Does School Choice Hurt Teachers?

Mairead Elordi: Welcome to Tough Questions with Robert Enlow, where we tackle the biggest myths in education and we give you the real story. Today’s tough question, does school choice hurt teachers? Robert, thank you so much for coming on.

Robert Enlow: Thanks for having me, and it’s a great question.

Mairead Elordi: Yeah, this is a question that we get a lot. Some people say school choice takes funding or jobs away from public school teachers. Why do people think the school choice hurts teachers?

Robert Enlow: So I think they confuse the idea that school choice hurts teachers with their thoughts that school choice hurts public education in general, right? And in fact, school choice is very helpful to teachers, gives them more power over their classroom, more ability to control their own finances. One of the things that’s happening as a result of the ESA movement is teacher ESAs, right?

The idea of creating teacher savings accounts. So there’s been a whole movement happening now with school choice to empower teachers by having greater opportunities. So the challenge about it hurting teachers is really a misunderstanding of people who say it’s hurting public schools.

And it’s not doing either of those things. In effect, it’s helping teachers. And we know from every survey that we can tell out there that teachers are in a very pessimistic mood right now about education, right?

The state of education in their mind is not great. According to our polling with Morning Consult, only 26 percent of teachers think that the education is on the right track nationwide. Only 22 percent of public school teachers are net promoters, meaning they would recommend teaching to their friend or colleague.

Those are some pretty seriously scary numbers for our educators. And school choice, the power of school choice, and parental school choice in particular, is the power to give teachers back their agency in education, right? We should be driving money to the people closest to kids, and that’s families and educators.

And public schools don’t do that at all, frankly, right? They take money and keep it further away. And we think school choice should drive it to families and to educators.

Mairead Elordi: And now, what are the main concerns you have heard from teacher unions or education leaders? And is there any truth to those concerns, or can they all be debunked?

Robert Enlow: So, one of the big concerns is, okay, we still have to turn the lights on, we still have to hire teachers, we still have to do that, all the sort of mechanics of the operation of the system. Well, okay, my argument to that is pretty simple. If that were the case, then you would find in every state that doesn’t have a school choice program, no changes in sort of teaching structures and levels.

But they change all the time, right? So, school districts move, and they get bigger, they get smaller. There’s all sorts of data showing that school districts have modified and changed employment over time.

I was just in Texas, and around Austin, there are 16 school districts, right? And only two of those school districts have seen declining enrollment in the last 20 or so years. And yet, both of those districts increase the number of total employees.

So, this is before school choice. So, there’s no connection. The fear is that you’re going to lose teachers their jobs.

And that’s clearly not what happens. There’s no evidence of that in school choice. Ben Scafidi has done a ton of work around this at Kennesaw State with EdChoice to show that the number of non-teaching staff is now more than the number of teaching staff in America, and in some cases, quite dramatically so.

And so, look, if we keep driving money away from educators and driving it into the system as opposed to towards families and educators, we’re going to continue to have a problem. From every bit of available data, teachers are actually benefited from school choice, not harmed by school choice. And this is what we know to be the case.

In every single state where there’s school choice programs, school districts get more money, right? They have to. A child leaving a traditional public school to go to a private school leaves all their property tax behind.

And so, the argument that teachers are going to get hurt is really a false argument. And in fact, they get benefited by school choice.

Mairead Elordi: Now, just diving into the data here, comparing teachers in public schools to teachers in choice environments, what do we know about what the research says about whether teachers in choice environments have more freedom or satisfaction than those in public schools?

Robert Enlow: Well, that data has been pretty clear for a long time, right? Families, educators in private schools love the flexibility and the freedom. They love the ability to control their classroom.

Look, let’s be clear. There’s a lot of challenging things going on in education right now, and teachers deserve all of our respect and all of our resources that we can get to them. It is our belief that school choice does a better job of that than the traditional system.

But there are lots and lots of issues, and teachers are the ones on the front line facing them. So, we do know that when teachers have more, they say that they have more freedom in private schools. They say that they have more flexibility in private and charter schools.

There’s a lot more satisfaction in private and charter schools than there are in traditional schools in general. But look, our goal here is to make sure that teachers are empowered in every single school system. And we think that the best way to do that is to give parents more choices.

