Advocating for Public Education: A Superintendent’s Guide
My first teaching contract was for $19,100. That was 1999, at Lakeside Elementary on Flathead Lake in Montana, in a building so new it still smelled like paint. If you were lucky, your classroom looked out over the water. What the school didn't have was textbooks. Most of the general fund had gone into finishing the building, so I spent that first year hunting down resources to cover standards our district had written itself.
That gap between a beautiful building and an empty bookshelf is where I learned what school funding actually is. Not a line item. A set of choices somebody else made, that you find out about in September when you go looking for materials that aren't there.
Twenty-five years later, I'm a superintendent, and the questions have gotten louder. Public education is being scrutinized, criticized, and in some communities abandoned. If you're a public educator, your stomach has probably been churning. The response isn't complicated, and it isn't someone else's job.
What School Funding Looks Like From Inside a Classroom
I started out in Palmer, Alaska. Schools were going up fast across the Mat-Su Valley and Anchorage districts, built for a growing population and designed around current research on how kids learn. Then I moved home to Montana and found classrooms with one computer and turn-of-the-century buildings still in daily use, added onto over the decades with whatever materials were available at the time.
Same country. Same promise of a free and appropriate public education. Wildly different delivery.
Montana funds its public schools through a combination of state funding, local revenue including property taxes, federal dollars, enrollment-based calculations, and equalization mechanisms designed to narrow gaps between districts. Nationally, the mix runs about 45.1 percent state, 42.0 percent local, and 12.9 percent federal, according to the National Center for Education Statistics for 2022-23. Property taxes specifically supplied 33.2 percent of total public-school revenue that year. Local property wealth can affect school resources, although the size of that effect depends heavily on each state's funding formula.
You can watch it happen across a single state. I've visited schools in Geraldine, Rapelje, Harlowton, Corvallis, Fort Shaw, and Fort Benton. I've also seen what's been built in Hamilton, Lockwood, Whitefish, Big Sky, Helena, and Winifred. The difference isn't effort, and it isn't teaching quality.
Why the Zip Code Argument Isn't Abstract
In the late 1980s, a coalition of Montana school districts sued the state, arguing the funding system failed to deliver the "appropriate" half of a free and appropriate public education. My own district was among the lead plaintiffs. The districts won. The formula has been revised several times since, and the disparity is still there.
That pattern isn't unique to Montana. School-finance litigation has a long history across many states, and equalization formulas continue to be revised. Winning in court moves the formula. It doesn't finish the argument.
We need visionary educational leaders and increased local support for public education.
So what separates the districts that have from the ones that don't? Public support and leadership matter, but you'll find both in places that are still short of resources. The honest answer is that the tax base does a lot of the work, and no amount of local goodwill fully compensates for it.
The Pull Away From Public Schools
Families who can afford private school or homeschooling are choosing them at rising rates. Montana's Office of Public Instruction reported in October 2021 that the state's homeschool population was growing faster than public or private enrollment.
I came to this late. Charter schools weren't part of the Montana landscape for most of my career, and our private schools are almost all religious, so I read about charter and voucher fights in other states through my AFT magazine without feeling them. That changed in 2023, when the Montana Legislature passed HB 549 authorizing public charter schools, with the first schools under that law opening beginning in 2024-25.
The documentary Waiting for Superman (2010) shaped how a generation of parents thought about this. It followed families trying to win charter lottery seats, and featured Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone built charter schools in New York, and Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools. Both were working on real problems in urban districts.
My argument isn't that those efforts failed. It's that a lottery is a poor model for a country that promised every child a seat. In a rural community, the public school is the largest employer, the economic driver, and the place everyone gathers on a Friday night. Introduce competition there, and you don't get two good options. You get one weakened one.
Horace Mann (1796-1859) was among the most influential advocates of the nineteenth-century common-school movement, which built the case that every child should receive a basic education supported by public funds.
Mann's idea was a system for every child. That's still the design we're operating, and it's worth defending before we replace it.
Five Ways to Advocate for Public Education
Here's what I've learned watching teachers do this well. None of it requires a title.
1. Tell your story, out loud and often
In my experience, this is the most valuable thing a teacher can do, and the most neglected. If every classroom documented its learning daily in pictures and words, the volume of that story would drown out the criticism. I've watched a teacher hand a student a camera and make documentation a classroom job, which freed her to teach while the record got made. Those photos went to social media and into the school annual.
