Too Expensive to Teach: The Systemic Push to Drive Out Experienced Educators
How Austerity, Market Logic, and Precarity Keep Public Education in a Constant State of Crisis
Public education’s crisis is by design—gutting funding, churning teachers, and forcing instability to justify privatisation. Today’s article explores how austerity, precarity, and capitalism erode education as a public good.
Introduction
I have spent years building my expertise as an educator, pursuing advanced qualifications and refining my practice so that I can better serve my students. In theory, this is exactly what the system wants—teachers who commit to their craft, deepen their knowledge, and bring experience into the classroom. In reality, however, the structure of public education funding in the US penalises those who do just that. As I approach the earning of my lifetime credential, I find myself in a precarious position, not because of any failure on my part, but because I am about to become too expensive to employ. My tenure and qualifications mean that, from the perspective of my district’s budget, I am about to be worth 1.6 new teachers. The very system that encouraged me to invest in my professional development now subtly pushes me towards the exit, not because I lack skill, but because retaining me is seen as a financial burden rather than an asset.
This contradiction is not unique to me, nor is it an accident. It is a feature of a system that has been shaped by decades of austerity, “market logic,” and deliberate attacks on public education. Schools are not funded based on need, but on rigid per-pupil allocations that create artificial scarcity, forcing administrators to make cost-driven staffing decisions. The result is a workforce model that prioritises churn over stability, treating teachers as interchangeable rather than as professionals whose experience directly impacts student outcomes. In this framework, longevity is a liability, and the cheapest workforce—early-career teachers who either burn out or move on before they become ‘too expensive’—is the most desirable.
As the Trump administration moves to gut public education further, my state is already tightening the purse strings. Federal cuts are cascading down to local districts, where top layers of administration are being eliminated, displacing superintendents into principal roles, principals into assistant principal roles, and assistant principals back into the classroom. This influx of former administrators into teaching positions will be used to justify wage stagnation in upcoming union negotiations. We will be told there is no money for salary increases, even as none of us earn above the effective poverty line in our county. More experienced teachers will be nudged out, either through unbearable working conditions or the manufactured scarcity that pits us against newly credentialed teachers who simply cost less to employ.
This is not just a financial issue. For autistic teachers like myself, it is existential. Employment is already precarious for those of us who struggle to navigate a system that was never designed for us, and in the current climate, retaining this job is a matter of survival. The erosion of public education is not an unfortunate byproduct of poor policy—it is an intentional act of enshitification, ensuring that schools remain in a constant state of crisis so that privatisation, union-busting, and the looting of public funds can continue unchecked. But understanding how this system works is the first step in fighting back, and in this piece, I want to pull apart the structural forces at play—why experience is devalued, how funding models incentivise instability, and what this means not just for teachers, but for the students who depend on us.
Capitalist Logic in Public Services: Cost Containment Over Quality
Public education in the United States operates under a framework that bears little resemblance to the idealistic rhetoric of investment in the future. Instead, it functions under the brutal logic of capital—where efficiency is defined not by student outcomes, but by cost reduction, and where long-term liabilities, including experienced teachers, are treated as problems to be managed rather than assets to be cultivated. This is not merely a failure of policy but an inevitable consequence of the neoliberal model imposed on public services, a model that prioritises fiscal discipline over human development. Marx reminds us in Capital that the accumulation of capital requires a constant search for cheaper labour, and in education, this manifests through a system that demands a highly skilled workforce whilst refusing to pay for it. The contradiction is striking: school districts incentivise professional development on paper, offering salary points and promotions for further education, but in practice, the financial structures of public education render these very teachers expendable once they reach a certain price point. This is not an oversight; it is a calculated feature of a system designed to extract as much value as possible from workers before discarding them when their labour becomes too expensive.
The logic that governs factory floors under capitalism—the endless search for lower production costs, the preference for a precarious workforce that can be replaced with minimal disruption—now governs the teaching profession. The system is built not to retain veteran teachers, whose deep knowledge and experience benefit students, but to maintain a perpetual cycle of recruitment and attrition, ensuring a fresh supply of low-cost educators who will burn out or move on before they demand too much. Marx’s concept of the reserve army of labour is fully at play here; the creation of an artificial surplus of workers allows employers—in this case, school districts—to justify stagnating wages and worsening conditions. The presence of a small but steady stream of newly credentialed teachers, combined with the downward pressure created by displaced administrators returning to the classroom, ensures that those who have spent years refining their craft are always seen as too expensive to keep. This structural churn serves a dual function: it suppresses labour costs whilst also preventing the kind of long-term organising and institutional knowledge that could challenge the very system that exploits teachers in the first place.
