VA: Ideas About How To Recruit and Retain Teachers

As squawking about the teacher "shortage" many states have developed methods to either take advantage of the situation ("Now we can finally break the teachers union and public education by letting any warm body stand in front of a classroom because, hey, there's a shortage") or try to figure out a way to actually solve the problem.

In Virginia, a coalition appears to be taking a shot at the latter approach. The Virginia Public Education Coalition is a group of a dozen Virginia organizations encompassing public school professional groups, school boards, principals, superintendents and even the ASCD and PTA. Collectively, they've come up with some ideas about how to attract and retain folks in Virginia teaching positions.

Is their plan a good one? It makes a nifty flyer. And can other states learn from it? Welll…..

The plan ignores some of the bigger reasons to avoid taking a job there. For instance, Virginia is a right-to-work state, meaning that a teacher in Virginia may, if she teaches in one of the areas where the union has been fully neutered, find herself with little or no employment protection or voice in her teaching conditions. If Virginia wants to attract more teachers, they have to recognize "We make sure them unions keep quiet" is not a winner. In 2012 a study was jointly produced by the right-tilted Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now, the "action" wing of Democrats for Education Reform, a group of hedge fundie privatizers masquerading as Democrats. The study ranked the relative strength of each state's teachers union; Virginia was 47th. Proposed slogan for Virginia teacher recruitment program: "Welcome to Virginia, teacher-- you're on your own!"

So they missed some parts. Did they do well with the rest? They talk about three areas, for each of three areas.

FIRST- RECRUITING

Compensation

According to some studies, Virginia has the largest teacher pay gap (gap between teacher pay and pay for other college-educated folks) in the country. Depending on who's counting, Virginia ranks thirty-somethingth in the nation for teacher pay. But the plan calls for more complicated steps than a simple, "Pay teachers more," though it does start with a wordier version of that, a la "establish compensation and benefits" that attract beginners and encourage them to stay. Well, yeah.

Fix the recession-era budget language that caps state funding for support staff, which would both pay support staff more and free up local dollars to spend on teachers.

Reform student loans, including loan forgiveness, and try a few other things to make it less expensive to become a teacher. Fix the busted formula use to calculate "prevailing practice' for teacher salaries. And an interesting idea-- come up with some state-funded supports for student teachers during their semester, like actual pay and housing allotments.

Preparation and Support

Here we run into trouble. "Ensure that the competencies included in the Profile of a Virginia Leader and Profile of a Virginia Educator are reflected in Virginia's educator preparation programs." Those profiles appear to be works in progress, building the structure for a new evaluation system, and it just all looks very jargon-filled and that certainly has its place, but it's no substitute for the kinds of preparation and support that new teachers need, which is more of the "which of these questions should I use top discuss Hamlet and how can I get that discussion to actually happen and what do I do about the kid who is being not quite but close to insubordinate to me face every day?" The challenge of the dailiness of teacher life, particularly new teacher life, is not the challenge of philosophical underpinnings or global standards, but how to deal with the specific classroom actions needed to make some education happen in the next forty minutes. This is why mentoring programs, when done properly, are powerful.

Virginia has a grow-your-own teacher program, which is basically about starting recruitment when students are still in high school and grooming them to return to their old school. It's a process that makes sense because so many teachers end up teaching close to home anyway. The plan says to take a look at the program and see how it's working.

Third and worst, the plan calls to "initiate multiple options for accreditation" of programs. "allowing for options that respond to the teacher shortage and offer opportunities to diversify the teacher pipeline." Yes, Virginia happily welcomes Teach for America temps, and has since 2013. If by "diversify," the proposal means "get more non-white teachers in the classroom," that's on point, but it seems more likely that it means "support more ways to fast-track amateurs into classrooms."

There are plenty of reasons not to like that idea. It's not just that it shuffles a lot of warm, unprepared bodies into classrooms. Those folks, beyond not pulling their own weight, also extract a toll on the system. There's the cost of churn, of being a student in a school in which "teachers" just keep coming and going. If you're saying, "Well, at least we got someone in that classroom for that year," you don't get it-- this is a short-term solution that creates long-term damage to the system at a cost to all the future students who will pass through it. These churning bodies also put extra strain on the rest of the staff who have to pick up after them. And finally, I don't understand why some folks still don't get the fundamental insult of TFA. You're a person who really wanted to be a teacher, went to college for it, went through student teaching, paid your dues, prepped hard and hoped to land a job, and now here comes somebody who just waltzed through five weeks of superficial training and they sit in a classroom just like you, and you ask yourself "Was I just the victim of some huge scam? Why did I bother with any of that?"

