Education and Mental Healthcare Crises Are Symptomatic of a National Empathy Deficiency
California, for all its liberal good intentions, is not exempt from a larger reality, namely that the fields where we expect young minds to grow have been salted.
I’ll take a break today from describing the horrors associated with the former president to illustrate the larger problem normalizing such assholery.
The examples I’ve chosen –education and mental health– are symptoms manifesting themselves in different ways pointing to a larger malaise affecting the political economy of the US.
I’ll let you in on a little secret–we all see parts of it, but rarely do we see the whole–, namely that our political economy is failing us across a broad front and has been doing so for a long time.
Our country is now at or near the bottom of the OECD countries and below many others when it comes to attainment in public health, well-being of children, democratic performance, gender equality, environment and climate, poverty reduction, personal safety, social justice and cohesion, and even equal opportunity.
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As the time approaches when schools traditionally head back into session, expect to see and hear more and scarier (if you’re a parent) stories about The Great Teacher Shortage.
There is no shortage of humans qualified and capable of filling this void. What the field of education does have is a recruitment and retention problem. The best of intentions by people looking forward to a life of guiding future generations run smack dab into a cold, hard reality before day one in the classroom.
Via Axios:
Nearly 50% of teachers are crippled by student loan debt before signing their first teaching contract. The average student loan balance for educators is $58,700, with 14% owing more than $100,000. Veteran educators are not exempt from drowning in debt, with 25% of educators over age 61 owing balances of up to $45,000. While educators are entitled to student loan forgiveness after 10 years of service under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, the program is irretrievably broken. About 98% who apply for loan debt relief are denied. Meanwhile, loan-servicing companies are raking in profits.
The wage gap between teachers and the rest of the comparably educated workforce was about 21% in 2018. That disparity was a much smaller 6% back in 1996, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute,
The oft-quoted figures in media accounts include mentions of 600,000 fewer educators nationally than prior to the pandemic, a shortfall of 300,000 teachers needed for this year, and a majority opinion within the profession that they personally are “somewhat” or “very” likely to leave the teaching profession within the next two years.
California ranks first among the top 10 states with teacher shortages, affecting the disciplines of early childhood education, language arts, mathematics, science and special education.
San Diego is luckier than many regions of the state, according to the County Office on Education, with just a 3% deficit in staffing. That’s likely because many school districts have taken proactive steps to retain and recruit staff. But–trust me on this one– the cost of housing and declining enrollments (I’ll come back to this in the near future) bode poorly for the future.
California, for all its liberal good intentions, is not exempt from a larger reality, namely that the fields where we expect young minds to grow have been salted.
Education as a discipline has been under attack for four decades now, with policies coming from across administrations promising to “fix” a system blamed for lack of an ill-defined “successes” stemming from external causes relevant to the failures of a political economy beneficial to an increasingly small number of already privileged people.
The various guises of the movement to privatize governance coincided with various schemes to alter the landscape surrounding a historically beneficial public education system. Some of the impetus when it came to education stemmed from resentment over desegregation; a nationwide political effort to reform taxation with promises of trickle down also contributed to that effort.
A big part of this neo-liberal (i.e.., public programs run by private money) agenda involved demonizing unions and educators. This year’s flavors of that effort involve scare stories about Critical Race Theory and protests over libraries stocking books with themes not approved by evangelicals.
Seriously –and this could easily be true in the further reaches of San Diego County– having your profession targeted by bigots bearing threats and lies isn’t exactly encouraging for education as a career choice.
Forbes education writer Peter Greene nails it:
Personnel costs are generally the most expensive part of running a school, so for those who want to reform schools without spending more money, replacing teachers with computers, guides, or coaches has long been a dream. Microschools, favored by Betsy DeVos, just require a home and a “coach.” While they have never quite caught on on the large scale, “We’ve run out of teachers, so we might as well switch to this other model,” becomes a new argument in favor of the teacherless classroom.
Some on the far right have long argued that the teaching profession is a scam. Hillsdale College president Larry Arrn argued that teaching doesn’t require trained experts because “anyone can do it.” Speaking at Hillsdale, anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo argued that jobs in public education are “patronage systems for left-wing activists.”
From there, it’s a short step to solutions like those proposed in Idaho and other states that have simply lowered the bar so that no formal education training is required to take over a classroom. Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has teamed up with Rufo in the past, offers a particularly cynical take—since teaching is a patronage job that anyone can do, why not award the job to American veterans and their spouses.
All of these sorts of solutions rest on the premise that there is a teachers shortage, that the mine has been stripped of every nugget, that there is no crop to harvest and we must therefor change the definition of what we’re looking for. All of these solutions rest on a dogged determination to misdiagnose the problem.