Under capitalism, as Lenin observed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the need for constant expansion and control over labour markets leads to the degradation of working conditions, even in industries ostensibly removed from direct production. Public education, though nominally separate from the private sector, has been subsumed into this logic. Rather than being treated as a public good requiring steady investment, it is administered like any other industry—one that must be made as lean and cost-effective as possible, even at the expense of its core function. The devaluation of experience, the disincentivisation of longevity, and the push towards an ever-cheaper, ever-precarious workforce are not accidental by-products of a poorly designed system. They are essential mechanisms of capitalist control, ensuring that education, like all other public goods under neoliberalism, is continuously hollowed out until what remains is a skeletal structure ripe for privatisation.
The ideological justification for this erosion is always the same: the supposed need for “efficiency,” for “fiscal responsibility,” for ensuring that budgets are balanced. But as Marx reminds us, the ruling class does not act in the interests of the working class. The same legislators and policymakers who cry poverty when it comes to funding schools have no issue diverting public money into private charter networks, bloated testing companies, and the ever-expanding administrative class that absorbs resources whilst producing nothing of value for students. The pressure to keep labour costs down is not driven by genuine scarcity but by the conscious prioritisation of profits over people. The struggle of teachers to remain in their profession is, in this sense, not separate from the broader struggle against capitalist exploitation. It is yet another front in the fight against a system that sees workers—whether in factories, offices, or classrooms—not as individuals with knowledge and skills, but as interchangeable units of labour power to be used up and discarded.
The Influence of “the Business Model” in Education
The transformation of public education into a business enterprise was not an accident, nor was it an inevitable outcome of modernisation. It was a deliberate ideological project, one that took root nationally in the 1980s under Reagan but had already been tested in California, where his tenure as governor served as a blueprint for the broader neoliberal assault on education. Reagan’s economic vision, rooted in market fundamentalism, positioned public services as inefficient, bloated, and in need of corporate-style restructuring. This ideology, exported from Reagan’s California to Washington, reshaped education policy at every level, imposing a model that prioritised financial sustainability over educational quality. Schools, once understood as public institutions invested in the holistic development of students, were transformed into cost-centres subject to the same budgetary logic as private enterprises.
Under this framework, students ceased to be seen as individuals with complex needs and aspirations; instead, they were reduced to economic units, their worth measured in per-pupil funding allocations. The logic of capital, which demands quantification, standardisation, and cost-cutting, took hold in education policy. Budgets were no longer structured around the actual needs of students or communities but were dictated by rigid funding formulas that assigned a set dollar value to each enrollee, with little regard for the realities of classroom instruction. This per-pupil model introduced an artificial scarcity, ensuring that schools constantly operated under financial strain. Rather than investing in experienced educators, districts became incentivised to balance their budgets through cheaper, less experienced hires who would not remain long enough to draw higher salaries.
This shift was not merely economic but deeply ideological, reinforcing the neoliberal conviction that education, like any other public service, should be governed by market principles. The push for financial “efficiency” led to the gutting of programs deemed unprofitable, the rise of high-stakes standardised testing, and the relentless drive to measure every aspect of student and teacher performance in terms of data points. The broader function of education—to cultivate critical thought, foster creativity, and prepare students for meaningful participation in society—was steadily eroded in favour of metrics that could be used to justify budgetary decisions. If a program did not generate measurable “returns,” it was cut. If a teacher’s salary became too high, they became a liability.
The business model also introduced a profound shift in the nature of school governance. In the past, local school boards, teachers, and communities played a central role in shaping education policy. But as education became increasingly financialised, decision-making authority was transferred to private interests—corporate-backed foundations, testing companies, and education technology firms, all of which profited from the dismantling of traditional public schooling. Charter schools, voucher schemes, and “public-private partnerships” were presented as “solutions” to the supposed inefficiencies of the traditional model, further embedding the logic of profit extraction into education policy.
