Ep 118 - Stop Blaming the Teachers

Vivek Ramaswamy wants teachers’ unions eliminated. He has accused teachers of unionizing against the children they are supposed to serve, as though the people buying classroom supplies, answering parents after hours and managing thirty different sets of needs are somehow the great predatory interest in American education. Against the children? Teachers are the adults identifying hunger, reporting suspected abuse, calming panic attacks, breaking up fights and trying to keep everyone learning while one student’s behavioral crisis consumes the room. But sure—the real act of selfishness is asking for a contract.

Teachers are expected to absorb every crisis facing public education—then blamed when the system fails them.

I’m not a teacher or an education-policy expert, and I’m not going to pretend that proximity is the same thing as professional expertise. But all five of my children went through public schools. I have many friends who teach. One of my children has earned a teaching degree and is beginning that career, while another is seriously considering following the same path. That doesn’t make me an authority on every policy question. It does give me enough real-world exposure to recognize a political caricature when I hear one.

The official job is teaching. The practical job is whatever crisis walks through the classroom door that morning. Teachers are expected to be instructors, counselors, behavioral specialists, disciplinarians, conflict mediators, technology troubleshooters, data collectors, mandatory reporters and emergency responders. They implement individualized education programs, administer tests, document interventions, communicate with families and attend meetings about initiatives created by people who will not be in the classroom when those initiatives collide with reality. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they are still expected to teach children how to read, understand history or solve an equation.

And while the teacher’s job description kept expanding, the organizational structure above the classroom was expanding much faster. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of public-school teachers increased by 9.8 percent between 2000 and 2022. Principals and assistant principals increased by 38.8 percent. District officials and administrators increased by 53.2 percent. Instructional coordinators increased by 155.4 percent. Combine district administrators and instructional coordinators, and those positions grew by approximately 94.6 percent while the teacher workforce grew by less than ten.

That does not mean the number of superintendents and conventional central-office executives nearly doubled. Instructional coordinators account for the largest increase, and many perform necessary work involving curriculum, testing, professional development and regulatory compliance. Schools need competent principals, special-education oversight, technology support and student services. The point is not that every employee outside the classroom is unnecessary. The question is why such enormous growth above the classroom did not prevent additional responsibilities from continuing to accumulate inside it.

Did teachers receive substantially smaller classes? Did every classroom that needed an aide get one? Did schools acquire enough counselors, behavioral specialists, social workers and special-education personnel? Did teachers gain protected planning time or relief from the documentation, meetings and reporting requirements landing on their desks? The lived reality teachers describe does not sound like a profession relieved of its secondary responsibilities. It sounds like a profession collecting more of them. The bureaucracy grew above them while the burden grew around them.

I’ve noticed another apparent contradiction in school districts around my part of Pennsylvania. I cannot establish that it is a nationwide trend, but administrative salaries—particularly superintendent salaries—seem to find room to grow more consistently than teacher salaries. A superintendent contract comes up, and suddenly everyone understands market competition, talent recruitment and the importance of competitive compensation. Teachers ask for meaningful raises, and the vocabulary changes to budget pressure, fiscal responsibility and burdens on taxpayers.

Superintendents manage complicated organizations and deserve appropriate compensation. But teachers are also highly trained professionals performing increasingly complicated work. The principle that excellent people must be paid enough to attract and retain them seems to become less urgent the closer those people get to the children. When a superintendent demands market-rate compensation, it’s leadership recruitment. When teachers demand it, it’s union greed. Compensation at the top is treated as an investment in talent; compensation in the classroom is treated as an expense requiring constant justification.

Ramaswamy says union contracts make it harder to remove ineffective teachers and prevent exceptional teachers from receiving merit pay. Those concerns are not entirely imaginary. Unions sometimes defend employees who should probably be dismissed. Disciplinary processes can become unnecessarily cumbersome. Seniority schedules do not always distinguish between extraordinary and merely adequate performance. Some union leaders take political positions that many members do not share. Teachers’ unions are human institutions, and human institutions are capable of behaving badly.

But criticism of a union decision is not an argument for abolishing the union. Due process does not mean a teacher can never be fired. It means the district must document its case, follow established procedures and apply its standards consistently before taking away someone’s livelihood. Teachers do not need collective protection because every teacher is perfect. They need it because administrators, school boards, parents and politicians are not perfect either.

Merit pay sounds wonderful until somebody has to define merit. Do we use standardized-test scores? If so, how do we compare the teacher whose students begin above grade level with the teacher whose students arrive two years behind? Do we rely on principal evaluations, parent satisfaction, graduation rates or classroom observations? How do we account for poverty, disability, English-language proficiency, chronic absence and instability at home? A teacher can do extraordinary work and still produce lower numbers than someone handed every educational advantage.

A poorly designed merit system can also punish teachers willing to accept the most difficult assignments. If compensation follows measurable outcomes, avoiding students with the greatest needs becomes the rational career move. And if the state does not add money, merit pay simply redistributes scarcity: selected teachers receive more because others receive less, or because fewer teachers are employed. “Pay good teachers more” is not a policy. It is the applause line politicians use before avoiding every difficult decision necessary to make the system fair.