2. Connect the school to the community that funds it
Schools are the hub of most small communities. Invite families in. Report findings from a science project back to the town. Tell parents what their kids did this week, not just when something goes wrong. People protect what they feel connected to.
3. Engage students emotionally before you engage them academically
Public schools enroll everyone without restriction, which means building support systems that reach students where they are. Every strong teacher I've observed works the relationship first. The positive words, the handshake at the door, the hug. Academics land after that, not before.
4. Take learning outside the walls
I spent an hour with 25 students in Woodside Creek collecting macroinvertebrates in donated waders. That's a water-quality unit the community heard about, students remember, and no worksheet replicates. Real-world learning is also visible learning, which makes it advocacy whether you intend it or not.
5. Team with your colleagues
Professional learning communities work because more brains solve more problems. Teachers who plan together, teach together, and reach across content areas produce better outcomes than any of them manage alone. A staff that functions as a team is also a staff that can speak with one voice when it needs to.
Where to Start If You've Never Advocated Before
The strategies above happen inside your building. Public education is also decided in rooms you may never have entered, and that's where most teachers hesitate.
Start with your school board. Meetings are public, agendas are posted in advance, and in my experience, relatively few educators attend. Ask your principal whether the school has absorbed recent budget cuts and how they're being handled, then ask the board for reporting on how state and local dollars are actually distributed across schools in your district. Those two questions surface more than any speech.
Then go one level up. Your state legislature writes the funding formula, and legislators hear from lobbyists constantly and from classroom teachers rarely. One letter a quarter about one issue you care about builds a habit and a record. When a levy or bond appears on your local ballot, say publicly why it matters and what it buys.
One caution worth taking seriously: your speech rights as a public employee are broader on your own time than they are while you're acting in your official role, and the specifics vary by state and district. Before you speak publicly on a contested issue, check your district's policy and talk to your local association. The National Education Association publishes guidance on educator advocacy rights that's a reasonable starting point.
Advocacy isn't a grand gesture. It's the accumulation of small, repeated acts, which is also a fair description of teaching. If you're considering the profession, the path starts with how to become a teacher, and open positions are listed through our teaching career board.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does advocating for public education actually mean?
It means two things at once. Inside your school, it's making the work visible: documenting learning, inviting the community in, and building the kind of classroom people want to defend. Outside it, it's showing up where decisions get made, including school board meetings, legislative sessions, and local ballot measures on levies and bonds.
Why are some public schools funded so much better than others?
Public schools receive a mix of federal, state, and local revenue, and differences in local property wealth can contribute to funding disparities depending on the state's funding system. State aid formulas are designed to narrow those gaps and don't always close them. The result is that two districts an hour apart can offer different resources to students with similar needs.
Can teachers get in trouble for speaking out about school funding?
Protections exist for public employees, but they're limited and they differ depending on whether you're speaking as a private citizen or in your official capacity, and on your state and district policy. This isn't legal advice. Check your district's policy and contact your local association or an attorney before speaking publicly on a contested issue.
What's one thing a single teacher can do that makes a difference?
Tell the story of your classroom, consistently and in public. Criticism of public education fills a vacuum. The people best positioned to fill it with something accurate are the ones in the room every day.
- Funding comes from three levels - Local sources supplied about 42 percent of K-12 revenue in 2022-23, and how much local property wealth affects your students depends on your state's funding formula.
- Court wins move formulas, not outcomes - Montana districts won their funding lawsuit in the late 1980s, and the disparity between districts persists today.
- Visibility is advocacy - Documenting and sharing classroom learning is, in this author's experience, among the most valuable actions available to an individual teacher.
- Show up where decisions happen - School boards and state legislatures hear from classroom educators less often than from other stakeholders, which makes each one who appears worth listening to.
- Know your speech rights first - Protections for public employees vary by state, district, and whether you're speaking officially, so check policy and your association before going public.
If reading this has you weighing a move into teaching, or a step up into school leadership, the programs listed on this page include online and hybrid formats built around people already working full time. Several are designed to meet or support administrative-licensure pathways. Requirements differ by state, so verify eligibility with your state's educator-licensing agency before you enroll.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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