Tags
economy, education, Employment, Im-Politic, Jobs, public schools, schools, state and local government, students, teachers
So it turns out that America’s public school systems have been excelling on the employment front after all. Only their perfomance has nothing to do with their effectiveness at equipping students with the knowledge and skills needed for successful careers. Instead, it has to do with their effectiveness in creating jobs in public school systems – and specifically, growing employment much faster than public school enrollment has increased.
And although most education specialists believe (understandably, IMO), that the lower student-teacher ratios get, the more the former learn, widely accepted measures of student performance show that this relatively rapid expansion of public school system employees has achieved nothing of the kind.
That may be because teachers are getting worse (or at least less capable of teaching today’s students), or because too many of the new workers in school systems are doing something other than classroom teaching. The (official) data I present below doesn’t distinguish between types of public education jobs, and which types have risen faster than others.
The big picture, though, should worry anyone concerned about lagging public school performance: From 1980 through 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the numbers of students in the nation’s primary and secondary schools were up by 22.16 percent – from 40.877 million to 49.375 million.
But the Labor Department figures peg the expansion of employment in “local education” during that period at 58.77 percent – from 5.073 million to 8.054 million. That’s nearly three times as fast.
And the disparity between the two growth rates has been pretty remarkable during some timeframes. For example, between 1980 and 1990, public school enrollment inched up by just 0.83 percent. But local education employment jumped by 15.45 percent.
Between 1991 and 2001 (generally the years of that decade’s economic recovery), public school enrollment grew by 12.26 percent. But local education systems added 24.29 percent more workers. That’s nearly twice as many.
As made clear by the Bloomberg piece that sparked my curiosity about the trends, the CCP Virus pandemic brought these trends to a screeching halt. Thanks to extended school closings, their aftermath, and other Covid-driven changes in the U.S. employment picture, between 2020 and last year, even though public school enrollment expanded by 1.13 percent, the local education workforce actually shrank by 3.66 percent.
More recently, local education payrolls have rebounded, and as Bloomberg‘s Nic Querolo reports, have almost returned to their pre-pandemic levels. And because municipal finances overall are in unexpectedly excellent shape for now, state and local governments may well be able to boost education headcounts further.
But will public school enrollment keep growing as quickly? (No figures for this year are available yet.) Will the result (finally) be better educational outcomes? Will state and local governments and taxpayers care enough to start changing what seems to be a losing game for students and the country in general? I’ll be eagerly anticipating the full year 2023 enrollment and local education employment data for further insights.