I'm asking for some friends: How easy is it to go from teaching English abroad (with a B.A.) to teaching K-12? Some school districts do not require a master's degree, correct? Is that job experience even relevant?
School districts don't always (or even often) require a masters degree, but they do require state certification. Are your friends certified to teach in any US states? If not, they will have a hard time finding a job in a public school.
None of us are certified. We are all just general Bachelor's degree holders. None of us are going back to East Asia to teach after recent developments... so we are trying to figure out what to do. I appreciate your insights, Bella.
MCM1986, A TEFL certification doesn't help at all in becoming a public school teacher. The only thing TEFL qualifies you for is teaching conversational English as a foreign language. There is no demand for that in public schools. There are some jobs teaching online in China, but that market is currently saturated, with so many online teachers hired that most barely get any hours right now. Most of the online TEFL companies are not even accepting applications right now, and have huge waiting lists for teaching. The hours are also difficult -- depending on what part of the country you live in, they are from about 4am until 8am, and Friday and Saturday nights, 11pm-3am. For these jobs, you are an independent contractor -- meaning you have to pay your own taxes, and you have no benefits and no guaranteed hours. They often over-hire, which means most of the teachers have many, many open sessions that never get filled, making it very part-time, and very unreliable. Even with a bachelor's degree, you would, at the minimum, have to go back to school and do a teacher's certification program. Depending on what degree you have, and what level and subject you are looking to teach, the time and cost would vary. I just checked this out for a friend online, and the cheapest we could find was $4,600 in tuition (books extra) and it would take 12 months full-time (much longer if part time.) It also depends on which state, because many states require a lot more than the minimum, and what I just mentioned is the bare minimum.
