by James A. Bacon

As K-12 schools open up this week, the good news is that the school-bus shortage has eased a bit. According to the Virginia Mercury, the bus driver vacancy rate is down 5% compared to last year. There’s still a shortfall that leaves school districts scrambling for bus drivers, but the situation is not as bleak as it has been.

The bigger, badder news is that teacher vacancies have gotten worse. Citing Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) data, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Virginia public schools have 230 more vacancies than last year. That amounts to a 4.74% vacancy rate.

The shortfall comes not from a lack of funding. The 2022-24 biennial budget contained $19.2 billion for public education, a 20% increase over the previous biennium. The current biennial budget steers another $2.5 billion to schools, an additional 13% boost. Teachers are getting 3% raises this year and next.

But you can count on the Virginia Education Association to take a partisan cheap shot against Governor Glenn Youngkin.

“The issue of increasing staff shortages in Virginia public schools has been a problem since before the pandemic. But according to these most recent numbers, our educators and students continue to bear the brunt of the Youngkin administration’s political intransigence on the issue,” said VEA President Carol Bauer, the RTD reports.

Political intransigence? A 13% spending increase following a 20% spending increase doesn’t sound like political intransigence to me. Any resistance to the VEA’s maximal demands, I suppose, amounts to intransigence.

To make matters worse, Bauer says, the schools with the highest vacancy rates have a higher percentage of poor students and Black students, “further exacerbating the challenges inequity has already forced upon them.”

Ah, the race card.

There’s one thought that you will never hear Bauer express: that teacher shortages are worst in districts that are disproportionately poor and Black because those districts are most likely to be run by Democrat-dominated school boards and share the same woke ideological obsessions as Bauer and the Virginia Education Association.

According to woke logic, if a disproportionate percentage of children subjected to disciplinary treatment are minorities, the system is racist and disciplinary standards must be watered down to become more inclusive. Schools enthusiastically embracing this worldview have a much higher tolerance for disorder in the hallways and classrooms. But many teachers don’t derive fulfillment by spending more time dealing with problem students than actually doing what they signed up to do, which is teach. Some transfer to other districts. Many just quit.

It is worth observing that the “intransigent” Governor Youngkin signed on to a budget that steers $371 million in additional funding in this two-year budget to schools serving low-income students or those identified as “at-risk” for the purpose of addressing teacher vacancies.

It is also worth noting that Richmond Public Schools, long noted for high teacher churn and vacancies in disproportionately poor and Black public schools, managed to trim the shortage this year to only 131 vacancies, down 21 from the previous year.

How did Richmond schools accomplish that? According to the RTD, it adopted the novel strategy of… planning ahead.

“This year, we made a really intentional effort to ensure we hired as many teachers as possible ahead of the school year, through recruitment fairs and wide advertising,” said Maggie Clemmons, chief talent officer at RPS. “We started quite early, and we’re proud of how that paid off.” 

I can’t recall a single disinterested and useful word issuing from the mouths of VEA leadership.

On the other hand, I don’t believe the Youngkin administration’s policy regarding teacher vacancies has been a model of perfection. The administration has pursued some policies that make sense — especially the effort to speed up the supply of new teachers through licensing reforms and the recent move to restrict cell-phone use in schools, a perennial source of teacher stress. But it has underplayed the critical importance of maintaining order in schools as a precondition for learning.

Politically, Team Youngkin is playing the VEA’s game when it fails to acknowledge the reality that in a full-employment economy teacher vacancies won’t improve until working conditions improve, and that improving working conditions requires enforcing higher standards of student behavior. That’s why, despite all efforts to raise pay and boost spending, vacancies are higher this year.