The American education system’s many weaknesses are legendary, but one of its hallmark strengths has gone unnoticed until now. It’s great at employing people. Not necessarily employing them productively, mind you, or recruiting them effectively or deploying them efficiently. But with three million-plus teachers on the school system rolls, and about the same number of aides, clerks, bus drivers, and other workers, it’s a jobs program extraordinaire.
So it’s no surprise that President Barack Obama would look to deposit 100 billion of his “economic stimulus” dollars in education. If the point is to keep current employees earning paychecks, making mortgage payments, and spending money, propping up America’s public schools is a sure winner. It’s just too bad that, as with the stimulus package as a whole, our children are going to pay for it.
That’s because what our kids need most isn’t teacher quantity but teacher quality. Yet, as my colleague Chester E. Finn, Jr. has illustrated, the United States has been obsessed with lower class sizes for fifty-odd years now. In that time, our public schools’ student population has risen about 50 percent while its staff has grown 300 percent. If we had simply hired enough teachers to keep pace with larger student enrollments, we could now pay the average teacher upwards of $100,000.
Loads of studies show that effective instructors boost student learning dramatically yet reducing class sizes tends to have a minimal effect. We nevertheless saw Education Secretary Arne Duncan, pitching the stimulus bill at a public school, ominously warning that without an influx of federal aid, class size could go from twenty-eight to forty. But how bad would that really be? Our schools would look a bit more like those in South Korea, which consistently cleans our clock on international tests.
We can’t rewrite history, but we could atone for it going forward. A smart course of action would be to let our most ineffective teachers go, allow class sizes to rise, and use the savings to pay our best teachers more. In normal times, such an approach would be political suicide, as teacher unions fight to forestall any and all lay-offs. But these aren’t normal times. With states and districts facing major budget shortfalls, it’s a rare opportunity to trim the least effective workers from the education system. Then, when the economy recovers, and school budgets swell again, the money could be used to enhance teacher quality.
That opportunity is now evaporating, thanks to the “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund,” which provides about $40 billion to plug school budget holes. Congress should have called it the Status Quo Stabilization Fund, because it locks in place the same old inefficient, ineffective ways. If schools don’t let go of burned-out teachers now, they never will.
Note well that the current education system is sure to grow even more expensive in the future, even if we don’t improve the teacher corps one bit. That’s because our schools employ a whole lot of Baby Boomers who are preparing for generous taxpayer-funded retirements. Teacher salaries may be so-so compared to those enjoyed by other college graduates (though still pretty decent when summer vacation is factored in), but the pensions are out of this world. One analyst recently figured that the average teacher in Anne Arundel County, Maryland that lives an average lifespan will receive more than $2 million in retirement benefits. Particularly in light of the stock market’s recent collapse, how many other Americans can say that?
This money is going to have to come from somewhere. Either taxpayers are going to see taxes soar to unimaginable heights, or dollars are going to be siphoned out of the classroom to pay for pensioners. Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.
To be fair, there are some redeeming elements in Mr. Obama’s stimulus plan. There are a few bucks for merit-pay programs, data systems, and charter schools. And, perhaps most significantly, there’s the $5 billion State Incentive Grant, which gives Education Secretary Arne Duncan the leeway to reward states that embrace reform. He could use his leverage to push them to make it easier to lay off bad teachers (through tenure reform and ending “last hired first fired” policies); restructure pension systems; and embrace differential pay for top performers. Otherwise, our education system will continue to be just a jobs program, long after the current recession has passed.
-Michael J. Petrilli is vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank in Washington. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an executive editor of Education Next.