Marxist analysis provides a clear framework for understanding this transformation. Under capitalism, as Marx outlined in Capital, the commodification of labour is inevitable; every aspect of human life is brought under the control of “market forces.” The extension of this logic into education ensures that schools function not as centres of learning but as institutions of production—where students are treated as raw material to be processed into workers, and where teachers are merely instruments in that production process. The imposition of “business logic” on education was never about improving learning outcomes; it was about subordinating one of the last public institutions to the discipline of “the market.” The results are evident: a school system that is perpetually underfunded, where teachers are disposable, and where the pursuit of knowledge has been reduced to the accumulation of test scores and data points that serve bureaucratic rather than educational purposes.
Reagan’s vision, first enacted in California, was always about more than just budget cuts; it was a reordering of public life to ensure that even education, one of the few remaining spaces where collective good could outweigh private profit, was transformed into another avenue for capitalist accumulation. The shift to a business model did not fail—it succeeded in precisely the ways it was intended to. It created a system where schools are no longer spaces of empowerment, but sites of managed austerity, where every decision is dictated not by the needs of students, but by the demands of fiscal “responsibility.” This is the legacy of Reaganism in education: a model designed not to uplift, but to extract, to weaken, and ultimately, to privatise.
The Role of Union Contracts in This System
For me, the fight for fair wages and dignified working conditions is not an abstract struggle but one woven into my very existence. I am a fifth-generation trade unionist, the direct descendant of one of the expelled protesters of Red Clydeside, where workers stood against war profiteering, the crushing weight of capitalism, and the unrelenting demands of industry. Those who fought then understood that their struggle was not just about wages, but about the fundamental dignity of labour. Today, standing in my classroom, I see the same forces at play—capital’s relentless drive to suppress wages, break solidarity, and ensure that workers remain in a state of precarity. The tactics have evolved, the battlegrounds have shifted, but the mechanisms of control remain the same.
At the core of public education’s labour structure is the step-and-column pay scale enshrined in union contracts. This model, designed to ensure fair wages and prevent arbitrary pay reductions, provides stability for teachers by tying salary increases to both tenure and professional development. In theory, this should reward expertise and ensure that those who dedicate themselves to the profession are justly compensated. But in a system governed by the dictates of austerity and neoliberalism, these very protections become a target. Rather than securing adequate funding to support a workforce of skilled educators, districts treat rising salaries as a financial liability, seeking ways to purge experienced teachers before they reach the upper ends of the scale.
The most immediate tactic is the hiring of cheaper, less experienced teachers to offset the costs of veteran staff. This is not about hiring based on quality, but on cost-effectiveness—ensuring that as older teachers leave, they are replaced with younger, lower-paid staff who have yet to climb the salary ladder. The push for turnover is not incidental but systemic, ensuring that few remain long enough to reach the top pay brackets. This mirrors the tactics used by industry, where experienced workers are forced out in favour of a cheaper, more precarious workforce that is less likely to organise, demand better conditions, or resist administrative control.
For those who do remain, pressure is applied in more insidious ways. The expectation that teachers should ‘move on’ after a certain point is baked into the structure of public education. Those who linger too long in the classroom, accumulating experience and salary points, find themselves subtly—or not so subtly—encouraged to transition into administration. This is not framed as an attack, but as professional advancement, a logical career trajectory for those who ‘outgrow’ the classroom. Yet the underlying economic function is clear: by moving veteran teachers into administrative roles, districts shift salary obligations into different budget lines, ensuring that the instructional budget remains artificially lean. What is presented as career mobility is, in reality, a method of extracting experienced educators from the teaching workforce, replacing them with cheaper labour, and maintaining a steady cycle of cost-cutting disguised as progress.
Marx’s analysis of labour under capitalism is as relevant in the modern classroom as it was in the shipyards and factories of early industrial Clydeside. In Capital, he describes how wages are kept in check not merely through direct suppression but through the manipulation of labour markets—ensuring that the workforce remains in a constant state of flux, with few ever reaching a position of security. The education system mirrors this precisely. Tenure and salary protections exist on paper, but the economic structures governing school budgets ensure that few will remain long enough to benefit fully. This is not just an issue of individual job security; it is a broader strategy of labour discipline, designed to keep educators in a perpetual state of uncertainty, unable to build the long-term power needed to challenge the system itself.
For me, as an autistic teacher, this reality carries an added weight. Stability is not simply a preference but a necessity, and the prospect of being pushed out of the profession is not just an economic inconvenience—it is a direct threat to my survival. The systemic devaluation of experience is not just an attack on veteran teachers, but on those of us who do not have the luxury of moving fluidly between careers, who cannot simply pivot into administrative roles or reinvent ourselves to fit the ever-changing demands of the labour market. My ancestors fought to establish the rights of workers, to resist the forces that sought to extract their labour whilst denying them dignity. Now, standing at my own crossroads, I see the same struggle unfolding—not in the streets of Glasgow, but in the budget offices of school districts that have embraced the logic of capital at the expense of both teachers and students.
