Teachers Are Getting a Raw Deal (and It Isn’t School Choice’s Fault)

By EdChoice

School choice is an “attack on teachers.” To hear people talk, it’s as if we educational choice advocates are the folks in the big, shiny central district offices dropping the hammer on teachers when budgets need tightened.

Except we aren’t. Public school administrators and school boards are doing the dirty work. And they’re doing an awful lot of it, as these recent headlines show:

But firing teachers or cutting their salaries are not their only options when faced with spending cuts. So why are teachers the first ones they choose to punish instead of the first ones they choose to reward? And why do they blame school choice when the numbers don’t add up?

The Reality: School Choice Doesn’t Affect District Funding the Way They Want You to Think It Does

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Public school districts have had to deal with fluctuating funding forever, long before school choice programs were even a twinkle in Milton Friedman’s eye.

Take West Virginia. It has no school choice programs and no charter schools. From 2017 to 2018, it topped the list of states to make the deepest cuts to their general funding per student at 2.9 percent.

For comparison’s sake, take three favorite school choice-rich states: Arizona, Florida and Indiana. Spending on their respective choice programs is around 2 percent if you look at that amount as a percentage of the states’ total public school expenditure — and some of those programs don’t even use funds set aside for public schools.

At the end of the day, we’re not saying fluctuating public school budgets are good or bad. We’re saying it’s not a new evil spawned by school choice programs, and school districts should be more adept by now at handling that amount of change. After all, they’ve always had to deal with families moving to other districts, tax values increasing and decreasing or state lawmakers adjusting their funding formulas.

The Big Idea: Teachers Lose, Feast or Famine

When district administrators and school boards have to find ways to reduce spending, teachers tend to be their ultimate target.

During the Great Recession — a time when everyone, including schools, had to scale back their spending — school administrators were about twice as likely to fire teachers than they were to fire other administrators or non-teaching staff. And not only did teachers suffer the financial hit, U.S. Department of Education data show they also were the most vulnerable to layoffs when school administrators were faced with budget shortfalls.

These are the folks literally on the front lines of education — the heroes in our classroom who are helping our kids learn. And yet they’re the ones whose jobs get cut first when times are tough.

But maybe that’s just a thing that happens when funds are low. Maybe when public school budgets are “fully funded” or even flush with new revenue, administrators and school boards reward their teachers. But that’s not true, either.

U.S. Department of Education data shows inflation-adjusted salaries for public school teachers fell by 2 percent between 1992 and 2014, despite a 27 percent increase in public school spending. To add insult to injury, districts continued to hire more and more non-teaching staff and administrators at a rate 17 percent higher than teachers.

The Question We Should Be Asking: Why Are Teachers the First Ones Sacrificed?

Districts big and small seem to have no problem putting teachers out on the front lines like bargaining chips — threatening to fire them, cut their salaries or load them up with bigger class sizes if the system doesn’t get more money. They’re also quick to blame school choice for their financial woes even though those programs are a very small portion, if any, of the state budget.

Yet we never seem to see teachers rewarded when those tactics result in more funding, and we certainly see teachers punished when they don’t.

So the big question we have to ask is why is that the case? Why not reduce administrative spending or any number of other cost-cutting options? Why are teachers — the folks we agree are doing the hardest job in K-12 education — the first people escorted out of the building?

Is it because they don’t truly have a seat at the table when administrators and school boards are making difficult decisions or allocating additional funding? Is it because those high-level, highly paid folks are unable to apply that difficult decision-making process to their own jobs?

We don’t have the perfect solution, but the data clearly bear out that teachers are getting a raw deal, and the folks calling the shots aren’t being held accountable for that.

EdChoice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing full and unencumbered educational choice as the best pathway to successful lives and a stronger society. We believe families, not bureaucrats, are best equipped to make K-12 schooling decisions for their children. We work at the state level to educate diverse audiences, train advocates and engage policymakers on the benefits of high-quality school choice programs.