The Greatest Government Jobs Program to Ever Exist: Public Schools

The greatest government jobs program ever created may be public education. So, for anyone wondering why public-school bureaucracies sometimes seem less focused on students than on preserving the bureaucracy itself, well, that is almost charmingly beside the point. 

Over the past 6+ decades, public schools have made the decision to hire over three times the number of staff

Way more teachers aids, administrators, sped teachers, and auxiliary staff

That’s money they didn’t invest in teacher salaries pic.twitter.com/MeKPoEEe3r

— Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” (@MrDanielBuck) September 30, 2026

According to a chart shared by Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of the Conservative Education Reform Network, K-12 enrollment and teacher salaries have seen only modest growth since 1959. School staffing, however, has exploded, increasing by well over 200 percent. That expansion has several causes: government-mandated growth in the ranks of aides, administrators, special-education personnel, and other student-support roles, which increased by roughly sevenfold; as well as teachers unions that had every institutional incentive to treat additional staffing as additional dues-paying membership. Unions have also helped fuel the staffing surge by pushing contract rules that expand support roles and make cuts more difficult. Research even finds that higher union density is linked to larger staff-to-student ratios, particularly in nonteaching positions, while non-right-to-work states have seen the sharpest growth.

The result is a school system that has steadily added adults at a far faster rate than it has added students, an impressive feat for an institution supposedly organized around educating children.

Buck argues that the staffing explosion was not inevitable. If public schools had maintained roughly the same student-to-staff ratio they had in 1959, about 18 to 19.3 students per employee, teacher pay could have doubled by now. Instead, he characterizes the choice to build an ever-larger educational bureaucracy as exactly that: a “decision.”

The scale of that decision becomes especially glaring when viewed through the annual cost. Public education now consumes roughly $1.014 trillion, while the country employs about 3.8 million teachers. If every dollar spent on public education went directly to classroom teachers, each would earn approximately $266,842 a year.

Here’s another set of basic calculations to drive the point home

We spend $1.014 trillion total on public education. There are about 3.8 million teachers

Were all expenditures to go straight to teachers, their salaries would be $266,842

We choose to spend that money elsewhere

— Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” (@MrDanielBuck) September 30, 2026

Public education is supposed to exist for one purpose: educating children. But after decades of expanding government involvement, unionized labor monopolies, and contracts that too often place union interests ahead of children’s, it increasingly functions as something else entirely: a government jobs program that just so happens to operate schools. 

Children may be the stated mission, but the bureaucracy is the actual constituency. As long as public education is organized around the needs of the adults it employs rather than the students it is meant to serve, taxpayers will keep funding a sprawling employment system that occasionally remembers to educate the next generation of Americans.

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