In his recent column “Let’s Talk About Bad Teachers,” Michael Petrilli fearlessly seized the third rail of U.S. K–12 education. Depressingly, after reviewing the multiple obstacles preventing school districts from getting rid of bad teachers with significant experience (e.g., union contracts, defined benefit pension plans, and extensive due process protections against dismissal in many states’ law), Petrilli concluded that “the Gordian Knot remains unbreakable” and, thus, “we’re pretty much stuck with them.”
Given the importance of high-quality teachers to improved education results, if Petrilli is right (and there is abundant evidence that he is), the consequences are grim—and in my experience, they are poorly understood by most people in K–12 schooling.
At the individual level, Raj Chetty’s research found that “students assigned to high value-added teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-ranked colleges, earn higher salaries...and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.”
For employers, access to talent that understands and can apply rapidly improving technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, data analytics, and automation) is critical not just to their success, but increasingly to their survival. But in 2023, a Manpower Group survey found that 75 percent of U.S. employers reported difficulty in finding the skilled talent they need—up from 36 percent in 2014.
Problems for individual employers add up to problems for the overall economy.
In their book “The Knowledge Capital of Nations,” Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann showed that “long-run economic growth is overwhelmingly a function of the cognitive skills of the population.” For example, between 1948 and 2019, U.S. labor productivity grew by 2.2 percent a year. Today, the Congressional Budget Office projects that it will only grow by 1.3 percent a year over the next decade. Since the Civilian Labor Force is projected to grow by only 0.4 percent over the same period, maximum real GDP growth is only 1.7 percent per year. In our knowledge economy, improving workers’ cognitive skills should lead to higher annual labor productivity growth. If this increased back to 2.2 percent, then after ten years, potential U.S. GDP would be more than 9 percent ($3 trillion) larger.
That would go a very long way towards meeting many of the macroeconomic challenges facing the United States without the need for ever larger increases in federal deficits, including funding future increases in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure, and national defense spending.
But as the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently found, “The United States needs to reinvigorate its STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education system if it is to compete successfully in the twenty-first century. STEM proficiency has been declining in America since the 1980s, threatening the nation’s continued technological leadership. Particularly as emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are set to put STEM proficient nations on the highway to innovation-based competitiveness, the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind.”
For example, in 2022 only seven percent of American fifteen-year-olds could do math at advanced levels, as measured by the OECD’s PISA math assessment, which evaluates their ability “to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts to describe, predict and explain phenomena.”
Now consider national defense. The Ukraine War has made two stark facts brutally clear. First, technical skills are critical to the rapid adaption needed to prevail on today’s battlefields. Second, talent shortages have limited the ability of America’s defense industrial base (DIB) to rapidly replenish the enormous volume of weapons expended in a high intensity conflict.
Now, faced with such conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and potentially another one over Taiwan, America’s talent shortage has become a critical, and possibly existential, national security threat.
A report last summer from the Aspen Strategy Group concluded that “America is engaging in the global technological competition with an education system that is not fit for purpose—it does not adequately prepare our students. We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China, in K–12 and higher STEM education outcomes... The U.S. must create a cohesive strategy that aligns its national security with a first-rate K–12 and higher education system.”
Unfortunately, the evidence is overwhelming that America’s district run schools will not improve their performance in the time frame and at the scale required to meet the talent shortage threat we face today.
Some believe that expanding school choice will solve the problem, via more charter schools, education savings accounts, and other mechanisms. But with accelerating enrollment declines in district-run schools, opposition to choice is rapidly mounting. And as Ashley Berner’s research shows, expansion of choice without a mechanism to ensure quality (unlike the systems used in many other countries) is unlikely to produce rapid improvement in academic outcomes at scale.
So where does that leave us? The warnings voiced in the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983 are now our reality. Can we do anything to quickly do to meet the rapidly worsening economic and national security talent crisis we face today?
I propose that the federal government create a national network of free STEM academies that are funded and held accountable by the Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA). Admissions would be based on competitive exams. Some of these schools could be run by contract operators competitively selected by DoDEA, provided they agreed to follow a common set of core policies, including non-discriminatory admissions, curriculum, instructional materials, professional development, assessments, grading, information systems, and employment.
Today, more than 90 percent of America’s fifty-two million elementary and secondary students attend district-run, non-charter public schools. To have a significant impact on reducing America’s STEM talent shortage, these new academies would aim to enroll one half of one percent of current elementary and secondary students, or about 261,000 students across the fifty states and District of Columbia.
Rapid scale up would almost certainly not be a challenge for the Department of Defense. And the cost would be miniscule compared to $857 billion in federal, state, and local funds that Americans spent on public elementary and secondary education in fiscal year 2022 for poor and declining results.
While questions have been raised about DEI programs in DoDEA schools, there is no evidence that they have degraded their academic performance. Moreover, there is no reason why such programs would have to apply to the DoDEA STEM Academies.
Let’s not forget that on the most recent NAEP assessment, DoDEA schools delivered better results than schools in any of the fifty states. While selection effects, such as the students coming from military families, are often cited as a contributing factor, there is evidence to suggest that the causes of DoDEA’s success are broader.
DoDEA schools follow many of the practices found in high performance education systems around the world, as documented by Ashley Berner. These include a rigorous and standardized curriculum, emphasizing core academic subjects, and employing evidence-based instructional practices. This consistent approach across DoDEA schools may contribute to better learning outcomes. They also have stringent teacher recruitment and retention policies, attracting and retaining highly qualified educators. Additionally, DoDEA invests heavily in curriculum-aligned professional development programs for its teachers, which can enhance instructional quality. Finally, DoDEA has a robust system for monitoring school and student performance, using data-driven decision-making to identify areas for improvement and implement targeted interventions.
To be sure, implementing this proposal would likely require new legislative authority (DoDEA schools are currently authorized under Section 2164 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code), similar to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, whose passage was given added urgency when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957. But if that authorization was not forthcoming, it still might be possible to expand DoDEA schools using the Defense Production Act (Section 4501 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code), which gives broad authorities to the President to influence domestic economic sectors in the interest of national defense.
In sum, the dangerous threats we face compel us to unflinchingly face the implications of Petrilli’s blunt warning that, as a practical matter, school districts cannot remove most bad teachers from their classrooms. This is yet another reason we cannot expect the performance of district-run schools to improve quickly enough to meet the critical talent shortages that increasingly debilitate the United States’ economic growth and national security.
Creating a national network of STEM Academies under DoDEA schools is one way to quickly begin to meet this challenge in a scalable and consistent way. It is admittedly an unorthodox approach that will attract substantial criticism. But we should demand that those who oppose it meet one of two tests: Either explain why our worsening talent shortage is not a critical challenge facing the U.S. economy and national security, or offer another solution that has a better chance of meeting this challenge more quickly than the one I’ve proposed.