I don’t believe Ramaswamy hates teachers. I think his motives are primarily political. Teachers’ unions organize voters, contribute to campaigns and generally support Democrats. They oppose voucher expansion and efforts to redirect public money into private and religious schools. They negotiate limits on management authority and give individual teachers some ability to challenge curriculum mandates, improper grading pressure and politically motivated dismissal. They are not simply bargaining organizations. They are independent centers of power.

Weakening them would serve several conservative objectives simultaneously. One of the Democratic Party’s most organized constituencies would lose strength. Voucher expansion would lose a determined opponent. Administrators and political officials would gain greater control over compensation, evaluation, staffing and curriculum. And Ramaswamy would retain a perfectly engineered culture-war villain onto which Republicans can attach COVID resentment, “woke” education, parental-rights disputes, public-sector employment and academic failure. Complicated problems become politically useful when one enemy can be blamed for all of them.

The financial alignment is difficult to ignore. Jeff Yass, one of the country’s most prolific supporters of taxpayer-funded school vouchers, contributed $20 million to the super PAC backing Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign, according to Signal Cleveland. That does not prove Yass purchased Ramaswamy’s position. Ramaswamy supported school choice before the contribution, and it does not establish a quid pro quo. The contribution does not prove why Ramaswamy believes what he believes. It tells us which powerful interests expect to benefit from his election.

This is what makes the issue especially personal for me. I want my children—and every young person who feels called to teach—to enter a profession that respects their judgment, compensates their work and provides the support necessary to perform it. I want teachers held accountable. I also want administrators, school boards, legislators and governors held accountable. Accountability that only travels downward is not accountability. It is scapegoating.

Teachers did not create childhood poverty, housing instability, the youth mental-health crisis, unequal school funding or the political war over curriculum. They did not create most of the crises arriving at their classroom doors. They are simply the people expected to manage the consequences while continuing to teach everyone else’s children. Teachers’ unions did not create every problem in public education, and they cannot solve every problem either. But reform that begins by silencing teachers is unlikely to produce schools that respect their professional judgment.

I do not believe Vivek Ramaswamy hates teachers. I believe he recognizes that organized teachers are politically inconvenient. One teacher can be pressured, ignored or replaced. Teachers standing together can tell a superintendent, a school board, a governor—or a billionaire with a voucher plan—that the people inside the classroom deserve a voice in what happens there. That is not a reason to eliminate their unions. It is one of the strongest arguments for why they still need them.

SOURCES

Ramaswamy calls for eliminating teachers’ unions during his presidential campaign — https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6337570263112

Ramaswamy repeats his call to abolish teachers’ unions and accuses them of using “woke” issues to evade accountability — https://katv.com/news/nation-world/vivek-ramaswamy-renews-call-to-abolish-teachers-unions-blowing-woke-smoke-to-deflect-accountability-randi-weingarten-nea-aft-republican-gop-trump-race-2024-presidential-crisis-in-the-classroom

Ramaswamy discusses teachers’ unions, merit pay and school choice during his Ohio gubernatorial campaign — https://signalcleveland.org/vivek-ramaswamy-talks-unions-stadium-financing/

Examination of Ramaswamy’s Ohio merit-pay proposal and the political obstacles it would face — https://signalohio.org/vivek-ramaswamy-revives-merit-pay-teacher-debate-in-ohio/

Official Vivek for Ohio plan calling for rewarding “the best teachers” and expanding parental choice — https://vivekforohio.com/the-plan/

Official announcement of Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign and merit-pay proposal — https://vivekforohio.com/vivek-ramaswamy-launches-campaign-for-governor/

NCES public-school staffing data by assignment, 1949–50 through fall 2022 — https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_213.10.asp

NCES analysis of public-school teacher characteristics and inflation-adjusted base salaries — https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr/public-school-teachers

NEA 2026 national teacher-pay and per-student-spending estimates — https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank

NEA report finding that average teacher pay has fallen approximately 5% after inflation over the past decade — https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/nea-reports-show-educator-pay-falling-behind-inflation-over-past-decade-highlight-power-unions

NCES report on teachers spending their own money on classroom supplies — https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018097/index.asp

NCES national data on teacher turnover, including teachers who moved schools or left the profession — https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/slc/teacher-turnover

Vanderbilt University’s POINT experiment examining performance bonuses and student test-score gains — https://my.vanderbilt.edu/performanceincentives/research/point-experiment/

Meta-analysis examining teacher merit-pay programs and the importance of program design — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831220905580

Conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute review of the evidence surrounding teacher merit pay — https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/closer-look-research-teacher-merit-pay

Signal Ohio report documenting Jeff Yass’s second $10 million contribution to V-PAC, bringing his disclosed total to $20 million — https://signalohio.org/ohio-202