Minneapolis’s Teacher Shortages Show The Larger Problem of School Choice in The United States
Minneapolis teachers rallying for increased funding for public education. (Image Source: Kerem Yücel for MPR News)
By Catherine Zhang
In the 2021-22 school year, Minneapolis’s schools shut down for three weeks as teachers went on strike in pursuit of better funding, both through increased wages and access to better resources to facilitate learning. Although Minneapolis’s school districts had faced budget cuts before, these cuts were only exacerbated during the pandemic.
In order to become a teacher in the state of Minnesota, one must first complete a Bachelor’s degree. And the reward for pushing through four years of schooling, possibly even amassing tens of thousands in student debt? Well, in the city of Minneapolis, some teachers receive a starting salary of as little as $24,000 annually. As with most public school districts, funding for Minneapolis public schools is tied to enrollment, and thus a series of issues ignited when the city’s school district began to bear witness to the largest drops in public school enrollment in the entire state of Minnesota, losing 2.55% of its students during the pandemic.
Although wages have been a challenge for Minnesota educators across the board, the lowest salaries tend to be handed to what are arguably the most high-support positions: special education assistants. At the time of the strikes, there was no cap on the caseloads a special education aid could take on, with some schools not having a single one employed. This meant that the few remaining aids oftentimes had to take on the job of an entire team of paraprofessionals, whilst being stuck with wages that did not even correspond to that of a single paraprofessional. This left students with learning disabilities—the group already most affected by the dramatic shift to remote learning throughout the pandemic—with even less of the vital support necessary for their academic success.
One of the root causes of these financial woes is the fact that teaching is a profession where the mantra “doing it for the love of it, not the money” is perpetuated ad nauseam. Thus, not only are teachers burdened with low wages and inadequate resources—oftentimes needing to pay for classroom supplies out of their own pocket—but must also grapple with the profound challenges that come with providing education in a disadvantaged environment. The pandemic has deprived students of adequate socialization, resulting in an erosion of respect for social norms. A rising percentage of teachers have reported observing more student misconduct, and as educators begin to grapple with the negative impacts of students’ social and emotional development, it becomes even more imperative to provide them with the proper resources to facilitate effective learning. Sitting in on any lesson at a low-funded public school will show repeated distractions, as students talk over teachers, go on their phones, or simply leave the classroom entirely. At one such low-funded school in rural Arizona, a teacher recorded that in a single class session, sixteen bathroom trips were taken. In an attempt to get a classroom of twenty-four to make name tags, only seven had been completed by the time the bell rang. Teachers are forced to yell, repeat themselves constantly, and make lesson plans that focus on how to teach, rather than on the material itself. At the end of the day, teachers are left exhausted trying to get the attention of students. On top of that, low wages force teachers to pick up second or even third jobs so that they can cover living costs. In some cases, school under-funding has forced teachers to take matters into their own hands, resorting to buying school supplies with the money from their already meager income. With these frustrating economic conditions and learning environments, it comes as no surprise that Minneapolis and the country as a whole are within the midst of a devastating teacher shortage. Although it might be convenient to blame these behaviors on simply “kids being kids,” one should wonder where exactly all the engaged, well-achieved and aspirational students of Minneapolis actually end up, if it’s not in their public schools.
A new exodus is taking place in Minnesota’s education system. As enrollments drop in public schools, the opposite is happening in Minnesota’s private and charter schools—schools that, although public, oftentimes require an application and standardized testing in order to enroll, with an admissions process on par with private schools. In fact, throughout the pandemic, the state’s non-public schools saw an increased enrollment of 6%, no doubt fueled in part by the decline in the quality of public schooling in districts like Minneapolis. Along with their kids, parents are also taking their money with them in the transition; Minnesota is one of many states in the U.S. to offer open enrollment along with school choice, which bestows parents with free reign over which school to send both their children and their tax dollars to. With midterm elections along the horizon, many candidates across the United States, including Minnesota, have expressed their support for the continuing the practice of school choice—advocates believe that school choice not only provides parents with the freedom to pick the exact best form of education for their child, but also proposes that this practice ultimately provides a net benefit for poorer students.
School choice allows parents to take their kids out of the local underfunded school and place them in a much better-funded school district instead—one that is often neatly tucked away in the suburbs rather than the inner city. If they’re lucky, they might even snag some financial aid for a private college preparatory school. However, in the process, there is a devastating economic impact left on the public schools they leave. In fact, many of the students who choose to leave public school for a private school are not students who genuinely need a higher degree of support that can be provided at well-funded schools, but rather wealthy students who were not dependent on the school’s resources in the first place. School choice also has the unexpected consequence of further disadvantaging students with very specific needs, that other schools in the era may not be able to accommodate, depriving their schools of funding.
