CONGRATS, BILLIONAIRES: YOU FIXED SCHOOLS SO WELL NOBODY WANTS TO TEACH IN THEM
A parent’s field guide to the most expensive science experiment nobody asked for.
So I’m at pickup the other day, and a second-grade teacher walks by with a rolling cart, three lanyards, and the thousand-yard stare of a woman who just got a “quick data check-in” scheduled during her lunch.
I said, “Hey, how’s it going?”
She said, “Fine,” in the voice you use when the answer is extremely not fine.
Here’s how we got here. Twenty years ago, a bunch of very rich people decided schools should be run like businesses. Which is a bold thing to believe if you’ve ever actually been inside a business. Half of them are held together by one guy named Dennis who knows where the password is.
The Pitch
It was a beautiful plan. Test the kids. A lot. Tie the teacher’s job to the scores. Open some charters. Hire consultants. Buy software. Name the whole thing something with “Leaders” or “Excellence” in it.
Boom. Education: fixed. Everybody go home.
The $575 Million Oopsie
The Gates Foundation went all in on this. Big, multi-year, three districts and four California charter networks, roughly $575 million all-in. The goal was a shiny new way to measure teachers and get the “best” ones to the kids who needed them most.
RAND went back and checked the receipts. Student achievement, access to effective teaching, graduation rates: not dramatically better than at similar schools that skipped the whole thing. And the new rating system? Almost everybody came out “effective.”
Read that again. Half a billion dollars to discover that most teachers are pretty damn good. Any parent at any pickup line in America would have told you that for free. We’d have thrown in a casserole.
Congrats, You Invented a Teacher Shortage
It gets better. Researchers who looked at states that rolled out these high-stakes evaluation reforms found they shrank the number of newly licensed teachers and made it more likely that jobs sat empty, especially in the schools that are already hardest to staff. The likely culprits? Less job security, less satisfaction, less say over your own classroom.
To be fair, they also found the people who did still show up were slightly more likely to have gone to selective colleges. So: fewer teachers, slightly fancier diplomas. Great job, everybody. It’s like opening a pizza place and hanging a sign that says “Pizza is hard, nobody will respect you, and we’ll grade you on it monthly.”
Choice! (Terms and Conditions Apply)
Charters and vouchers are the crown jewels of this whole movement. Choice! Freedom! Every family a CEO of their own kid’s education! Which is a cute way of saying: take public money, hand it to somebody else, and let them run it with fewer rules.
The old federal numbers (2003–04, the best apples-to-apples snapshot I could find) had charter teachers leaving at about 25% a year versus about 14% in traditional public schools. The researchers say a good chunk of that gap comes down to more young, uncertified teachers and less union membership. Which, sure. Also known as the business model.
Longer days. Emails at 9 p.m. No union to say “hey, maybe not.” And a revolving door of folks who spend two years in a classroom, update LinkedIn, and bounce. Teaching is supposed to be a craft you get good at over a decade, not a free trial you cancel before the billing date.
And when your veteran teacher walks out, you lose the one person who knows which kid needs a granola bar before math, which parent needs a phone call instead of an email, and which “mandatory new platform” will be dead by March. Try putting that on a dashboard.
Meanwhile, Back in the Real World
RAND’s 2026 State of the American Teacher survey just dropped, and here’s the scoreboard:
- 55% of teachers report frequent job-related stress. Similar working adults: 34%.
- Average teacher base salary: $75,599. Similar working adults: a little over $105,000.
- After inflation, only 39% of teachers got a raise.
- Nearly a third of teachers have a second job, averaging 13 extra hours a week.
- Teachers spend an average of $665 of their own money on classroom supplies.
Let me say that louder for the folks in the back. Teachers are buying their own markers and moonlighting to cover rent while somebody with a foundation and a logo gives a TED talk about “disruption.” Somewhere a guy is naming a yacht Innovation, and a fourth-grade teacher is driving for DoorDash after dismissal.