Why make it a point to say that you're going to make sure that teacher prep programs reflect all your lovely competencies if you are also going to say that you want to come up with a bunch of ways to circumvent those programs?

Working Conditions

Establish a state "clearinghouse" of available jobs, with a common application. As someone who spent his first summer out of college applying to about seventy different districts, I say, "Bravo!"

They repeat the part about compensation here.

They propose a career ladder that doesn't require teachers to go into administration. This always sounds like a swell idea if 1) it doesn't involve lowering everyone's salary to make room for ladder-climbing "raises" and 2) if you can pry administrations' fingers off of the power needed to make any of these ladder steps actually mean anything.

"Provide an administrative framework" that gets school leaders to support effective teaching rather than just monitoring compliance. Yes, well. First the state has to actually mean it, because the compliance mindset starts there and just trickles down. The someone is going to have to fire a bunch of administrators who have compliance mindset so hardwired into their brain that nothing short of a lobotomy will remove it. Good luck with all of these.

NEXT- INDUCTION

Compensation

Yeah, still need more.

Preparation and Support

Update teacher prep programs to reflect all those profiles (including the Profile of a Graduate). Not sure how this helps the induction of a new teacher.

Then there's some noise about looking over the guidelines for mentoring and coaching and make sure it's all "grounded in research" and "evidence-based practice" which would mean a lot more if it weren't coming from a state that has welcomed Teach for America, a program which is neither research- nor evidence-based. Also, if your research and evidence is based on standardized test scores, it's junk and useless (especially to every inductee who isn't teaching reading or math).

Working Conditions

Get experienced teachers to be mentors. Duh. Both mentor and mentee should have reduced teaching load so they have time to do the mentoring thing. Which is absolutely correct, but how does that actually work? Will the district hire a 1/2-day teacher to pick up the slack for a year (and if so, who's mentoring that person). Or will the district absorb the slack by enlarging class sizes, turning mentoring into more work for everybody? Or will the district just take the same old route of assigning mentors based on which teachers have the same prep period as the newby? I mean, this reduced schedule is a good idea. It's the right idea. But it's also an expensive, schedule-snarking idea. I expect many dragged feet.

Improve professional development. Yes, please.

"Establish avenues" for new teachers to develop relationships with others in the school. Again, important and easy to say. Too many teacher first years are shaped by whoever the newby happens to eat lunch with. But hard to do, and therefor hard to get districts to do.

FINALLY- RETENTION

Compensation

Fix that pay scale problem where you hit the middle of the scale and your wages stagnate. And do that magic career ladder thing again. Really, there's nothing mysterious about the compensation piece of all this. Everyone knows exactly what needs to be done; it's just that mostly they don't want to. So we get all these conversations on the theme of, "Can we pay them more without it actually costing the district more money?" The Magic Beans school of improved compensation.

Preparation and Support

Virginia is going to update that evaluation to match the profile things. And the evaluation will suck less, and emphasize growth, and are competency-based--uh-oh. Here comes a multi-item checklist that may or may not have anything to do with actual good teaching.

Make the professional development better, somehow. Use evidence-based stuff. (Is competency-based education or evaluation evidence based? No? Get some more magic beans in here!)

Also, get a teacher and school administrator advisory board to work with the General Assembly, Secretary of Education, and Board of Education. That way the General Assembly, Secretary of Education, and Board of Education can look like they're listening to actual educators without having to budge from their comfy offices and meeting rooms.

Working Conditions  

Reduce emphasis on standardized testing for accountability. Ding ding ding! We have a winner. "Recognize that deep and personalized learning requires that teachers have more autonomy to design their instructional practices." If you could get the legislature to actually understand this, you wouldn't need much of anything else.

Weight admin supervisory time toward newbys. In other words, give the new teachers more help, and leave your veterans alone.

More avenues for professional relationships. This sounds cheesy, but it's not. I taught in a district where for years the philosophy was that any minute a teacher spent anywhere other than in front of students in a classroom was a minute wasted. I barely knew what other people in my department were doing, let alone teachers in other parts of the building. It got in the way of becoming a better teacher, both in my general practice and for those specific students in those years. Teachers need the chance to talk to other teachers.

