What does your school need from a private school teacher?
Hiring starts with the job, not the résumé pile. Before you post, write down what the teacher will actually carry at your school: the subjects and grade levels, the number of course preparations, and the duties beyond the classroom — advisory, coaching, clubs, chapel or dorm duty, depending on your model.
This page is the teacher-hiring anchor in our library on hiring for private and charter schools; the sections below take the hire end to end.
The pool you are drawing from is real. NCES counted 466,000 private school teachers, full- and part-time, in 2020-21, alongside 3.5 million traditional public and 251,000 public charter school teachers. The work is not finding a teacher in the abstract; it is finding the fit for your program.
Sort your need by role shape. A lower-school generalist who covers several subjects is a different hire from a single-subject upper-school specialist, and both differ from the associate or assistant teacher who works alongside a lead. If you are drafting the posting, start from what a private school teacher does and adjust it to your school's own expectations.
Special education deserves its own check before you post. When a public agency places a child with a disability at a private school, the federal regulation requires the child to receive an education meeting the standards that apply to state and local education agencies, at no cost to parents.
The same regulation expressly carves out the special-education teacher certification rule, so any certification requirement for teachers at approved private special-education schools comes from state law, not from the IDEA regulation itself. If your school serves publicly placed special-education students, ask your state education agency what teacher rules attach before you write the posting.
Looking to hire? Post your private school teacher role on SchoolHires and reach people who already work in private and charter schools.
Post a Private School Teacher Job →What qualifications are required at a private vs a charter school?
Certification is state law, and at private schools it turns on the school's category. What binds your school depends on your state and on what kind of private school yours is: accredited, approved, licensed, chartered or simply registered under state law.
The variation is easiest to see in a state whose statute does reach private school teachers. Michigan's Private, Denominational and Parochial Schools Act (MCL 388.553) bars anyone from teaching the regular or elementary grade studies in a private, denominational or parochial school without a certificate that would qualify them to teach like grades in Michigan public schools.
How the Michigan Department of Education applies that act beyond the grades it defines is not settled in the sources our research read — which is exactly why the confirmation step matters. Ask your own state education agency what its law requires of a school like yours before you write the qualification line.
Where no certification statute covers your school, the hire is still not rule-free. Background checks and mandated-reporter duties are set by state law for the schools and roles each state names. An accrediting association may set expectations for the schools it accredits. A school-choice program may set its own teacher rules for the schools that participate. And a religious school, or an association it belongs to, may set a faith-based credential for its own faculty.
Degree expectations are yours to set and yours to verify. In NCES's 2020-21 survey, 50% of private school teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree, against 62% of traditional public school teachers and 51% of public charter school teachers.
Charter schools run on a different rulebook. What a charter teacher needs is set by that state's charter law and its authorizer, not by private-school practice — check both rather than assuming your private school's flexibility carries over, or that a charter's rule applies to you.
One federal rule often gets confused with certification, so separate them. Under the FLSA (29 CFR 541.303), an employee whose primary duty is teaching and who is employed as a teacher is an exempt professional at private, charter and public schools alike.
The salary-level and salary-basis tests do not apply to exempt teachers, and a teaching certificate is not required for the exemption. That is the Department of Labor's wage-hour test, not a credential rule — it never makes an uncertified hire satisfy your state's certification law. Confirm classifications with the DOL or counsel.
Rules change, and categories differ. Confirm the qualification requirements that bind your school with your state education agency before the posting goes up.
How much should you pay a private school teacher?
There is no federal private-school teacher pay table. BLS has no private-school or charter-school occupation code, so every federal figure needs its label before you budget from it.
The broadest series is BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025 in elementary and secondary schools (NAICS 611100), all school ownerships combined — public district, charter and private together. For elementary school teachers, except special education (SOC 25-2021), the national median annual wage was $63,980, the mean $72,710, and the 10th-to-90th percentile range $47,990 to $104,390, in a national employment figure of 1,381,960.
BLS also publishes a series for privately owned elementary and secondary schools (industry 611105). For the same occupation it shows a median of $58,140, a mean of $59,410 and employment of 159,700. It isolates private ownership, but it is still an occupation table — not a salary scale for your school.
NCES's survey gives the sector comparison, with its year attached. In 2020-21, regular full-time private school teachers averaged $46,400 in base salary, against $61,600 in public schools overall ($62,100 traditional public and $54,400 charter), summer earnings excluded. Those are 2020-21 averages, not current pay.
Whatever you set, you are competing for people who move over pay. Among private school teachers who voluntarily changed schools between 2020-21 and 2021-22, 36% cited salary and other job benefits as the most important reason, against 9% of public school movers.
The working method: benchmark against the district and charter scales your candidates actually weigh, write the schedule down, and review it on a cycle. Stipends, tuition remission and housing change the total offer, and each carries its own cost — cost them with your CPA before they appear in an offer letter.
Where you post, posting rules can bind the pay you show. Washington requires covered employers to disclose the wage scale or salary range, or a fixed wage, and a general description of benefits in each job posting, including postings through third parties; the requirement took effect January 1, 2023 and was amended in 2025.
Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act requires employers to disclose compensation, benefits, and how and when to apply in all job postings. Posting rules differ by state, so check your state labor department's current requirements wherever you hire.
Where do you find private school teachers?