Mairead Elordi: And would you say that that’s reflected in teacher turnover and burnout in traditional versus choice settings, too?

Robert Enlow: Yeah. Also, I mean, I think what’s happening in America is we are in the midst of shifting how we deliver education. You know, for 150 years or so, a little bit longer than that, so from the early 1840s onwards, we’ve created this sort of common school system where you teacher in front of a classroom, very mechanistic, very sort of old-school factory-like, right?

And I think COVID really changed that, and the delivery model is really being altered. Teachers are now doing micro-schools. They’re doing these small settings.

Families are doing co-ops. There’s a great awakening, I think, going on in education, and it’s going on among teachers, too, right? There’s a great awakening of teachers saying, I want more freedom.

I want more power. I want more flexibility. I want the ability to run my classrooms the way I want, and that’s why I support ESAs.

It is really interesting in our polling how high the support is for education savings accounts among teachers, and I think they see that flexibility and freedom being a really positive thing. So I think we’re in the midst of this sort of dynamic shift in how we deliver education, and I think that’s going to cause some disruption, and I think that’s good that we’re being disrupted because, look, getting families and educators together at a closer, more direct level where dollars follow the kids to a teacher of their choice or to a small setting of their choice, that’s only good for education.

So I think as this sort of dynamic shift continues, as parents want more and more options, as the idea of a one-size-fits-all school system sort of fades into the background, I think teachers are only going to benefit.

Mairead Elordi: It’s such a surprising data point, I think, to the critics that teachers support ESAs, and then we’re also seeing they support the teacher savings accounts, too. I think that’s something critics really wouldn’t expect.

Robert Enlow: Yeah. I mean, look, it is shocking when people do what is enlightening in their, as Milton Friedman called it, in their enlightened self-interest, right? So teachers want the ability to control some of the account, the money that comes into their classroom.

Like, I’ve always said this, assuming my math is good anymore. Let’s say you had a class of 25, right, and that each of those kids got $15,000 per kid, right? Let’s say you had a class of 25 kids, and they each got $15,000.

That’s $375,000 per classroom. Let’s say that the, let’s give a generous thing, that the teacher salary and benefits for a teacher is $75,000. That means 20% benefits, and they get their salary.

So that’s $300,000. Then let’s say that the classroom is 1,000 square feet at $25 a square foot, which is what you pay in the highest seats. That’s $25,000 more.

So that’s $275,000 less. Then let’s say that the teacher needs, heck, let’s call it $50,000 worth of versus material in the classroom. Well, that’s $225,000 left.

You’ve got to ask yourself as a teacher, why is my classroom getting $225,000 that’s not coming into that classroom? And if you’re a teacher and you’re seeing that, you’ve got to be mad, and you’ve got to be saying there’s a better way to do things.

Mairead Elordi: Yeah, absolutely. Now, we’ve talked about some of the concerns. What would you say if you were speaking to a public school teacher who’s worried about losing their job?

What would you tell them?

Robert Enlow: I would tell every teacher what I tell them every time. First of all, thank you for being a teacher. Thank you for doing that.

It is such an important job. And the second thing is, fight hard for your ability to control your classroom and control the money around your classroom, and we’ll be there by you, helping you, and supporting you every single chance we can. The goal here is to not say to teachers you should be worried about losing your job, but that choice can come alongside and make your job easier, more effective, and more beneficial to you.

And I think that’s one of the challenges we face is this old school idea that teachers think that school choice is not a positive thing. What teachers think is they want to educate kids. What the unions think is that they don’t like school choice.

And the unions don’t like school choice because it means they don’t control the dollars. When you control the means of production, you control how things are paid for and run. And teachers unions want to control the means of production of education, and that does not benefit educators for the greatest part, right?

And so I think what we want to see is school choice being more beneficial and more positive for educators down the road.

Mairead Elordi: Absolutely. Well, Robert, thank you so much. Thanks for tackling this with us.

We will be back next time, and we’ll take on another tough question and break down the facts from the fiction. Thanks, Robert.

Robert Enlow: Thanks for having me.