Let teachers own their own professional development. Help leaders develop cultures based on shared responsibility, vision, values, and culture.

Honestly, there's some real junk in this plan, but this third section of the third section is worth its weight in gold. Now if they can just get someone in positions of power to listen.

For any state interested in approaches other than wishful thinking or warm body snatching or letting their public system collapse, this Virginia plan is a place to start. It gets some things very wrong, but some other things very right.

Just remember, if your state is experiencing something that people are calling a teacher shortage, that is not a failure of teacher prep programs to produce teachers, and it's not a failure of gritless millenials and it's not a failure of education to be sufficiently inspiring-- it's a failure of your state's legislative and educational leaders to make the jobs appealing and rewarding enough to convince people to take them and stay in them. Every useful discussion among such leaders about trouble filing teacher positions has to start with a good long look in the mirror. After that, you can take a look at documents like this one.

Big Brother U & The Surveillance State

If you missed this article at Washington Post about on campus surveillance of students-- well, congratulations on having one less troubling thought in your head over the past week. Because the surveillance is continuing its slow, steady advance. Now technology lets colleges monitor their students 24/7. Yay.

This particular article focuses on a company called SpotterEDU, and they are creepy as hell. The main part of their is a quick, easy technofix for taking attendance. Students are required to download the app (this also means, though the article is so tech forward it doesn't even address these issues, that students are also required to carry an up-to-date cellphone and keep it fully charged at all times) which then "checks in" with Bluetooth beacons in classrooms on campus (or anywhere else the beacons are planted).

Bluetooth beacons were supposed to be the Thing Of The Year in 2016, the tech that was going to put coupons on our phones when we approached a certain product and which would unlock doors as we walked closer. As with virtually every big tech promise of the last twenty years, it hasn't exactly arrived yet. If the function of Bluetooth in my home is any indicator, I'm guessing we have a few bugs to work out yet.

That seems to be the case for some students, who report in the article that they get in fights with the tech about whether or not they were really absent or late to class. yay, computer technology-- usually almost doing of what it's supposed to do, sort of. As the SpotterEDU Terms of Service say, its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”

But a professor in the article notes that this method of techno attendance taking has caused more students to show up to class, which raises an important question. Why did they previously think they didn't have to? Because as a lowly high school teacher, I always assumed that if a student could miss my class a whole without it having any apparent effect on what she was learning, then I'm the one who must be doing something wrong. If I can skip your class 50% of the time and still get a great grade, I'm not the one who's screwing up. But the colleges, and some professors, like this tech because it "nudges" students to be more well-behaved and compliant.

If we were just talking about classroom attendance, this would be bad enough, but the SpotterEDU site touts this as "An automated attendance monitoring and early alerting platform." Because our go-to justification for this kind of oppressive tracking, whether we're talking Florida's police state state or Big Brother University, is that This Is For Your Own Good. This is how we'll catch shooters and thwart suicides. We'll just watch all of you young folks all the time, for your own good. Even though there's still not a shred of evidence that this kind of tracking does any good.

Sadly, Bluetooth-based monitoring isn't remotely this 

obvious. Just a little box on the wall, too boring to make a

good pic for a post.

Who's good is it for, really? Another line from the SpotterEDU site is "decrease friction between those helping students succeed." It's for the People In Charge (who are also, not coincidentally, the ones reserving the right to decide what "succeed" will mean. These are tools for lazy managers, for the boss who keep thinking that his job would be so much easier if the people he's in charge of would behave the way he wants them to and stop exercising so much independent thought.

There are other troubling aspects. Colleges can split the tracked students into sub groups like freshmen or minority students. Where is the data stored, and for how long, and under what sort of security. And always, the usual sort of mission creep-- "We'll collect data to deal with this specific issue" becomes "now that we have this big pile of data, I bet we could sift through it do X" followed by "I see you have a big valuable pile of data sitting there-- can I make you an offer so that I can use it? Strictly for the students's own good, of course..."

At one point, one of the interviewees raises the big question-- who exactly does this serve? What sort of utility do students get from allowing themselves to be tracked, imperfectly, everywhere? How does this help them take their place as educated leaders in an adult world? The answer of course is that it doesn't do any of those things-- it lets a tech company make a sale and some college administrators make their own jobs a bit easier.

Even if you don't have a Washington Post subscription, this is worth using up one of your free reads for. It's alarming and disturbing, not just that this kind of thing exists, but that there are people who think it's a great idea, and that we have an entire generation growing up to think that being tracked 24/7 is perfectly normal and okay.

Merry Christmas

To those of you who celebrate the holiday, best wishes. (For those of you who don't, best wishes). Here's the Curmudgucation Institute's annually curated selection of Christmas music that's not just the same damn thing the radio's been playing for weeks. Enjoy.



I've taken off a couple of days to spend with board of directors and the rest of the institute stakeholders who are in town. I'll be back with the usual education shenanigans shortly.

WI: Pre-K Cyberschool Shenanigans

A few Wisconsin legislators have a dumb idea for a law. They'd like to spend $1.5 million on cyberschool-- on line computerized instruction-- for pre-schoolers.

This is just layers and layers of dumb.

First, cyberschools in general have proven to be lousy. Spectacularly lousy-- and that's in a study run by an organization sympathetic to charters.. Students would be better off spending a year playing video games lousy. So bad that even other charter school promoters won't defend them lousy. In short, outside very specific sets of special needs, there is no evidence that cyberschooling works.

Second, while there is still considerable debate, the general consensus is that screen time for littles should be somewhere between very small amounts and none at all.

Third, academic studies are a lousy idea for littles, unlikely to yield real benefits even as they may create real harm.

But education committee chair Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt is either unaware or unconcerned-- well, I don't know how he can be either. The man has an elementary education degree (from Martin Luther College) and taught for some time at Winnebago Lutheran Academy. Now, yes-- MLC has as its purpose the cranking out of witnesses to the Lutheran faith (and playing sports). And yes, WLA is a private religious school that exists to "glorify God" (and play sports). But I've known plenty of Lutherans, and there's nothing about being Lutheran that would preclude knowing that cyberschools and academic instruction for littles is a lousy idea.

The program would be used fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, and would be piloted in a combination of rural and urban districts and would be added on top of the state's existing program for four year olds.

Thiesfeldt has some fairly specific ideas about what the program should provide.

The vendor would be required to show past success in similar endeavors; provide instruction in reading, math and science; design a program to improve a child’s transition to kindergarten; require parental engagement including interaction with a learning coach; evaluate a child’s growth; and provide internet and a computer at no cost to families that do not have them.

Also it would help increase reading scores. Because getting standardized test scores up should totally be the focus of pre-school education.

How did he come up with such a clear picture of what he wanted. Well,  he just happened to see a presentation (aka "sales pitch") from Waterford.org, the outfit that is an industry leader in infliucting cyberschool on preschoolers through their widely adopted UPSTART program. So, to recap, he's seen a pitch from one company that works in this field, and he's written a law tailored exactly to that company. I hope the marketing guy for UPSTART is being paid really well.

UPSTART popped up in Utah a few years back, a state that was investing $0.00 in pre=school education. In Utah they also used the business model of making friends with a legislator,State Senator Howard Stephenson, and his explanation was not inspiring:

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being smart.”

I'm more inclined to go with this alternative theory.

“It’s wishful thinking by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the director of the National ­Institute for Early Education ­Research at Rutgers University. “We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t actually want to spend the money.”

Sadly, UPSTART has been spreading like a weed-- a big, cheap weed. Indiana. Mississippi. They benefit from, again, the cheap, plus the shiny computers, plus periodic outburst of uncritical just-run-the-news-release press. The idea of plunking three and four years olds in front of computers to do academic work has become widespread enough that Defending The Early Years actually took the time to write a report pointing out that putting pre-schoolers in front of computers to learn to read is a terrible idea. 

Waterford's website trumpets "Do you know 2.2 million children do not have access to public-funded early education?" which is a compelling statistic, except that it compels me to agitate for public-funded pre-K for all and not a cheap, unproven, bad idea of a software program. But it's really shiny, and it promises a cheap technosolution; the TED-linked Audacious Project handed Waterford $20 million. Waterford calls their program "Award-winning" and boasts that their DIBELS scores (that's the test in which small children decode nonsense syllables, Exhibit A in "When phonics goes too far"). UPSTART also "improves cognitive outcomes," and, no, sorry, but no, you have no idea whether or not it does any such thing.

Their business model, as we've seen, seems to focus on getting paid with tax dollars, which allows them to market their product as "free"! Oh, and they're "non-profit," so you know-- no, you don't know anything other than there are no stockholders making money here. As multiple non-profits have shown, "Non-profit" and "intensely focused on making money" are not mutually exclusive.

Ah, well. It appears that Wisconsin is poised to join the states that would rather get pre-K cheap than right. Bad news for Wisconsin's children, good news for the UPSTART marketing team. Ka-ching.

ICYMI: The Nights Before Christmas Edition (12/22)

Down to the wire (or in some cases, past the wire-- my extended family gathered at my folks yesterday for our holiday celebration). But there's still plenty to read from the last week.

The Science of Writing

"Science is not a hammer." Paul Thomas with some thoughts about the teaching of writing and the science that is (or is not) behind it and science's place in the grander scheme.

Whatever Happened to EdTPA? It's Still Here and Still Messed up

A new study suggests that EdTPA shouldn't be used for, well, much of anything. Fred Klonsky, who's been following EdTPA for a while has some thoughts (and some links) about the study and the program.

How Ending Behavior Rewards Helped One School Focus on Student Motivation and Character  

KQED makes a visit to Jersey to revisit the question of whether or not t's a good idea to reward students for behaving well. Daniel Pink makes an appearance.

Gary Larson Is Back, Sort Of.

Important news from the New York Times-- The Far Side is getting digitized-- and there night even be new panels.

Demand Pennsylvania Reform Its Charter Laws    

Steve Singer reminds Pennsylvanians that there is some legislation just waiting for public comment. A must read for PA residents.

The Lanes That Divide

The Washington Post looks at how the drawing of school district boundaries is still a potent weapon against integration.

American students aren't getting smarter-- and testing is to blame  

Testing expert Daniel Koretz is at NBC, explaining that high stakes testing has been a damaging crock. This should inspire you to buy Koretz's book.

Seven Reasons Teachers Trust Each Other More Than...Well, Anyone.  

You should be reading Nancy Flanagan regularly, but she is particularly on target this week, talking about how teachers value the judgment of other teachers more than, say, self-professed internet ed experts.

Reporters Faced Resistance At Every Level  

Reporters from the Record and NorthJersey.com have done some good work writing about charter schools, but this article shows how one of that reporting came easily. Another reminder that charter transparency and accountability are not really things.

Why Education Reform Is Not Working  

The New York Times runs a few responses to its piece about the Core's tenth birthday. They are not complimentary.

The Myth of Charter School Innovation  

The notion that charters are laboratories of educational innovation just won't die. nancy Bailey explains why it should.

OH: Voucher Crisis Looming

When does a voucher program lose support? When it comes for the wealthy white districts.

Ohio has quietly been working to become the Florida of North when it comes to education, with an assortment of school choice programs that are like a cancerous growth gnawing away at the health of the public school system. But now, due to a collection of lawmaker choices, the privatized schools of Ohio have dramatically advanced their bid to consume public education. And somer lawmakers have noticed.

"Hey! I would like to speak to a manager!"

Ohio has followed the basic template for implementing choice-- get your choicey foot in the door with some modest programs that are strictly to "save" poor, underserved students from "failing" schools. Then slowly expand. Only, somehow, somebody screwed up the "slowly" part.

Next year, the number of "failing" districts in Ohio will jump from 500 to 1,200. The voucher bill for many districts will jump by millions of dollars. (If you like a good graphic, here's a tweet that lays it out.) And the list of schools whose residents are eligible for the EdChoice program include districts that are some of the top-rated districts in the state.

It might not matter that top districts are now voucher-eligible-- after all, parents can just say, "Why go to private school when my public school is great?"-- except for one other wrinkle. Next year ends the requirement that voucher students be former public school students. In other words, next year parents who have never, ever sent their children to public schools will still get a few thousand dollars from the state. Districts will lose a truckload of money without losing a single student.

House Speaker Larry Householder has presided over plenty of choice expansion and school privatization (and been praised by Jeb Bush's right-hand lady of privatization, Patty Levesque, for it), but even he sees some problems with the current trajectory, and has declared that something has to be done, toot de suite. Mind you, his phrase is "soften the blow" and not "stop the funneling of public tax dollars to private schools." He has previously proposed an assortment of softening agents, but he seems to have increased his sense of urgency. “We have failed badly as far as our report card system and our testing system in this state,” Householder told reporters in his Columbus office.

Meanwhile, February 1 kicks off the EdChoice application period for next year.

Householder thinks the problem is the school grading system, and that whole thing needs to be tweaked. By a coincidence, a committee report released Monday suggested that Ohio needs to do away with the business of giving A-F letter grades for schools for a variety of reasons, though personally I think "It's dumb and doesn't tell you anything useful about the school being graded" is more than enough. In the annals of accountability ideas, A-F grades for schools is one of the worst; it provides schools with zero actionable data. The only thing it's good for is a blunt instrument to set policies for closing down public schools or chicken littling your way to pro-privatization policies ("Look at all these public schools with a low grade!!"). A-F grades are not about helping schools improve; they're about punishing them, gutting them, and replacing them. Of the policy groups involved in the committee, only two argued in favor of the A-F grades. One is the Ohio Excels, a group of Ohio business folk who have decided that they should get to set education policy in Ohio, because they want to. The other was Fordham Institute, the right-tilted, reform-pushing, charters-in-Ohio-running thinky tank.

Meanwhile, Sen. Teresa Fedor doesn't believe the Ohio GOP is serious about fixing the coming voucherpocalypse, noting that A) they've known this was coming since the budget, complete with various last-min ute sneaky voucher addendums was passed and B) they've been called back to session about a week before the Feb. 1 opening of voucher season.

So we'll have to wait and see. It could still happen; the Ohio legislature is aces when it comes top speedy stealth legislation, and when they really want to get it done, the last minute is thirty more seconds than they need. On the other hand, the only thing that seems to be wrong here from the reformster perspective is that the voucher expansion came too quickly and may potentially alarm too many people to whom legislators might have to actually listen. Again, nothing about this expansion is out of line with a voucher rollout as a matter of substance or policy; the only problem is the speed with which it's barreling into Certain Neighborhoods. Someone cranked up the heat on that pot of frogs a little too swiftly.

Would Medicare-For-All Come With An Education Bonus?

This is the least-read thing I've ever written for Forbes, but I still wonder about the issue. So let  me put it out there again.

The expansion of Medicare coverage as a path to universal healthcare for the U.S. has unleashed a great deal of debate from think tanks to water coolers. One of the biggest questions remain—how much would it actually cost, and what would the average citizen pay?




The answer to the first question is “a whole lot (but remember--we currently pay a large number of whole lots. The second part-- well, there are many possible plans floating around at the moment. Some argue that the overall cost of healthcare in the U.S. would come down, meaning savings for some folks and fewer profits for others. The government costs would go way up, necessitating increased taxes for everyone. But, argue supporters, the increased tax burden would be offset by the end of deductibles and co-pays; there’s also the hope, under some versions, that employers would save on healthcare costs and some of those savings could be passed on as wage increases. Plus, the extra wrinkle that businesses would no longer be able to use health care as leverage against striking workers.

There is one other wrinkle that seems to draw little or no discussion.

Public school employees, like other citizens, get their healthcare from their employers. But unlike other citizens, public school employees have their healthcare paid for by taxpayers. According to the Kaiser Foundation, the cost of an employer-provided insurance policy has topped $20,000. District-provided insurance has stayed in that neighborhood. That means that in small a school district with just 200 employees, even if the district has been paying $15,000 per employee, Medicare-for-All could potentially provide as much as $3 million savings to local taxpayers. That could be immediately translated into lower real estate taxes, or higher wages or better facilities, or something.

One of the great sticking points for retirement is often how to cover insurance until the retiree is old enough for Medicare; this results in some pricey retirement incentive programs in some districts. Those could go away under Medicare-for-All, providing more savings to school district taxpayers.

There could be additional non-financial benefits as well. Contract negotiations often run aground over benefits, even as increased health insurance costs give teachers “invisible” raises (the school district spends more per teacher, but the teacher never sees it). Taking health insurance off the table could make contract negotiations just a bit easier and clearer.

Heaven only knows what Medicare-for-All (or Mostly-All) could eventually look like, nor what it would look like after it miraculously passed through the House and Senate, But an education bonus could be part of that picture, and with it, maybe even some real estate tax relief. It may not be a major feature of health care policy, but an instant couple of million being freed up is not nothing.