The Political Side: Undermining Public Education
Austerity in public education has never been a matter of necessity. It is not about a lack of resources, nor is it an unfortunate side effect of economic downturns. It is, and always has been, a deliberate political strategy. The systematic defunding of schools serves a clear function: to manufacture a crisis in public education, one that justifies its dismantling whilst enriching private interests. When funding is cut, schools are forced into scarcity mode—overcrowded classrooms, outdated materials, understaffed faculties, and demoralised teachers. The resulting dysfunction is then weaponised as proof that public schools are failing, that they are bloated bureaucracies incapable of meeting the needs of students. This narrative is not built on reality but on the very conditions imposed by austerity itself.
This is how capital functions. The ruling class does not destroy public institutions outright—it starves them, ensuring that they collapse under their own weight. Marx warned in The Communist Manifesto that the state, under capitalism, exists to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the attack on public education. The goal is not merely cost-cutting but the wholesale transfer of education from the public sphere into the hands of private enterprise. Charter schools, voucher programmes, and ed-tech grifts are presented as ‘solutions’ to the crisis, when in reality, they are the intended beneficiaries of it. The extraction of public wealth into private hands requires the destruction of any alternative, and public schools—one of the last remaining institutions designed to serve the common good rather than the profit motive—are a prime target.
Charter schools, in particular, have been the vanguard of this assault. Presented as innovative, community-driven alternatives to ‘failing’ public schools, they function as profit-making enterprises, siphoning funds whilst evading accountability. Their proliferation is not about improving education but about weakening public-sector unions, undermining labour protections, and breaking the collective power of teachers. When public schools are closed due to budget shortfalls, it is charter operators, venture capital firms, and ideological think tanks that step in—not to educate, but to extract. This is not limited to physical schools; the rise of ed-tech, fuelled by Silicon Valley’s influence over education policy, has introduced a new frontier for privatisation, replacing teachers with algorithmic learning tools that further dehumanise students while lining the pockets of corporate investors.
The ‘teacher crisis’ narrative is another essential piece of this strategy. The very conditions that drive teachers out of the profession—low wages, impossible workloads, lack of support—are then cited as evidence that public education is unsustainable. But this crisis is manufactured. The same politicians who lament ‘teacher shortages’ are the ones ensuring that wages stagnate, that classroom conditions deteriorate, that job security is eroded. Their aim is not to attract and retain qualified educators, but to dismantle the profession altogether—replacing experienced teachers with underpaid, uncredentialed staff, and ultimately, reducing education to a market-driven commodity where students are not learners, but consumers.
This strategy is not new. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine outlined how capitalists exploit disaster to impose sweeping privatisation, and the same playbook is being used against public education. The crisis is the point. The longer schools remain underfunded, the easier it becomes to argue that the public sector has failed, that private interests must take control, that education must be run like a business. But as Marx understood, the interests of capital and the interests of the people are irreconcilable. The fight for public education is not just about better funding or fair wages—it is a fight against the broader project of neoliberalism, which seeks to strip away every communal institution until nothing remains but the logic of the market.
For me, as an autistic teacher, this fight is personal. The destruction of public education is not just a policy failure; it is an attack on those of us who rely on its existence. The market has no use for teachers like me—those who do not fit neatly into its demands for flexibility, efficiency, and profit generation. My ability to remain employed is already precarious, and the forces working to dismantle public education only serve to accelerate that precarity. The enshitification of education is not just an abstract political concern—it is a direct assault on my survival, on the survival of my students, and on the very idea that education should serve the people rather than the interests of capital.
Social Control Through Job Precarity
Precarity is not an accident of capitalism; it is its natural state. The insecurity that defines the modern workforce is not a byproduct of economic turbulence but a deliberate strategy of control. Workers kept in a constant state of uncertainty—never fully stable, never able to plan beyond the immediate future—are easier to exploit, less likely to organise, and more willing to accept deteriorating conditions out of sheer necessity. This is as true for education as it is for any other sector. The same system that encourages teachers to accumulate qualifications, invest in professional development, and refine their craft ensures that stability remains just out of reach. In doing so, it keeps educators in a state of permanent contingency, where the fear of replacement—by younger, cheaper workers, or increasingly, by algorithmic learning systems—undermines any real possibility of collective resistance.
