New ranking gives Kansas high marks for education — but the teachers are quitting | Opinion

There’s some good news and bad news this week for education in Kansas.

First, the good news: Our school system is a crown jewel of the state’s economy. CNBC on Tuesday listed its annual “America’s Top States for Business” rankings and Kansas came in at the 23rd spot. Yes, that’s fairly middling — Missouri, next door, came in 32nd — but the Sunflower State received superlative rankings in two categories: second in the nation for cost of living, right behind Iowa, and fifth in education.

The education ranking was based on a variety of inputs, including test scores, class sizes and funding for K-12 schools.

“A state’s education system is its main source of talent and an engine of innovation,” the network said in explaining its rankings. “It is also a key consideration for companies and families deciding where to put down roots.”

So we’ve got that going for us. The bad news? Public education in Kansas remains — as ever — extremely fragile.

The canary in the coal mine, of course, is Kansas teachers.

New data presented this week to the Kansas State Board of Education shows the challenge schools face. The number of teaching positions in the state that were left vacant because there were simply no applicants for the jobs has risen dramatically — from 482 spots in fall 2021 to 683 a year later.

Finding new teachers is tough. So is keeping them. The data also shows that more and more Kansas teachers are leaving the profession, getting out of the education business altogether. A bit more than 500 of the state’s teachers — not including retirees — opted out of a teaching career during the 2020-21 school year. That number rose to 985 in 2022-23.

“The number of teachers simply leaving the profession has nearly doubled over just a couple of years,” Scott Rothschild, communications editor for the Kansas Association of School Boards, wrote on Twitter.

That’s bad for Kansas kids, of course. Put that information next to the new CNBC business rankings, though, and you can see a clear threat to the state’s economy.

Now: Kansas isn’t alone in facing challenges hiring and retaining teachers. The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic — a year of lost classroom time, and the desperate effort to make up for the learning loss that went along with it — have made the already-stressful job of being a teacher anywhere more difficult than it’s ever been within living memory.

The truth, though, is that Kansans have battled for their schools constantly in recent decades.

It took a decadelong lawsuit from the state’s schools to force legislators in Topeka to bring funding to anything like adequate levels, despite a requirement in the Kansas Constitution that the Legislature should make “suitable provision for the finance of the educational interests of the state.”

Along the way, then-Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cutting experiment nearly strangled Kansas schools. Kansas voters rebelled, electing legislators who reversed the tax cuts and stopped punishing public education. Brownback’s name was so tarnished by the effort that his political ghost still hovers over the political careers of state Republicans — such as failed gubernatorial candidate Derek Schmidt — who were connected to the effort.

But the GOP-controlled Legislature still doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson — leaving special education underfunded at the end of the 2023 session despite a massive budget surplus. Republicans wouldn’t approve that funding without tying it to their efforts to create a voucher-like program that would undermine public schools by diverting students to other options.

These are just the funding issues. We haven’t even talked about how the right’s culture wars against racial and sexual diversity have turned Kansas schools — and other schools across the country — into fraught political battlegrounds.

No wonder teachers are leery of sticking around.

Despite that, the CNBC rankings suggest we still have a good thing going in Kansas public schools. That’s great — something we can build on. Let’s hope Republican legislators don’t throw it all away.