William Marvel: Empire busting

The United States fields an overpowering army of teachers. In mid-July, our combined armed forces included only 1.3 million people; in June, Education Week reported an equivalent of about 3.2 million full-time public schoolteachers. Some are not full-time, so somewhat more than 3.2 million teachers draw municipal salaries, which represents about 1 percent of the entire nursery-to-nursing-home population of the country. Fewer than 160 million Americans were employed before coronavirus drove the country to economic hara-kiri, and teaching accounted for more than 2 percent of all those jobs.

Incidentally, Education Week also calculates that nearly 80 percent of public schoolteachers are white, and less than 7 percent are black. Maybe it’s time school districts broke up the systemic racism that created this disparity and booted some of those privileged white teachers out on the street. Teachers tend to be women by more than three to one, however, which might lead to dueling discrimination claims, but just fire all the white men. They have no rights anyone is bound to respect, anyway.