If we can’t find a babysitter to work for $1.50 an hour, we don’t shrug and just leave our infant at home with the family dog. If we’re scheduled for spleen surgery at Low Budget Hospital, we aren’t okay with hearing that our surgery will be performed by somebody from accounting who plays Operation a lot, because there’s a surgeon shortage.
If the fields haven’t yielded enough food to feed the family, we don’t declare that food just doesn’t grow any more. We don’t start feeding our family pictures of food pasted on cardboard. Instead, we look at our fields and how we’ve cared for them. We look for a more useful diagnosis than “Food just doesn’t grow,” so that we can bring forth a better harvest.
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This week, the San Diego Union-Tribune highlighted an outstanding report compiled by San Diego Workforce Partnership, requested by Nathan Fletcher, chair of the county board of supervisors, during his 2021 state of the county speech.
We have, in case you haven’t noticed, a serious national mental health problem. Domestic violence, crime, homelessness and drug addiction are all symptoms. Currently, the approach favored by way too many people would be to lock up the troublemakers and throw away the key until such time as they’ve come to their senses.
People who seek treatment all-too-often can’t get it; people who work in the mental health profession are overwhelmed. Thousands of workers in Northern California associated with Kaiser Pernamente have walked off the job this week with no intention of returning anytime soon. The main issue isn’t pay or benefits; it is that the system makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.
Unlike the education profession, there is an actual shortage of human beings willing and able to do the work. And, unlike the education system, the largely privatized health care system sees its profits threatened by solving these problems..
In the public sector, many counties and community-based organizations in California are reporting 30% and higher vacancy rates
This report was no superficial examination of a much larger problem.
The list of affected organizations that took part in the report include UC San Diego Health, San Diego State University, the National Alliance on Mental Illness San Diego, the Alliance Healthcare Foundation, the region’s behavioral health advisory board, community colleges, Family Health Centers of San Diego, the San Diego Center for Children, the Hospital Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties, McAlister Institute and Rady Children’s Hospital.
Here’s the bottom line:
San Diego’s significantly undersized mental health care workforce is underpaid compared to peers in other California markets and is so burnt out dealing with broken bureaucratic paperwork requirements that 44 percent of current workers say they may seek different jobs in the next 12 months.
“Short-staffed” doesn’t even begin to describe the problem.
Using the most recent federal estimates of local mental health care use and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a baseline, researchers calculated that the roughly 17,000 people already working in mental health-related fields across San Diego County is about 48 percent short of the 25,109 needed today. The report also found that the need for these workers will continue to grow, surpassing 27,000 by 2027.
Taking the current turnover rate into account, the report estimates that San Diego County will need nearly 18,500 more behavioral health workers by 2027, a number that is more than 1,000 workers greater than the estimated size of the region’s entire current workforce.
The report is a significant step forward in that it acknowledges and defines the problems needing solutions.
Addressing those challenges is another matter altogether. For one, it requires coordination and cooperation among entities who feel they are continuing to fight a losing battle just to maintain the status quo. For another, vast amounts of money are needed, more than any single government entity is capable of providing. The UT article cites a need for $128 million as a “downpayment” to get the ball rolling.
There are some fixes mentioned in the report, like apprenticeship programs, but a timetable for implementation has yet to be established. This will no doubt be a major topic for the Board of Supervisors headed into next year, and I urge you to stay aware of the forces working to limit progress.
Getting back to the “field” analogy used in the above commentary on education, these solutions don’t really fix the underlying problem. Mental health is the underrated issue of our time, one with the potential for significant disruptions in society on a scale only comparable to the climate crisis.
The sheer scale of the problem, said Dr. Luke Bergmann, director of behavioral health in San Diego County, has been clearly visible for decades, with the overall marginalization and stigmatization of those who need mental health care.
In both education and mental healthcare (along with other issues not addressed in this essay), we have an empathy issue. The dehumanization of teachers and the stigmas applied to mental health are two sides of the same coin.
Whether this empathy shortage is a product of societal organization (too many people with no real human connections) or a political technique used to get people to place their personal concerns over the public good makes little difference.
If solving problems requires identifying them and their causes, then admitting to an empathy deficit is a good starting point. This isn’t something you can run for office on per se, but it can be a part of any public individual or organizational branding. It could be a credo, right up there with saying “I support democracy.”
The nihilists among us will be quick to poo-poo such a notion. Expect attacks on “manhood” and other such nonsense. Let’s elevate our discussions to the point where such drivel becomes irrelevant.
Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
Lead image by Gregg Segal, photo series, ‘7 Days of Garbage‘