EXPOSED
The content layer of this job — leveled reading passages, grammar drills, GED practice sets, pronunciation feedback, placement quizzes, progress reports to funders — is exactly what language models and apps like Duolingo already produce cheaply, and self-study tools will absorb the motivated, higher-level learner. What survives is the part machines handle badly: standing in a room with adults who have interrupted schooling, low digital literacy, trauma, night-shift jobs and immigration stress, and keeping them coming back week after week. Funding is the real threat vector here as much as AI — adult ed programs are grant-dependent and thin-staffed, so cheap software gives budget-cutters an excuse.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half the week — writing leveled passages, marking TABE/CASAS practice items, running pronunciation and grammar drills, generating BEST Plus placement scores and NRS progress narratives — is already replicable by an app, while the other half (multi-level classes where one adult decodes at 2nd-grade level and another needs workplace idioms, plus the phone calls chasing a student who missed three weeks for a shift change) has no software equivalent, which lands it mid-band rather than higher.
Some physical or field component. You teach in physical rooms — church basements, community college annexes, county jails, employer break rooms — and do real bodywork there: modeling mouth position for /θ/, walking students through a paper GED registration or a bus route, hauling materials between two or three sites a night, but it is still a classroom rather than a job site with hazards, so it sits at the top of the 'some physical component' range, not in the field band.
Certification preferred, not legally required. Credentialing is genuinely split: ABE and adult secondary teachers in K-12-operated programs often need a state teaching license, while a large share of ESL instruction at nonprofits and community-based providers hires on a bachelor's plus a TESOL certificate or nothing at all — and in neither case does a licence attach personal legal liability to your instructional calls, so the protection is a hiring filter rather than a shield.
The human relationship is the product. Adults with interrupted schooling, past classroom humiliation, undocumented status or a supervisor who resents the night class attend because of a specific person who learned their name, remembered the daughter's surgery, and did not make them feel stupid the first time they read aloud — retention, the metric your funder actually watches, is almost entirely a function of that relationship, which is why this is near the top of the band.
Meaningful discretion. You make consequential calls — placing someone at the right level, deciding a student is ready to sit the GED, noticing disclosed domestic violence or a learning disability and knowing where to refer — but they run inside CASAS/NRS assessment rules, mandated-reporter statutes and state curriculum frameworks that constrain the range of defensible answers, so the discretion is real but bounded, not the ambiguous ownership of a 15.
Has AI actually changed your work?