The channels overlap, so run them in parallel rather than one after another through the winter.
One channel is the placement firm that works the independent-school market. Carney Sandoe, a placement firm, describes its Placement Group as success-based: the school pays a fee only when it hires a candidate through the firm, and the fee amount is not published. The firm says it works with over 2,000 independent, private, boarding and charter schools in 48 states and 32 countries — a self-reported count.
The firm's services are free to candidates; client schools pay the fees. It also hosts hiring conferences each winter and spring in US cities, built around pre-scheduled 30-minute interviews; attendance is free for the firm's own candidates, and schools pay registration, discounted for members.
Beyond placement firms, the channels are familiar. Use national and regional education job boards, your own website, and education schools and graduate programs whose students want independent or faith-based settings.
For parochial networks, the diocesan or denominational school office is a natural first call; teacher job fairs and college career offices fill out the winter circuit; and the referral network your current faculty and families already form is a channel of its own.
It also pays to see your listing the way candidates see it. Browse private school teacher jobs before you write yours, and note what a posting tells a candidate — pay, contract term, start date, faith expectations — that yours currently leaves out.
How do you screen and interview private school teachers?
A workable sequence for a small school: a structured read of applications against written criteria, a screening call, a demo lesson in front of real students, reference checks, then a campus visit with the people the teacher will actually work beside.
Weight the demo lesson heavily. Watch how the candidate opens the class, checks for understanding, and handles the student who is lost. Build your question set around teaching practice, classroom management, the subject or pedagogy your program uses, and the extra duties the role carries.
At a religious school, mission fit is part of the job. Ask about the faith-formation duties the role carries and the community expectations your handbook publishes. Where the legal lines fall on faith-based hiring questions is a legal question — have counsel review your application and interview materials before the season starts.
Run the safety checks in the same pass as the academic ones. Fingerprint checks run through state procedures: under the National Child Protection Act as amended, states may let qualified entities — organizations that provide care to children, which can include private schools — request fingerprint-based national criminal history checks on employees and volunteers through the state.
Availability depends on whether your state has established those procedures, so confirm what applies to your school with your state education agency, and run whatever check your state or your own policy requires before the first day.
Reference checks carry their own legal footprint. ESSA §8546, the provision often called pass-the-trash, requires each state, state education agency or local education agency receiving ESSA funds to have laws or policies prohibiting school employees from helping a person get a new school job.
What it bars is helping someone the employee knows of, or has probable cause to believe, engaged in sexual misconduct with a minor or student. The duty sits on states and agencies, so it reaches public and charter schools directly; private schools are covered only where state law extends it. The practical takeaway for any school is to document every reference call and to ask each former employer directly about misconduct history.
Verify credentials against the source rather than the résumé: certificate records live with the state agency that issued them, and our guide to teaching certificate lookups explains how those lookups work. Who counts as a mandated reporter, along with what training the state requires, is likewise your state's statute — mandated reporter training covers that topic.
When in the hiring calendar should you start?
The independent-school season has a recognizable shape, and the placement conferences mark it. Carney Sandoe describes its hiring-conference season as running from January through April each year — the window our research reads as the core of the independent-school faculty hiring season.
Its 2026 calendar included FORUM/Connect Philadelphia on January 30-31, FORUM/Boston on February 13-14, FORUM/West Los Angeles on February 20 and FORUM/NYC on March 6 — the winter-spring block your own posting calendar should respect.
Work backwards from the start date you need. A fall-start hire posted in mid-winter leaves room for the demo lesson, the reference calls and the campus visit; a hire posted in June is choosing from whoever is still looking. When a vacancy opens midyear, post it when it opens — midyear hiring runs on its own clock, not the winter season's.
Charter schools run on their own calendars, and our research found no published national charter hiring calendar to point to. The same backwards planning from your start date is the working answer there too.
How do you onboard and keep them?
Onboarding is paperwork plus belonging. The paperwork floor is federal: every US employer, private and charter schools included, must complete Form I-9 for every person hired, citizens included.
E-Verify is a separate, free system run by the Department of Homeland Security with the Social Security Administration that checks Form I-9 information against government records; it is in addition to the I-9 requirement, not a substitute. Whether your school must use it depends on rules beyond the I-9 itself, so confirm with USCIS or counsel.
Then the belonging part: a named mentor, a written first-week schedule, curriculum and assessment expectations in writing, and introductions to the colleagues, families and advisors your new teacher will work with. None of it needs a benchmark; all of it needs an owner.
Retention is where hiring pays itself back. Of the teachers teaching in 2020-21, 82% of private school teachers were still at the same school in 2021-22, while 6% had moved to a different school and 12% had left teaching, according to NCES's Teacher Follow-up Survey, updated May 2024. Keeping your 82% is cheaper than re-running this whole process every spring.
The movers' reasons tell you where the leverage sits: 36% of private school movers cited salary and other job benefits as the most important reason. A salary schedule you can defend, extra duties that are assigned rather than assumed, professional development for teachers worth the time, and evaluation that feeds development instead of paperwork are the levers your school controls.
Employer information, not legal, tax or immigration advice. Certification, background-check, wage and job-posting rules are set state by state and agency by agency — confirm the rules that bind your school with your state education agency, the Department of Labor, USCIS or counsel, as the question needs.