by reducing the churn that districts already absorb.

The teacher-coach is not a new idea. Treating it as a professional role worth designing – and supporting – more deliberately would be. And it could help us turn the tide on the declining share of male teachers.