The Devastation of Public Service
The Devastation of Public Service
We are desperately in need of teachers, cops, and disability workers.
I have friends who have no plans for their young adults with autism, once they age out of the public school system next June. Without a full day program that provides opportunities for employment and socialization, their young adults face years of boredom and isolation in their homes.
Our state cannot provide services for adults with disability, because there aren’t enough people willing to work in those specialized programs. And that problem isn’t isolated to the disability world — there is a surplus of openings for certain types of teachers, police officers, and other state positions. Young people are shunning those jobs, even though the salaries have risen, are supported by strong unions, and offer generous benefits. With greater opportunities, more flexibility, and higher respect in other fields, service work isn’t attractive.
Service work is essential to our society. We need people to take disabled adults to the mall for the day, to teach five-year olds how to read, and to make sure that nobody is parking on the curb. The challenge of the next decade will be to make service jobs cool again and to revitalize our national commitment to community.
With broad brushstrokes, there are three main paths for young adults with disabilities. Some might will eventually go to college or a job training program with minor support and get a job. Others need a 9-5 environment with job training and social opportunities. Others need 24/7 care with one-on-one support in group homes.
But there is very little support of any kind to help that population. The biggest culprit, according to local social workers, is the lack of staff. The private companies that serve this population, with public funds, cannot get people to work with this population anywhere.
From colleges to intensive residential settings, people won’t take disability support jobs no matter how high the salary and how low the qualifications. Job coaches only need a high school degree and earn between $42K to $62K in my area, but there are still tons of openings.
As a consolation prize to beleaguered families, the state just writes them a check and expects them to take over this job. But families are not able to provide the necessary social network and daylong stimulation to keep their young adults happy. It’s really a bad situation.
Schools are facing similar problems. Not enough young people are going into education, particular in math, science, special education, and bilingual education, with a 1/3 drop in students completing all education programs between 2008 and 2019. The post-pandemic teaching loss has been described as a five-alarm crisis.
The lack of teaching talent is clearly related to education’s bad reputation, with only 18% of Americans likely to encourage a young person to go into education. Teaching is perceived of being a low paid and poorly supported profession. Educators feel like their work is not respected by society.
Teacher’s poor morale then colors the next generation’s perception of the work. My oldest son said he would never go into education, because his teachers always seemed really unhappy and never bothered to get to know him. Sadly, he doesn't remember the name of his Kindergarten teacher.
Districts have been forced to do all sorts of half-baked solutions — four-day schools, uncertified educators, remote education — just to have a warm body in front of the room. School leaders lower standards, so teachers who cannot pass the notoriously easy certification exam end up in front of a classroom (or win billion dollar lawsuits.) Union rules make it difficult, if not impossible, to offer bonuses to target teachers in the most hard-to-fill positions.
Lowering standards brings in more teachers in the short term, but in the long term, it reduces respect for the field even further.
Other government work, including law enforcement, fire fighters, and bus drivers, also face low levels of respect and high numbers of job openings. The Marshall Project reports that the number of workers in law enforcement, including officers and civilian employees, fell by 4% between March 2020 and August 2022.
It’s clear that money alone can’t convince people to do these jobs; respect and prestige are necessary to nudge a young person to do service work. Academia has managed to convince thousands to gain a PhD, even without the promise of a big salary, because it’s a high status job. Theoretically, K-12 schools could find ways to increase the prestige of teaching.
We also must modernize our schools. Today, young people are less interested in rule-bound work environments. They want flexibility and rewards for hard work. They want to be professionals with the same perks and expectations of the private sector. I think many would exchange some union protections for independence.
We need to have a national conversation about how to make these changes. Without change, without people taking service work, inequality will grow and government support will decline. Rich families will disinvest from all public solutions and will fight tax increases on services that don’t benefit them.
I would like to see young people give service a chance. We could offer greater student loan forgiveness to young people, who work in the service sector for even one year. Perhaps if 50 people work with the young or the vulnerable for a year for student loan forgiven, five will decide to stick with it.
Last year, I spent a few months as an aide in our local school (a story for another day). They put me in the room with the toughest autistic kids, and guess what? I loved it. I totally loved those babies. I only stopped when I decided to run for school board.
Service work might appeal to more young people with more opportunities for experiences and with greater respect. We have to try everything, because a world without police officers and school teachers is unthinkable.
LINKS
The WSJ talks about how the post-pandemic teaching loss is interfering with learning recovery.
The Federal government pumped $190B into schools. That money probably did nothing to help COVID’s Academic Crisis. Amazing article from The 74.
“It’s easy to love someone who presents as vulnerable. It’s harder to love those who manifest their pain with rage and snarls.” From David A French, in the NYT about Richie from “The Bear.” (I love Cousin.)
Personal: So, all the pictures currently on my phone involve food. Ask me why I can’t lose five pounds. Pictures of Florence. Steve and I have started doing a post-dinner walk every night.
Watching: “The Bear” (watching Season 2 for the second time), Outlander, What We Do In the Shadows, Reservation Dogs
Travel: Went to Spring Lake, NJ for a day trip on Saturday. Going up to the Catskills this weekend.
This is a problem that requires thinking on bigger scales that the respect we show people doing this kind of work (whether that's cultural respect or $$$$). This is a diagnostic sign of killing public goods, of killing social democracy, of killing any sense that we have responsibilities to one another but also that we all benefit from a society that looks after everyone. Every single moment we say "but these people are getting something I'm not; I have needs too" is one of those diagnostic signs. It's like seeing red lines coming from a wound, a sign of sepsis. We cannot address this kind of failure one system at a time, one profession at a time, one unmet need at a time. The only way we can address it is by restoring a sense that we are building a rich society that cares for everybody, by refuting the idea that we are poor and services are scarce, by saying "this is not a society built to make a few people so wealthy they scarcely know what to do with it, it's for everyone". Every attempt to make justice that starts smaller just pits one need against another, one site of failure against another site of failure, and asks each group to demonstrate that they're bleeding out more and faster than the other one. No matter who wins, we all lose in the end.