Paris Is Going to Have Some Opinions
On November 20, Education International, MGEN, and the MGEN Foundation for Public Health release the third big international barometer on the health and well-being of education workers. Nineteen countries and territories, Argentina to Zimbabwe, 33 unions and organizations, and it covers everybody who keeps a school running, not just teachers. Aides. Early childhood staff. The people who actually know where the good scissors are.
This round adds real-human interviews on top of the numbers, which is a radical concept: ask the people who do the job. The results aren’t out yet, so I’m not going to pretend I know what they say. But the people behind it are already tying all this to a global teacher shortage that they put around 50 million. That’s not a blip. That’s a whole country of missing teachers.
The livestream starts at 10 a.m. Paris time, which is 1 a.m. in California. I’ll be watching the replay with coffee, like a normal person.
Okay, Fine, It’s Not Only the Billionaires
I’ll say it before the comments do. RAND says student behavior is the number one stressor for teachers, followed by low pay. Nobody needed a hedge fund to make a studio apartment cost a kidney.
But when you take a profession that’s already stretched thin and pile on the surveillance, the scripts, the rankings, and the “we’re data-driven” speeches from people who’ve never packed a lunch for 28 kids, you didn’t help. You built a nicer-looking pile of work and set it on top of the old pile. Then you sold the schools a subscription to the pile.
And the folks who bankrolled it are never in the building when the fire alarm goes off. They fund the “innovation.” The teacher gets the 7 a.m. training about it.
I would pay actual money to watch a billionaire do one full week of substitute teaching. Fifth grade. Day before winter break. No slides, no consultants, no Dennis.
Pack a lunch, champ. You’re going to need it.
Sources and Further Reading
The teacher well-being numbers
- RAND: Teacher Well-Being, Pay, and Intentions to Leave in 2026 (Steiner, Levine, Doan, June 2026). The full report behind the stress, pay, and retention figures.
- RAND press release: Teachers’ Stress, Burnout Continue to Outpace Those of Other Working Adults. The 55% vs. 34% stress gap, salary comparison, and raise data.
- eSchool News: Teacher burnout is at an all-time high. Source for the second-job and $665 out-of-pocket figures.
- Education Week: More Teachers Name Classroom Management as a Job Stress Than Low Pay. Student behavior as the top stressor, and the inflation-adjusted wage problem.
- RAND: Teachers Spend Eight Hours a Week Supporting Student Well-Being (October 2026). Newer follow-up on student mental health work.
Did the billionaire reforms work?
- RAND: Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report (Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching). The big Gates-funded evaluation, with the full findings.
- RAND research brief on the same evaluation. Shorter read, includes the “almost all teachers rated effective” finding.
- The 74: Multi-Year Gates Experiment Spent $575 Million, Didn’t Make an Impact. News coverage with the spending breakdown.
- Kraft, Brunner, Dougherty & Schwegman: Teacher Accountability Reforms and the Supply and Quality of New Teachers (Journal of Public Economics, 2020). Free working-paper version: EdWorkingPapers.
- Education Next commentary on the Kraft et al. study. A skeptical read of evaluation reforms, from outside the usual union orbit.
Charters and teacher turnover
- Fordham Institute summary of Stuit & Smith: Exploring the Higher Rates of Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools. The 25% vs. 14% figures (2003–04 data).
- Stuit & Smith: Explaining the gap in charter and traditional public school teacher turnover rates (Economics of Education Review, 2012). Includes how much of the gap is explained by teacher experience, certification, and union membership.
- Shanker Institute: Comparing Teacher Turnover in Charter and Regular Public Schools. Los Angeles-focused analysis of turnover among similar teachers.
The global survey
- Education International: Educators’ health and well-being in the spotlight (I-BEST 2026 launch). Background on the survey and the 33 partner organizations.
- Education International: I-BEST 2023 summary. The previous edition, for comparison once the 2026 results drop on November 20.
Editor’s note: the I-BEST 2026 results had not been released as of this writing (November 8, 2026). Check Education International’s site after November 20 and update. The charter turnover figures are from federal data on 2003–04, so swap in a newer source if you find one.
