Featherbed Ed

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New data for the 2022-2023 academic year paints a disturbing picture. While students are slowly trickling back into public schools post-COVID-19, the same cannot be said for staffing. The National Center for Education Statistics revealed an increase of 173,000 students in public schools, yet during the same period, a staggering 159,000 employees were hired, including 15,000 additional teachers.

Researcher Chad Aldeman provides specific examples of hiring trends in various districts across the country. He explains that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

About a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time, but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a 22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.

Another group of districts grew student enrollments, but their teacher count has risen even faster. The Katy Independent School District, near Houston, added 4,299 students last year, a gain of 4.9%. At the same time, it hired 366 teachers, a 6% gain. Over the period, its student body increased by 22% while its teacher count grew by 29%.

But as Aldeman notes, the future is murky, “As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief ) dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings.”

If teachers must be laid off, the typical union contract stipulates that it must be done by seniority or the “last in, first out” (LIFO) regimen. This industrial style of dealing with a teacher overage is typified by Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools system, where the teacher union contract states that after considering years of experience with the district, if two teachers have equal seniority, the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for a layoff.

Also, a study from Stanford U. found that only 13% to 16% of the teachers laid off in a seniority-based system would also be cut under a system based on teacher effectiveness.

Then, there is the problem of “under-enrolled” schools, for which Chicago is the poster child. At this time, one-third of Chicago’s 473 public schools (CPS) are at less than 50% capacity. Considering that just 20% of 3rd through 8th graders in the Windy City are proficient in reading and only 15% are proficient in math, this is hardly surprising. Also, in 30 Chicago public schools, no student can read at grade level.

Egregiously, the city’s Douglass High School, with only 34 students enrolled, is slated to receive $34 million for renovations.

Why not have these kids go somewhere else? As Ted Dabrowski of Wirepoints maintains, “Already families have abandoned these schools. The question for CPS is, ‘Why are you keeping empty, failing schools open?’ Shut them and use the money elsewhere or give the money back to the taxpayers.”

It’s noteworthy that if one is an equity-driven fanatic, anti-shutdown doggedness does not apply to all schools. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a former labor organizer and member of the Chicago Teachers Union, decided in December to eliminate the city’s 11 selective public high schools, which are among the best in the country, and use standardized tests to determine student admissions. The CPS Board of Education agreed and passed a resolution to “transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.”

But, with the exception of selective schools, the education establishment won’t accept school closures without a battle. As noted in the leftwing Counterpunch, education reporters and policy experts tend to frame stories about school closures as “difficult but inevitable.” Justifications for closures are “steeped in the language of business and economics with words like ‘efficiency’ and ‘rightsizing’ dominating the discourse. District leaders tend to be portrayed as pragmatic realists doing what’s best for children, while efforts to include parents and teachers in decisions over how many schools to close and where are often cast as ‘placating the adults.’”

Instead of closures, Counterpunch suggests the advancement of so-called community schools, which have their roots in the early 20th-century Progressive Era. This arrangement, adored by the teachers’ unions, makes schools into one-stop shops for families with all kinds of “wrap-around services” like welfare-to-work programs, caregiving, a legal defense fund, and foster care, all staffed by (unionized) government workers. While this setup won’t do anything for students academically, it certainly does blur the lines between parent and state, which is not good for the sanctity of the parent-child bond. It also further burdens taxpayers.

National Education Association president Becky Pringle says she wants every school to be a community school and hopes there will be 25,000 such schools in the U.S. by the time she leaves office in 2026.

On April 8, the American Federation of Teachers launched a six-figure television advertising campaign to “highlight the crucial role of community schools as a real solution to help kids and their families thrive.”

Teacher union leaders in California are especially interested in negotiating shared governance of community schools as part of collective bargaining agreements. EdSource reports that the unions want to ensure the rollout of thousands of new community schools in California over the next eight years.

Ideally, we need to get the government out of the education field entirely. Short of that, education should be treated like a business; schools should become more efficient, employing far fewer teachers and other education employees. Small class size typically has no benefit for students. And the horde of other education employees do little for kids but most assuredly are an enormous burden to taxpayers. If workers must be let go, LIFO should be ditched, and the poorest performers should be shown the door.

Additionally, if students abandon a school, it should, like any business, close. Fewer schools and fewer teachers save taxpayers money, and students, except for some who may be inconvenienced by having to take a school bus, would not be affected negatively at all. But with government education bureaucrats and unions running the franchise, I’m not holding my breath for any meaningful change.

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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.