A Message from My Past Self
We all need to continue to push for a better public school system, because no one will do it for us.
Going back through old posts, I found a draft that was over three years old that seems worth sharing as public schools creep past the halfway mark towards summer. I’m not going to change the original wording, which was shared on social media at the time, but I will add some links and footnotes for context.
September 23, 2020:
My response to a parent who seemed angry about our day of action1 today:
For the record, we are trying to get people to take action because we are understaffed and under-resourced. We want to be in class with students, and we don’t want more and more teachers to leave the profession.
If we could get the legislature and others to act by voting alone, we would, but we voted and it didn’t work. If we could do it with protests outside of school hours, we would, but we protested outside of school hours, and it didn’t work (largely because many of the same parents and community members who call us essential and say we are abandoning kids have actually “abandoned” those same kids when it comes to fighting for a system that is adequately funded).
So we asked school staff to be out one day to desperately try to get a tiny bit of funding FOR the kids, so they would have closer to enough teachers and nurses (which the Senate bill also funded) to make schools a little safer.
We shouldn’t have to call out of work to do that, but we do, because at the end of the day teachers seem to be the only organized group looking out for the well-being of kids in school. If more would join us, we could be at school, with kids, where we want to be, while others fight this battle.
Imagine if our communities had said to teachers, “There are only 50,000 of you in the state. There are a few million of us. We’ll make the calls. We’ll demand better funding, PPE, a school nurse in every school, and enough funding that we can attract and retain enough teachers.”
27% of teachers surveyed last week2 said they planned to quit their current job, so taking one personal day seemed worth it to try to avoid that.
Since I wrote this, South Carolina has continued to break record after record in numbers of teacher departures and vacancies. Rather than listen to teachers, legislators and other state officials have continued to break, or ignore through proviso, the state’s own funding law, which requires teacher pay to meet or exceed the Southeastern average. They have continued to offer, at best, piecemeal fixes to small parts of the larger problems of working conditions and morale, while spending undue time on legislation that targets and villainizes teachers, school librarians, and other school staff.
I don’t think it’s because they don’t know how to respond. The research is pretty clear on what works, in the big picture. (Hint: paying people more is helpful; blaming them for all of society’s problems and suggesting that they are brainwashing their students is not.) Rather, it’s that the political narrative that is most convenient for many of our elected and appointed officials and their financial and political backers is that public school is a fundamentally flawed endeavor, best replaced by some kind of alternative, for-profit system. That they also know there will never be such a system which will serve the millions of students in public schools— including the approximately 800,000 in South Carolina public schools— is also obvious, and speaks to the lack of authentic engagement with the problem.
Thankfully, since 2020, I do think part of what I was yearning for has come into clearer focus: Many parents, students, and community members have been showing up to advocate for schools, for intellectual freedom, and for what students need. I have seen them pack committee hearings and State Board of Education Meetings, flood the mailboxes and inboxes of officials, and advocate for improvements to the system in a thousand small ways. I believed in 2020, and believe even more strongly now, that this is the only way kids in our state will get anything close to a fair shake.
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SC for Ed called on educators and supporters to take an approved personal day to draw attention to the growing crisis in teacher retention and recruitment. Local news media focused on the fact that the Legislature had reneged on promised pay raises, and that was certainly a factor, but the bigger picture was and continues to be that the state has not prioritized having enough employees in school buildings to safely and effectively function. This problem continued to increase, with the most recent numbers from CERRA showing, once again, record numbers of teacher vacancies in the state.
On behalf of SC for Ed, in September 2020 I surveyed as many educators as I could to get a sense of the way school districts and the state were handling the fallout of the pandemic. The results of the study (available here) show that almost 28% of the 4,026 respondents planned to leave their current jobs at that time. 15% of respondents said they planned to leave the teaching profession altogether. For context, in 2020 CERRA reported 699 certified/ teacher vacancies; in 2023, the number had increased to 1,613 vacancies. At the time, most districts had chosen to freeze salaries in response to the legislature’s decision to freeze the minimum salary schedule during the pandemic. At the time, House Speaker Murrell Smith argued there was not enough funding, although even at the time he acknowledged the state had over a $100 million budget surplus. By August 2020, the state had a projected $775 million budget surplus, and yet there still had been no move to unfreeze salaries.
Steve, the situation is even more complex for those of us trying to recruit education candidates at the post-secondary level. Higher education schools and departments of education along with specific education degree programs are closing or down-sizing at alarming rates. We just are not going to have teachers to place or replace in the classrooms.