How to Destroy Public Education
In Four Easy Steps

FOUR: Drain the Swamp

When state coffers run dry, school budgets are cut. Try to find an exception to this rule, and you will waste your time. The rhetorical flourishes with which elected officials declare their love for and loyalty to the public schools do not survive the first signs of fiscal trouble. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, schools predictably found themselves scrambling to make do with much less in the way of money, thanks to the ineptitude of state legislatures that were only too happy to give away the store when times were flush but without any contingency plan if the economy should go south.

Rather than elicit sympathy for being twice victimized — first by the economic downturn, then by state legislatures — schools have instead been raked over the coals for their levels of spending, as though paying teachers a living wage were the fundamental cause of the global financial crisis. Banks failed by the score, businesses went bankrupt, mortgages went under water by the millions, the auto industry nearly collapsed, governments defaulted — and the cause must be those public school districts and their high-living teachers. Thus education has been victimized even further, paying dearly for the mistakes of others not only in lost revenue, unemployed staff and curtailed programs, but in public esteem.

If not for the accusations of fiscal irresponsibility aimed at schools, it would be easy to suppose that the budget squeeze of the last few years was not only inevitable but fair, as the recession has taken an indiscriminate toll on the virtuous and the profligate alike. Why should schools alone be spared? Of course, one could make the argument that, if people cared as much about the education of children as they claimed to do, then schools should in fact be spared from the budget ax. But we must take hollow statements of generalized support with the grain of salt to which they are entitled. On the other hand, the nasty fights over school funding and teachers' rights in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and other states has put paid to the argument that this struggle is just about money. Following the time-honored political principal that a good crisis should never go to waste, those with an ax to grind about schools and teachers have found in the fiscal crisis a pretext for pushing through "reforms" that would otherwise have been unthinkable and untenable at any other time.

And so we see schools starved for cash at the very moment when they can least afford to absorb any more financial bad news. We see the salaries and pensions of teachers and administrators attacked, as long-standing resentments against public workers boil over during an extended period of low investment and high unemployment. We see anecdotal evidence of a handful of superintendents who have indeed garnered private sector-level compensation packages presented as if it were iron-clad proof that every school employee is getting rich at the taxpayers' expense. It fits the narrative nicely: why should I pay such high taxes so teachers and administrators can get such good salaries and benefits, especially when I am in such tough circumstances myself? Inevitably, we are treated to the perennial chestnuts: teachers only work 10 months of the year, they don't even work a full day, they can't be fired, they have guaranteed pensions, and so on.

As demoralizing as it is to have to address these thoughtless and ignorant accusations, decency demands that they not go unanswered. First, teachers who work 10 months of the year are paid for 10 months of the year. As it is, a vast number of teachers would be unable to make ends meet on their regular salaries if they didn't have after-school and summer jobs to supplement their incomes. Others, particularly young teachers, spend their summers and evenings during the year taking graduate classes and completing other coursework in order to meet certification requirements, which have grown more onerous over time. Curriculum writing, professional development and preparation for the next year occupy much of teachers' free time.

Teachers didn't invent the 180-day, 10-month school year, and the main reason it has never been significantly extended beyond that length is because states don't want to pay for it. Those who fume that teachers ought to spend many more days in the classroom presumably never ask themselves how they would feel if their boss demanded that they work 20 percent more days during the year with no additional compensation. Second, the day does not end for teachers when the final bell rings. Most teachers of my acquaintance, in my nearly quarter-century in the field, spend nearly as much time outside of class preparing lessons, grading papers and pushing the inordinate amount of paper demanded by the educational bureaucracy as they actually spend teaching students. Third, teachers can be and are in fact fired, as discussed earlier.

Finally, most of the funding for the pensions that teachers receive comes from mandatory payroll contributions from the teachers themselves and from investment returns. The taxpayers' portion, while not inconsiderable and widely variable from state to state, is still a relatively small part of the total. In New York State, for example, 86 percent of the pension benefits paid to teachers comes from investment returns (according to the New York State Teachers Retirement System). New York's taxpayers indeed pay a higher price than those of most states for this system, but New York happens to be one of the few states whose public pension systems are entirely solvent and in no danger of default. For this, the state's taxpayers should be grateful that those who created these systems in the early part of the last century knew what they were doing. Pity the teachers in those states that failed to keep their systems fully funded when tax revenues were plentiful, and pity the taxpayers, too, in states from Rhode Island to California who are seeing their investment in public pensions squandered, not by the greed of teachers or other public employees, but by the mismanagement of elected officials who deferred payments, made decisions based on unrealistic projections of investment returns, and otherwise allowed their systems to go broke because they could not see past the next election cycle.

Budgets are slashed because of declining state support. Programs are cut and teachers laid off because funding sources are drying up. Capital investments in schools are derailed because of the necessity of diverting funds to instructional programs. Desperately needed funds are drained from public schools to pay for charter schools and voucher schemes. Pension systems are put under strain and some even default on their legal obligations. Teachers' rights are curtailed to reduce school expenditures. A confluence of unfortunate events? Or an intentional, coordinated effort to wield an unrelated financial collapse as a weapon to make public schools less solvent, less effective, and less attractive to parents and new teachers? If it isn't deliberate, this predicament is nonetheless succeeding at producing all of these reprehensible effects.