{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/secondary-school-teachers-except-special-and-career-technical-education/",
  "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": "Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education",
    "soc_code": "25-2031",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 1065210,
    "median_annual_wage": 72040
  },
  "verdict": "SAFE",
  "risk_resistance": 69,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 12,
    "embodiment": 15,
    "liability_shield": 14,
    "trust_premium": 15,
    "judgment_accountability": 13
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "A 12 rather than a 16 reflects that a large slice of the week — writing unit plans to state standards, generating differentiated worksheets, grading multiple-choice and even first-draft essays, logging grades, drafting parent emails — is genuinely machine-assistable now, while the irreducible core (running a Socratic seminar, redirecting a defiant student mid-lesson, re-teaching a concept three ways because you read the room) has no digital substitute.",
    "embodiment": "A high school classroom is an uncontrolled environment by any honest definition — 28 adolescents, hallway and cafeteria duty, breaking up a fight, chemistry lab supervision, fire drills and lockdown drills, bus and field-trip chaperoning — and the 15 rather than 19 only reflects that the intellectual work itself is done seated with a screen and a whiteboard.",
    "liability_shield": "State teaching licensure with content-area endorsement is a hard legal gate: an unlicensed adult cannot be the teacher of record, cannot sign off on credits toward a diploma, and cannot discharge in loco parentis duty of care — the 14 rather than 18 is because districts routinely fill seats with emergency and provisional certificates when they cannot hire, and personal malpractice exposure is far thinner than a physician's.",
    "trust_premium": "Adolescents work for teachers they trust and stonewall ones they don't, so the relationship is the delivery mechanism for the content — but 15 not 19 because students are assigned to you by scheduling software, not chosen, and the roster resets every September regardless of how good last year's rapport was.",
    "judgment_accountability": "State standards, pacing guides, district curricula and standardized testing calendars constrain a lot of the day, which caps this at 13 — but the calls that matter are yours alone and are made without a script: whether a bruise or a change in a kid's affect triggers a mandatory-reporter call, whether a plagiarism case goes to the office, whether to fail a senior short of credits, whether to escalate a suicide-risk disclosure."
  },
  "rationale": "The paperwork layer of teaching — lesson plans, worksheets, rubrics, first-pass essay feedback, quiz generation, parent email drafts — is already being handled well by AI, and that is real time savings, not a real threat. What is not automatable is standing in a room with 28 sixteen-year-olds, holding attention, noticing who is quietly failing, and being the adult legally responsible for them; state licensure and in loco parentis duty of care make a credentialed human non-optional. The main risk is budget-driven class-size increases and a shift of some content delivery to software, which compresses headcount rather than eliminating the job.",
  "outlook": "Still a licensed, in-person, in-demand job in ten years, but with more AI-generated materials, harder fights over assessment integrity, and slow headcount pressure from enrollment decline and larger classes.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "State-level mandates that AI instructional tools cannot be the system of record for grades or IEP-adjacent accommodations without a licensed teacher's sign-off — the pattern in emerging state AI-in-education guidance (e.g. California AB 2876-style requirements, and district AI policies requiring a credentialed 'teacher of record' for any course with AI-delivered content, as in Ohio and Texas virtual-school teacher-of-record rules). Also class-size and supervision-ratio statutes written to count only licensed adults, not software-supervised students.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Expansion of mandated-reporter and student-threat-assessment duties: post-Uvalde state laws and district behavioral threat assessment teams (Texas SB 11, Virginia's threat assessment statute) place named teachers on teams making documented consequential calls about student risk. If AI screening tools flag students and a licensed teacher must adjudicate and document the disposition, the judgment tier is formalized rather than advisory.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Genuine two-tier job: if worksheet generation, first-pass essay marking, and lesson planning are fully absorbed, the residual role is behavior management, differentiation for the 5-8 students who are failing, and family conferencing — none of which current systems do. Task resistance rises mechanically as the automatable tier is stripped out, though this compresses headcount at the same time.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Parent and union resistance to AI-delivered instruction becoming contractual: NEA/AFT locals bargaining language that AI cannot replace direct instruction hours or determine grades (AFT's AI guidance and several 2024-25 district contracts contain versions of this). Separately, private and parochial school marketing that explicitly promises small human-taught classes sustains a paid premium in the ~10% of enrollment outside public systems.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Levers protect the credential and the room, not the headcount. Every mechanism above can hold while districts raise class sizes from 28 to 34 and cut positions — the job stays human and there are fewer of them. Nothing here is a lever against budget-driven compression."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 1027230,
        "wage": 59170
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 1051570,
        "wage": 60320
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 1035850,
        "wage": 61660
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 991000,
        "wage": 62870
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 1020240,
        "wage": 61820
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 1042090,
        "wage": 62360
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 1045170,
        "wage": 65220
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 1072540,
        "wage": 64580
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 1065210,
        "wage": 72040
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 3.7,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}