{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/education-teachers-postsecondary/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Education Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1081", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 60830, "median_annual_wage": 75350 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 50, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 10, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 15, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "The lecture-plus-rubric-plus-literature-review half of the week is already drafted competently by a model, but the other half — clinical placement supervision, live observation cycles with pre-conference and post-conference debriefs, and CAEP/state program-review evidence that must be tied to actual candidate performance — has no digital substitute yet, which is what puts this at 11 rather than down at 5 with lecture-only humanities faculty.", "embodiment": "Field supervision means driving to elementary and secondary schools several times a semester, sitting in a classroom you don't control, and reading a candidate's proximity, voice, and transition management in real time — real physical presence, but it's a few hours a week in K-12 buildings rather than the daily uncontrolled-site work of a nurse or electrician, hence 10 and not 16.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates the job of teaching education courses; a doctorate and, in some programs, a lapsed K-12 credential are hiring preferences, and when a program loses accreditation or a graduate fails licensure, the consequence lands on the institution and the dean, not on your personal certificate — the 3 reflects that even the state approval process names the program, not you.", "trust_premium": "Teacher candidates choose and stay in programs on the strength of a named mentor who watched them teach, wrote the recommendation the district reads, and takes their call in year one of teaching — districts recruit from specific supervisors they trust, and that referral network is the part of the job no one can transfer or automate, which is why this sits at 15.", "judgment_accountability": "Deciding whether a struggling candidate is remediated, removed from placement, or recommended for licensure is a genuinely contestable call with a child's future classroom on the other side of it, but you make it inside program rubrics, disposition checklists, and state approval standards with a committee or chair signing off, which caps it at 11 rather than the high-teens of someone who owns the decision alone." }, "rationale": "Education professors split their week between lecturing on pedagogy, grading reflective papers and lesson plans, advising teacher candidates, observing student teachers in K-12 classrooms, and writing accreditation reports — and AI already drafts syllabi, rubrics, discussion prompts, feedback on lesson plans, and literature reviews at usable quality. What holds is the embodied part: sitting in the back of a third-grade classroom watching a candidate manage 25 kids, then coaching them on what went wrong, plus the mentorship relationship districts and licensure boards rely on. The modal worker here is contingent or non-tenure-track faculty, so institutional cost pressure — larger sections, more asynchronous delivery — is a bigger near-term threat than the model itself.", "outlook": "Lecture-and-grade faculty lines will thin as courses go asynchronous with AI-assisted content and feedback, while faculty anchored in clinical supervision, district partnerships, and candidate gatekeeping keep their seats.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "State licensure boards and CAEP/ AAQEP accreditation standards already require named, qualified faculty to sign off on clinical practice hours and teacher-candidate recommendations for licensure. If boards tighten this — e.g. a state rule that only a credentialed education faculty member with in-person observation hours may certify a candidate's clinical competency, and that AI-generated observation summaries cannot substitute — the personal sign-off becomes a hard gate rather than a soft norm. Watch state boards of education revising edTPA-replacement or clinical-hour rules.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Gatekeeping decisions — recommending or denying a candidate for licensure, removing a candidate from placement after a classroom safety incident — are consequential, contested, and appealable. If institutions formalize these as documented faculty-of-record determinations subject to due-process review (as some programs already do after litigation over dismissed candidates), the ambiguity-ownership becomes explicit rather than diffuse.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: syllabi, rubrics, lit reviews, and written feedback on lesson plans are the routine tier and are already being absorbed. If those go, the residual job is live classroom observation, coaching a candidate mid-crisis, and accreditation defense under site visit — harder tasks. The rise is real but partly offset by section consolidation.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "If states raise required in-person clinical supervision hours or cap remote/video observation (several states expanded video observation during COVID and have been rolling it back), the unavoidable in-classroom share of the week grows.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Districts hiring from programs, and the mentor-teacher network, buy the named supervisor's relationship and judgment about a candidate. This is a real premium but it is paid by institutions, not students, and it does not protect the lecture-and-grade portion.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "The binding constraint is not model capability, it is that most of these workers are contingent. Every lever above protects the ROLE (in-person clinical supervisor of record) while the institution can still cut the number of people filling it via larger cohorts and asynchronous coursework. A program can satisfy a tightened licensure sign-off rule with a third of the current faculty. Realistic ceiling around 60-65." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 60500, "wage": 64020 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 60930, "wage": 64780 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 61300, "wage": 65510 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 57560, "wage": 65440 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 58780, "wage": 63910 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 58280, "wage": 66930 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 60860, "wage": 73240 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 59090, "wage": 72090 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 60830, "wage": 75350 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 0.5, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "secondary-school-teachers-except-special-and-career-technical-education", "title": "Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 69, "median_wage": 72040, "overlap": 82, "skills_to_close": [ "Coordination", "Quality Control Analysis", "Judgment and Decision Making", "Mathematics" ] }, { "slug": "special-education-teachers-secondary-school", "title": "Special Education Teachers, Secondary School", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 73, "median_wage": 74260, "overlap": 77, "skills_to_close": [ "Coordination", "Service Orientation", "Operations Monitoring", "Social Perceptiveness" ] }, { "slug": "clinical-and-counseling-psychologists", "title": "Clinical and Counseling Psychologists", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 71, "median_wage": 100580, "overlap": 77, "skills_to_close": [ "Social Perceptiveness", "Service Orientation", "Judgment and Decision Making", "Persuasion" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }