when i last worked in Minneapolis Public Schools in 2017 (sped paraprofessional), one of the special ed teachers asked me (as they often do) if I was considering becoming a teacher. When I told her I wasn’t sure, her response surprised me. She told me that no one should go into teaching right now, because she felt that the public school system was so broken and nothing would change until the pool of cheap teachers dried up. She and I had both seen overpaid school admin make countless poor decisions that hurt our students more than they helped them. She referred to them as “lawsuit dodgers,” because every decision they made seemed to be weighed only on that basis. The way she saw it, as long as there continued to be a large pool of cheap, college-educated candidates for teachers, the school admins would continue to throw teachers and staff and students under the bus any time they thought it might help the district avoid a lawsuit.

Of course, the “public school” question is always more complicated than one answer can address. As this article mentions, the poor conditions in public schools are by design, and the designers have the goal of eliminating public schools overall so that only private schools remain. If would-be teachers are pushed away by the poor conditions and pay and schools have no one to hire, then that ultimately helps the mission to fully privatize K-12 education. I’m not saying that teachers and staff should just put up with shitty conditions because they’re hurting the country. I’m just pointing out that the problem is more complicated than most laypeople can understand, and this is why the rich are winning.