As I noted in January, the public school enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year, showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report.
Now, there is more bad news. The results of a Gallup poll released Feb. 5 show that Americans’ opinions about the quality of public education in the U.S. continue to tank.
The percentage of adults who are dissatisfied with public education increased from 62% to 73% between 2019 and 2025, making the percentage of adults who feel satisfied with public education the lowest since 2001. (The report tracks Americans’ satisfaction across 31 aspects of U.S. society or policy, such as the military, health care, and crime, and it found that public education ranked 29th among those 31 areas.)
What can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?
First, we must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.
One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.
Focusing on Act 10, Barbara Biasi, an assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, found that there was a “34% increase in the quality of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts and a 17% decrease in the quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts.” In fact, about half of Wisconsin’s school districts abandoned their lock-step salary schedules to the teachers’ unions’ great chagrin and began to pay teachers for performance, for having advanced math and science skills, taking difficult assignments, etc.
(Act 10 was overturned by a county judge in December. The ruling, however, has been appealed in state court by Republicans, who run the legislature.)
Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and long-time proponent of performance pay, simply states that we should provide monetary incentives to our better teachers to take on more students. This move would result in less proficient teachers educating fewer students.
Hanushek et al. looked at several large urban districts that implemented linked performance-based evaluations with new merit-based pay schedules. “In Washington, D.C., for example, the IMPACT system rated teachers based on a variety of outcomes, including student test scores and professional observations, and triggered boosts in pay, targeted supports, or dismissal notices for educators at the ends of the spectrum. A long-running study by Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff found substantial improvement in teacher quality after IMPACT began in 2009, with greater retention of high performers and quick exits or improvements among teachers with lower performance rankings.”
To continue reading, go to https://www.forkidsandcountry.org/blog/the-sandstorm-retooling-schooling
