Apodaca: Education cuts reveal an ‘outrage we can’t afford to ignore’

Here’s a thought experiment: What if no one wanted to teach anymore?

Too extreme? Then I will modify the question. What if we didn’t value teachers enough, or education generally, to ensure that we had a sufficient number of well-trained educators capable of providing every child living in the U.S. with equal access to at least a satisfactory learning environment?

Some schools would be understaffed and underfunded. Many kids, particularly those in low-income areas, would fall through the cracks, their futures deeply diminished. Poverty and crime rates would increase. Health outcomes would be compromised. Some sectors of society would be stuck in a depressing generational loop of disadvantage and hardship.

We know all these outcomes are real because we see them happening, despite the valiant efforts by many people to correct course and address the problems that have long plagued public education—the problems that have led to teacher shortages in communities throughout the nation in recent years.

But now the situation is in danger of getting even worse because of the current administration’s goal of shuttering the U.S. Department of Education. It’s a move that threatens to take with it an important source of funding for schools to educate disadvantaged and disabled students, for collecting important data, and for grants and loans to college students.

Those would all be devastating losses, but let’s just focus on the latter for now. In California, the administration cancelled $148 million in grants for recruiting and training new teachers in the state. California joined in a lawsuit to try and stop the move, but the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld the cuts.

Again, this is occurring within the context of persistent teacher shortages. Districts throughout the state find it increasingly difficult to fill vacancies with trained and credentialed teachers, particularly in math, science, special education and bilingual education.

As teachers retire or leave the field for other opportunities, fewer and fewer new recruits are coming in to replace them. In the 2020-2021 school year, 26,179 college students were enrolled in teacher education. By the 2022-2023 school year, that number dwindled to 19,833.

The reasons behind the declining numbers are varied, but if you talk to any teacher in any district they will tell you that people turning away from what was once considered a valued and noble career path is hardly surprising. Teaching has become an early burnout profession.

Sure, teaching pays less than other jobs with similar required education levels, the work is intense and often draining, and many teachers must open their wallets to pay for their classroom supplies. But the biggest complaint I hear, over and over again, is that teachers are fed up with a lack of respect and an increasingly hostile work environment.

Many schools have become so desperate to fill empty slots that they have had to employ growing numbers of underprepared and substitute teachers, increase class sizes, and reduce course offerings. Not by coincidence, the shortages are worse in communities with high numbers of underprivileged students.

Now we’re faced with more chipping away at programs desperately needed to help recruit new blood into the field. Worse still, many observers believe the damage inflicted is intentional. They see the dismantling of the Department of Education as a part of a broader project to starve public schools and shift more resources to private education.

The drying up of federal aid and downplaying the importance of supporting public education hit professionals like Dr. Alison Dover hard.

A professor of secondary education at Cal State Fullerton, Dover was a first-generation college graduate and scholarship student who “came to see the massive inequalities in our world.” She has devoted her career to fighting for equal educational opportunities for all.

“I fell in love with the ways that young people use their voices and wanted to use their voices to change the world around them,” she said. But in so many instances, she witnessed the ways that societal inequities worked to hold back many students from academic achievement.

Addressing those inequities requires a Herculean effort, even when access to funding is available for programs that have been demonstrably effective. But now Dover is deeply worried about the impact of a loss of federal funding.

“I don’t know how anyone could not be,” she said.

“Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about someone wondering ‘What’s going to happen to my loan? Will I have a job in a few years?’ It produces a tremendous amount of stress.”

There’s a lot going on right now and much to worry about. I know it’s tough to focus on every problem when retirement accounts are shrinking and economists are warning about the potential for a trade war to worsen inflation and push us into recession. Not to mention that the purges at other government agencies—affecting such vital functions as weather forecasting and the containment of dangerous viruses—could literally cost lives.

Even so, the education cuts are an outrage that we can’t afford to ignore. Our vast, unwieldy system of public education is far from perfect, but it is one of the pillars of our democratic society. If we weaken it, we will be poorer for it.