The Great Exodus
As a substitute teacher in the local school system, I’ve witnessed how exhausted teachers are. According to a recent Gallup Poll, 44% of American K-12 teachers reported feeling burned out often or always. A survey by the National Education Association (NEA) revealed that 67% of educators consider burnout to be a “very serious” issue.
As a result, teachers are quitting. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 300,000 public school teachers and other related staff left the education field from February 2020-May 2022. One NPR story reported that over half of teachers say they will retire sooner than originally planned. Devlin Peck summarizes the problem well: “As teachers quit their jobs, more and more positions go unfulfilled. Teachers who have stayed are forced to compensate for the missing educators and non-teaching staff. At the same time, their workload isn’t shrinking and salaries aren’t increasing. No wonder burnout is rising and a growing number of teachers are planning on quitting.”
If we want to attract more teachers and keep the ones we have, we need to pay teachers more. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average salary for public school teachers was $66,397 during 2021-2022 school year. This represents a nearly 8 percent pay cut, in inflation-adjusted terms, from a decade ago. The Hoover Institute published a report showing that, adjusting for factors such as talent and experience, “teachers are paid 22 percent less than they would be if they were in jobs in the U.S. economy outside of teaching.”
The public education system is essential to a thriving republic. But even more important is public safety. Unlike the drop off in teachers, which I’ve witnessed firsthand as a substitute teacher, I haven’t personally experienced the negative effects of the police recruiting crisis….yet. But I’ve read that it is happening all across the country, including in my own home town of Charlottesville, Washington, D.C., and New York City. According to a survey of chiefs of police, 78% of agencies throughout America reported having difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates.
The post-George Floyd rise in antipolice sentiment has dissuaded young people from pursuing law-enforcement careers and has driven experienced cops out of the job. One survey of law enforcement officers in eight states revealed that half of cops have considered quitting because of antipolice attitudes and nearly sixty percent personally knew a colleague who left because of public hostility. As Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, writes, “Faced with record levels of retirements and resignations, police agencies are putting recruit quantity over quality with disastrous results.” Desperate departments hire risky recruits, which brings bad policing. Consider the death of Tyre Nichols in Tennessee.
Slow Boring’s Ben Kraus and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle introduced me to an interesting public policy proposal. In separate op-eds, they argue that we should create “an elite police university in the style of West Point” and ROTC-style training programs offered at colleges. These programs would be free of charge, with officers pledging to fulfill a multi-year service commitment at an understaffed police department upon graduation. Kraus writes that this could “deepen the recruiting base and bolster societal respect for one of our most important public institutions.” Also, as McArdle points out, “A West Point for cops could serve as a research center for learning what works in policing, and as a place to transmit that information to new generations of officers, who can be attracted to the profession through a combination of free, high-quality education and opportunities for elite public service.”
Another scary recruitment crisis is in the military. In 2023, the Army, Navy, and Air Force missed their goals by a combined 41,000 recruits. While the Marine Corps met its target, its leaders described recruitment as challenging.
One reason for the decline in military recruitment involves a modernized health-records system. The new system, Genesis, arrived in March of 2022. As Luther Ray Abel, a journalist and former Naval serviceman, writes, “Before records were on paper, and each base clinic, carrier medical bay, or hospital had its own records system. The paper-records system was in need of modernization, but the introduction of Genesis may also have inadvertently suppressed recruitment.” For example, 81 percent of all Air Force applicants going to Military Entrance Processing Stations were qualified on their initial processing visit in 2021. But in Fiscal Year 2022 (the first year the military used the new system), this initial qualification rate dropped to 69 percent and ended Fiscal Year 2023 with a 58 percent initial qualification rate.
I think back to my trying to join the Army twenty years ago. The recruiter told me not to say anything about my taking Ritalin. As Abel writes, “Gone are the days of sidestepping via white lies to present a clean medical record while giving the military plausible deniability. They didn’t ask too intently, and recruits didn’t volunteer extraneous information. The reality is that many recruits fall into the military. An ugly break-up, getting kicked out of the house, or finding little success in job-searching may bring an 18-year-old into the recruiter’s office. The greater the administrative burden placed on the applicant, the less likely he is to join.”
Abel also points to the challenges facing those trying to join the special-forces. He writes that most of these people participated in competitive-sports programs in high school. The probability of their having had minor injuries is high, but they may not have shared this information until now. “The service thus keeps a now-recovered recruit at arm’s length until he can provide documentation for every little thing. Guys who are interested in special warfare have plenty of private sector options and can walk away,” writes Abel.
The Covid-19 pandemic also made recruiting more of a challenge. First, recruiters were not allowed on many college and high school campuses for over a year. Second, the vaccine mandate discouraged many. Some recruiters estimate that a quarter of recruits dropped out once they learned the vaccine was mandatory, and, according to data provided by the military, only 43 of the more than 8,000 US service members who were discharged from the military for refusing to be vaccinated rejoined once the vaccine mandate was officially repealed.
When we think about military recruitment in America, it’s important to think about the fact that there is a “warrior class.” 80 percent of the young Americans who join the military have a family member in the military and 30 percent have a parent in the military. Given the importance of family military legacies, it’s a problem is that fewer military families are willing to recommend military service to friends and family. As retired Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, U.S. Army and Dr. Nora Bensahel write, “In 2019, almost 75 percent of military families said they would recommend military service to someone they care about. That figure dropped to just under 63 percent in 2021.” According to the Blue Star Families' Military Family Lifestyle Survey, the proportion of active duty family respondents likely to recommend service fell from 55% in 2016 to just 32% in 2023.
I wonder if it’s problematic that progressive social changes, which have swept through the academy, are now making their way into the military. Michael Gallagher, a former Marine who earned a Ph.D. in History from Princeton and who served three terms in Congress, wrote about the changes a few years ago. “For decades,” according to Gallagher, “it was common to hear from senior officers and noncommissioned officers that troops were all just shades of green.” Colin Powell famously said that “race, color, background, income meant nothing” in his Army.
I recognize that there are inequities in the military justice system. For example, a year ago, a Pentagon review surfaced that showed prejudicial behavior by commanders, which contributed to the fact that Black personnel are 2.2 times more likely to face court-martial and conviction. When it comes to DEI efforts in the military, I love how we have renamed military bases. I’m glad that Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty and that Fort Hood became Fort Cavazos. We should not honor military generals who fought for the Confederacy and its goal of maintaining slavery.
But it worries me when I read that service members were forced to watch a TED Talk asking, “What is up with us white people?” I wonder about the wisdom of Admiral Mike Gilday including Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist in his “professional reading program,” which is supposed to help sailors “outthink our competitors.” I’m skeptical of Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener’s claim that racial diversity is important to building a better military.
As far as I’m concerned, Gallagher is right to write: “The military is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. To that end, the military obsessively measures pull-ups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain. Diversity may be a strength for America, but it cannot be an organizing principle for the Pentagon….If the DEI agenda sends the signal that, to get promoted, one must affirm progressive dogmas or spend more time on inclusivity training rather than training for war, the services will attract fewer warfighters and more risk-averse political drones.”
It isn’t just that we need more teachers, police officers, and soldiers. The great exodus is occurring in other key parts of the government, as the Secret Service is having recruiting challenges and many congressional staffers are also fed up with life on Capitol Hill and are retiring early. When thinking about the need to pay all these public sector employees more money, I’m questioning my political beliefs. Maybe I’ve been wrong in supporting low tax levels. Maybe we need higher tax rates.