Marx’s analysis of the reserve army of labour is crucial here. Capitalism requires an excess of workers who can be drawn upon when needed and discarded when they become too costly. This logic has extended far beyond traditional industrial labour and now shapes every profession that can be fragmented, casualised, or automated. Teaching, once considered a relatively secure career, has been restructured into an industry where long-term stability is not guaranteed but rather systematically eroded. The churn of educators—new teachers entering, veterans pushed out—ensures that wages remain suppressed, union power is weakened, and the workforce is kept in a state of constant flux. Those who resist, who attempt to build careers within the profession, are marked as liabilities rather than assets, their experience seen not as an advantage but as an expense to be eliminated.
For autistic teachers, this instability is especially punishing. Capitalism already makes employment precarious for those who do not fit neatly into its demands for adaptability and hyper-productivity. The expectation that workers should be able to shift roles, change careers, or ‘reinvent themselves’ at a moment’s notice is fundamentally a construct of the neuro-majority, one that assumes a level of cognitive flexibility and social capital that many autistic people simply do not have. For us, work is not interchangeable; it is something that must be carefully navigated, often against systems that are already stacked against us. When the labour market treats experience as disposable, it does not just make employment difficult—it makes it impossible to build the kind of stability that is essential for survival.
The devaluation of expertise, then, is not just an economic issue—it is a method of exclusion. By ensuring that only the most flexible, the most compliant, and the most willing to endure endless uncertainty can remain in the profession, the system systematically weeds out those who require stability, those who resist degradation, and those who—by necessity—demand better conditions. For me, this is not theoretical. My ability to remain employed is already contingent on navigating a system that was not designed for me, and the forces working to make teaching more precarious only accelerate that uncertainty. The more unstable the profession becomes, the fewer of us will be able to remain in it. The long-term effect is not just fewer autistic teachers, but the further entrenchment of a system where only those willing to accept worsening conditions without question are allowed to stay.
This is why the fight for job security is not just about wages or tenure—it is about resisting a system that thrives on insecurity. The enshitification of education is not just about cost-cutting or ‘efficiency’—it is about control. Precarity is a tool, one used to discipline workers, to ensure they remain atomised, fearful, and unable to mount a serious challenge to the forces that exploit them. Understanding this is crucial because it reveals the deeper function of austerity, of union-busting, of the slow hollowing-out of public institutions. These are not merely policy decisions—they are mechanisms of class warfare, designed to break resistance before it can begin. And for those of us who cannot simply move on, who cannot just ‘find another job,’ the stakes could not be higher.
Final thoughts …
The reality of public education today is not one of accidental dysfunction but of deliberate design. This system, which relentlessly cycles teachers in and out of the profession, is not failing in the way policymakers claim—it is succeeding precisely as intended. The expectation that teachers should come, burn out, and leave before they become too expensive or too powerful within their unions is not a flaw but a feature, one that serves both economic and political ends. By ensuring that no one remains in the profession long enough to amass institutional knowledge or fight back effectively, capital maintains its grip over public education, suppressing wages, destabilising unions, and keeping schools in a constant state of crisis. It is a strategy that guarantees not only the financialisation of education but also the slow erosion of any real resistance to its further privatisation.
The question, then, is not simply how to reform this system but how to dismantle the conditions that make it possible in the first place. If austerity is a political choice, then so is fully funding public education. If turnover is incentivised, then so must be retention. If precarity is used to discipline and control workers, then our response must be to build collective power that refuses to be fragmented. This is not just a fight for teachers but for the very future of public education itself. A system that treats educators as disposable does not just harm those who teach—it harms those who learn, ensuring that students are taught in institutions that prioritise cost-cutting over knowledge, compliance over critical thought, and efficiency over human development.
For those of us who do not have the privilege of moving between careers with ease, who have fought to remain in a profession that increasingly tells us we are unwanted, this fight is deeply personal. The enshitification of education is not an abstract policy failure—it is a calculated act of class warfare, one that must be met with an equally deliberate refusal to accept its terms. The path forward will not be easy, but history has shown that even the most entrenched systems of exploitation can be undone when workers refuse to be broken. Public education is worth fighting for, not as it is, but as it could be—an institution that values experience, nurtures its workforce, and exists not as a site of extraction, but as a true public good.