What are schools for?
Almost everyone would say they exist to educate students. For a small but powerful slice of the population , the main purpose of school is to employ adults.
As America has fewer school-aged children every year thanks to a generation-long baby bust , public schools around the nation will need to adapt. With low and falling enrollment, the sensible options are to consolidate schools or to learn how to be small.
In many cases, the teachers unions present a third option: Whatever you do, don’t downsize the staff!
“Whereas leaders on the left were eager to close schools during the pandemic,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Michael Petrilli writes , “they are allergic to doing so now. Teachers unions worry that their members will lose jobs, and the social-justice crowd fears that minorities will be disproportionately affected by closings.”
First, a note on the demographics:
America has had fewer and fewer babies nearly every year since 2007. The birth rate hit a record low 1.62 babies per woman in 2023. There are fewer children in the country today than there were 18 years ago, and basically every age cohort is smaller than the one above it.
In the living memory of today’s school parents, the number of graduating seniors across America has gone up every year. That changes next year. After the class of 2025, each high school graduating class will be smaller than the one before — for the foreseeable future.
Elementary and middle schools across America have already felt this blow. High schools are starting to. Colleges are preparing for the baby bust to hit their age demographic.
This demographic problem explains some of the fearmongering, from Democrats and the news media to families using school vouchers to attend Catholic or other religious schools. Also, charter schools become a more acute threat to teachers unions amid falling enrollment.
Petrilli puts it this way: “Unions are pushing districts to delay school closings while attacking charter schools for taking ‘their’ students. Progressives are asking school boards to promise not to close schools in minority neighborhoods. Some ‘equity’ hawks even want to make it illegal to consider the quality of schools and their students’ education when making closing decisions, on the theory that this has a disparate impact on minorities.”
The federal government provided massive amounts of COVID-19 aid to schools, and many school districts used this one-time money to add staff. That simply exacerbates the problem of too many staff members for too few students.
Read the education press, and this all spells an argument for even greater state funding per pupil.
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Why not cut spending proportionally as the number of students drops? Well, the teachers unions, being teachers unions, see their responsibility as protecting the jobs of their members. That means that their priority is making sure there are no layoffs. And the teachers unions are very powerful politically.
How to downsize schools is a difficult question, not without pain. But postponing that pain to save adults’ jobs is not the right answer.
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