It is not just students who are incentivized to leave, but also teachers. There is oftentimes a severe lack of transparency regarding school vouchers, and administrative costs make it easy for administrators at charter and private schools to abuse this archaic system for their own financial gain. For example, in one week alone there were six reports of credit card fraud at a single Los Angeles charter school management company. The lucrative nature of the private education industry means that underpaid teachers and administrators at underfunded public schools are now even more incentivized to abandon their disadvantaged students, in pursuit of a lofty high-paying position at a much better-funded charter school. The lack of funding for public schools has more ramifications than just failing to support students, as it also fails to support teachers through their wages. In the current stage of the ravaging teacher shortage, the allocation of funds for public education is crucial. Eliminating school vouchers and open enrollment is needed if America wants to truly socioeconomically integrate education.
Although the rampant fraud at some charter schools should already paint a picture of concern, the largest examples of wealth hoarding take place in perfect legal conditions at other top non-traditional public schools in the country. Phillips Exeter Academy, a private school that consistently ranked at the top of schools in America in terms of standardized scores, had an endowment of $1.3 billion dollars in 2018. Choate Rosemary Hall, a similarly ranked private school, raised funds equal to almost $260,000 per student. At the time of the teacher strikes in Minneapolis, even a $86 million budget gap could not be fixed with pandemic funds, resulting in $37 million in cuts. What was left as a result was public school spending that equated to just $23,000—less than a tenth of what students at Choate Rosemary receive. The sheer difference in the amount of funding means that some of the nation’s poorest school districts are left with no other choice than to hire teachers from foreign nations like the Philippines, because their budgets simply cannot accommodate salaries that are competitive enough for American teachers.
The consequences of the gaps have become especially apparent in the scope of college admissions, where major inequalities in prior schooling have manifested. At Yale, 24% of its incoming class went to independent schools—a clearly disproportionate amount, as only 2% of students nationwide attend independent schools. In the end, school vouchers only exacerbate the inequality between private/charter schools and public institutions, whilst failing to address the actual reason why the public schooling is of such low quality in the first place—if anything, depriving public schools of proper funding is only further fueling their decline.
School choice in itself is a misnomer because a majority of voucher students have never attended a public school, to begin with, therefore failing to achieve its purpose of bringing low-income students out of disadvantageous solutions. In reality, the kids who benefit from school choice are already likely to be receiving high-quality and well-funded education. As for the less fortunate, poorer students continue to stay at poorly funded schools, meanwhile rich students are rewarded with what are essentially subsidies to attend the elite private schools, that they would’ve attended even without the school choice option. When it comes to the single most powerful instrument of socioeconomic mobility, there is little room for error—the difference between a low and high-quality education could mean the difference in a student choosing to drop out of high school, versus motivating them to pursue post-secondary education. In the United States, the median income of someone with a bachelor’s degree is 84% higher than that of someone with just a high school diploma. Public education itself is meant to be public for that exact reason: to provide everyone with a universally accessible, high-quality education through which they climb the socioeconomic ladder. The reallocation of funds from public schools to private education ultimately makes rich students richer, while leaving the poor in an even worse off state. The wealthy should not be able to divert funds from going to public education, when said education is intended to be the primary means of escaping poverty.
All of the problems of education inequality can be solved with one solution that teachers have been vouching for since the beginning: paying teachers more. Funding must also be directed towards tackling overcrowding in classes, improving school facilities, updating learning materials and textbooks, as well as ensuring that school supplies are provided so teachers no longer have to pay for them out of their own already meager salary. When the very nature of these public institutions screams “We don’t care about your education!”, how could you possibly expect kids to behave and pay attention during schooling? And yet, despite the relative simplicity of this solution, districts like Minneapolis cannot afford to invest more into teachers and schools, when that money is instead busy being diverted towards billion-dollar endowments of private schools. Thus, the elimination of school choice, along with its vouchers, is crucial in ensuring that public tax money is going towards public services that benefit every student, and not just the country’s elite.
Catherine Zhang is a first-year student from Minnesota, studying Business and Political Economy at NYU Stern. She is passionate about international economics and how political systems influence local, national, and global economies. In her free time, she can be found wandering around the aisles of the Union Square Barnes and Noble.
