Eleanor Vance once told me she does her best accounting at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, right after grading a mountain of lab reports.
She’s not balancing the books for the school district, mind you.
She’s reconciling the $87 she spent at the hardware store for PVC pipe and tubing—for a gas law experiment the curriculum demands but the budget forgets—against a grocery bill that seems to inflate faster than the national debt. What we’re looking at here, folks, isn't a teacher’s personal budget. It’s a forensic audit of a bankrupt corporation.
The corporation is the American Education-Industrial Complex, and its business model is built on the single greatest accounting fraud of our time: "doing it for the kids."
This folksy little phrase is the off-balance-sheet liability that allows the whole rickety structure to keep its lights on.
It’s the Enron-level scam used to hide a gaping operational deficit, and the auditors in Washington and the state capital are either in on it or too stupid to see it.
When Eleanor started teaching a decade ago, she was what any good corporate raider would call a high-value asset.
She came fully capitalized with a master's degree (financed by debt, of course), a head full of idealism, and a surplus of energy. The system, like any good asset-stripper, went to work immediately. In her first year, she was handed a science budget of $200 to service 150 students.
To do the actual job she was hired for, she spent over a thousand dollars of her own money.
In the cold, hard language of a 10-K filing, the district had successfully transferred a core operational cost directly onto its employee, depreciating her personal net worth while booking a "win" for the taxpayers.
This brings us to the predictable moral hazard of the martyr. The folks in the central office, with their six-figure salaries and MBAs in "Educational Leadership," know a sure bet when they see one.
They know that if they cut the school’s only social worker, teachers like Eleanor will absorb the duties of an unlicensed therapist during their unpaid lunch breaks. They wager the house that teachers will stay after school to help a struggling student rather than work a second job to pay down their own student loans.
The system isn't broken; it's designed to run on the free, guilt-fueled labor of its most dedicated employees. Why would you ever properly fund a line item when you know someone will do the work for free out of basic human decency?
Of course, no hostile takeover is complete without peddling some junk bonds to the rank-and-file. In education, this junk bond is called "psychic income." It’s the emotional reward, the thank-you note from a graduate, the "aha!" moment when a kid finally understands stoichiometry.
It pays a powerful, short-term dividend, no doubt. But it’s a high-yield instrument with a near-100% default rate. That heartwarming card gets shoved in a drawer, while the 403(b) retirement statement sits on the table, a testament to a decade of service that amounts to less than the down payment on a used pickup truck.
So the audit is complete.
The findings are grim.
The entity known as Public Education, Inc. is functionally insolvent. Its assets have been stripped, its infrastructure is crumbling, and its entire valuation is propped up by the goodwill of a workforce it actively defrauds.
My recommendation?
A Chapter 11-style restructuring.
Acknowledging that the primary creditors—the teachers—have been paid in worthless emotional scrip for far too long.
It’s time to liquidate the folksy platitudes and compensate them with the one thing the system has been hoarding for itself: cold, hard currency.
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