Two articles from The 74 online caught my attention this morning. Both demonstrate how broken the traditional public education system is and how it can’t be fixed.
The first article, written by two researchers from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, warns public school teachers not to quit their jobs because, if they do, they might not find another. According to Katherine Silberstein and Marguerite Roza,
“For several years there have been lots of available jobs in school districts. Employees could take a year off and, with all the openings, take comfort in the knowledge that districts would always be hiring if and when they wanted to come back.”
“But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.”
“That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year.”
“In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their ‘help wanted’ signs. Portland and Auburn, Maine issued a hiring freeze this spring. Hartford, San Francisco, and Baltimore County are eliminating unfilled positions. Fort Worth and Seattle are already doing layoffs. And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.”
“What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.”
“To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.”
“…Over the last decade, Michigan districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%. In Connecticut, staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in Pennsylvania. Even in Washington State, where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.”
Here’s the problem. Public school districts are infamous for their boom to bust approach to staffing. In good times (or maybe I should say bad times, since extra funding usually comes with a national crisis like COVID or an economic calamity like 2008), school districts add staff based on additional funding coming primarily from the federal government. But that money always goes away, and then traditional districts are forced to cut budgets and therefore staff, since 90% of a school’s budget is made up of teacher and other adult school worker’s salaries.
It’s a broken way to try to run a learning organization.
Adding to the worrisome dysfunction of schools when it comes to staffing is the fact that traditional districts can’t even tell us whether extra funding, paying for that additional staff, has made any impact on student learning. Most traditional school leaders will say that funding has made an impact, but when you look at the data, no one is too sure what the truth is.
Remember Race to the Top? If you don’t, let me remind you that the federal government approved billions of dollars to be spent on our public schools after the 2008 economic calamity. In the end, though, I don’t remember seeing any definitive evidence that any of that money made much of a difference when it came to our young people’s learning, especially when you considered black, brown, and poor kids.
Anu Malipatil, vice-president of the Overdeck Family Foundation, wrote in The 74 online just today that,
“Since the pandemic began in March, 2020, the federal government has provided nearly $190 billion in education funding to states and districts. The three rounds of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding represent the largest infusion of federal funds in history for reopening schools, updating building and supporting learning recovery. Now, over three years later, is the time to assess whether the dollars have made a difference, and what they should be spent on going forward.”
“ESSER funds should be analyzed without regard to partisanship. The nation’s education system especially in underresourced rural and urban areas, has long needed additional funding to update classrooms and school buildings, integrate technology into teaching and learning, and refresh curriculum and materials. But funding alone does not yield meaningful progress for students, as seen with past government-funded programs like Investing in Innovation (i3) or Race to the Top.”
“At this critical moment, when children have experienced learning deficits that amounted to approximately a third of a school year’s worth of knowledge, evidence of impact is particularly important. This makes now the ideal time for nonprofits to invest in developing evidence that shows their product works, and for districts to make such impact nonnegotiable when deciding what to bring into their schools.”
Sorry to disappoint, but none of what Malipatil lays out here is probably going to happen.
Public school districts are notoriously bad at linking funding with performance. Instead, most just want more money, and let’s leave it at that.
Malipatil’s call for nonpartisanship is aspirational I guess, but anyone who has lived in this country the past decade understands that, even at the school board level, partisanship is carrying the day. And, the idea that school districts are going to hire the nonprofit with the best evidence is just folly. My experience suggest school districts hire those nonprofits that receive favor from a majority of school board members who vote on the contract that will supply them the public monies for their services.
The inability to align resources with staffing, along with not being able to connect funding with academic results are, in my mind, death blows to our current public school system. But yet, the traditional system continues to survive the way most bureaucracies are designed to do – to live another day.
There’s an easier way. For each young learner, connect a certain amount of funding for that learner’s annual learning plan. Hire a well-trained learning coach to help the young person and their family develop their own learning plan. Develop formative feedback to share with the young learner and their family as they begin to work on their personalized learning plan. At the end of the year, engage in a summative review of whether the young learner was successful or not when it came to their learning plan goals. If so, celebrate and repeat. If not, make the necessary corrections, including using money a different way and maybe with a different learning coach.
Sound simple? It is. And it works.
But here’s the problem, it’s so simple that most people don’t believe it will work. And therefore, we continue to invest in a broken public school system, unable to align resources with staffing and unable to tell the public if they are successful as learning leaders or not.
What was Einstein’s definition of insanity?
I’ll be off tomorrow, so I’ll be back Monday. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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