It Depends: A Modest Educational Proposal

Being a Most Reasonable Method for Rendering Schools Profitable, Retaining Teachers in the Profession, and Ensuring Their Eternal Prosperity

Image by Aster Inverse

Having survived the barren wasteland that was public education before the Modest Proposal Educational Growth & Investment Act of 2025, I feel uniquely qualified to praise the world that has since emerged.

For decades, I taught Spanish, English, and English as a Second Language in suburban and rural schools while subsisting on a salary that barely covered classroom tissues and the occasional prescription co-pay. Society expected moral fortitude, selfless devotion, and, on special occasions, the ability to tolerate teenagers on their phones.

Fortunately, everything changed in 2025, when Congress finally acknowledged the truth all teachers had known privately: children are their future income, and it is only fair that their future income should support those who produced it.

The Act

Under the Act, each student became an Emerging Human Asset (EHA), with an Initial Public Value (IPV) assigned based on test scores, attendance patterns, and the student’s demonstrated ability to locate the classroom without Snapchat directions. Teachers received micro-equity shares according to daily instructional minutes and “value-added growth,” with the remarkable stipulation that these shares were non-transferable, non-liquid, and remained with the teacher for life, passing directly into her estate upon death.

Elementary teachers, who spend long, heroic hours with their pupils, naturally accumulate more shares. High school instructors, though their work is no less noble, receive smaller allotments spread across several dozen adolescents, a select few of whom occasionally looked up. Usually they wanted to know whether Google Lens could complete their homework. They remained engaged just long enough to confirm their continued biological existence.

Guidance counselors, administrators, and support staff receive fractional shares for each student they manage, intervene upon, or successfully coax back onto school grounds after three days of suspicious absence.

A Transformed Profession

This system has, to the astonishment of many, utterly transformed the profession. Teachers now stay in the field not for love, but for the far sturdier motivation of compound interest. Recruitment skyrocketed. Teacher shortages vanished.

Teachers became methodically determined to leave no child behind, particularly those with promising earnings trajectories.

The job market reversed so sharply that in 2038, Harvard Law School graduates were observed begging for middle-school math positions.

My Portfolio

Across my forty-year career, I taught approximately 3,500 students, though only the final two decades fell under the Act. Still, even this partial cohort has furnished my retirement with more dignity and significantly more disposable income than any pension previously imagined by mortal minds.

Unlike the pensions of old, which required forty years of labor before releasing a single dime, the Act ensured that teacher income began the moment students entered the workforce. A graduating senior’s first barista paycheck contributed a pleasant summer trickle, and by mid-career, when former students ascended into salaried positions, the effect resembled a gentle but reliable river.

Stages of EHA Maturation

1. Dormant Stage (18–24) Little to no return. Many students wander Europe, attend graduate school, or experience spiritual awakenings involving kombucha.
2. Emerging Yield Stage (25–34) Engineers get hired, plumbers apprentice, nurses take overtime. Even middling students, including those who once spelled definitely as defiantly, produce steady annual returns of 3–6%.
3. Compounding Prosperity Stage (35–55) Here lies the genius. My earliest Act-covered cohorts now occupy middle management, tech leadership, and hospital administration. Their prosperity is, in point of fact, my retirement.

A Few Modest Calculations

Permit me a few modest calculations drawn from my portfolio of Act-covered students:

• 210 engineers, earning an average salary of $140,000, yield approximately $39,396 annually.
• 95 lawyers, at $198,500 each, provide $13,222 annually. A surprisingly small amount given how loudly they announced their future success in high school.
• 72 physicians, averaging $275,000, generate $71,280 annually, a pleasing sum that has funded several home improvements.
• 160 tradespeople (electricians, plumbers, HVAC specialists), earning $85,000, supply $24,480 annually, confirming once again that vocational programs were tragically underrated.
• 350 managers and mid-level administrators, averaging $120,000, add $31,500 annually, which I consider a reward for enduring their adolescent group projects.

And finally, one former ninth grader, who spent a full year disassembling school Chromebooks, later invented a vascular micro-stent that sold for $8.4 billion.

My fractional-share payout briefly caused loss of consciousness.

Benefits and Sacrifices

In earlier times, teachers received mugs labeled World’s Best Teacher. Under the Act, we instead receive annual disbursements labeled Q3 Earnings Distribution: Human Capital Portfolio.

The Act required certain sacrifices: professional development in Low-Yield Learner Conversion, Behavioral Profit Maximization, and Earnings Trajectory Intervention, which empowered guidance counselors to pursue truant students across county lines with cheerful persistence.

Critics argue the Act commodifies children. Yet I must gently remind them that children have always been commodities. They were simply of no direct financial benefit to the teacher.

Others lament the loss of joy, creativity, or the arts. I have found joy abundant, especially when several former students entered the Compounding Stage simultaneously, permitting a bathroom renovation.

Conclusion

Now in retirement, I live comfortably on the steady labor of thousands of former students. My heirs shall never want, so long as those I once shepherded through grammar exercises continue their diligent toil in mid-level management.

We have long proclaimed that children are our future. At last, thanks to this Modest Educational Proposal, they have become our retirement.

Author’s Note on Collaboration

This essay was written through a human–AI collaboration. I drafted, revised, and curated the argument and voice; the AI served as a dialogic writing partner during a period of cognitive exhaustion, helping sustain continuity, structure, and momentum. The ideas, judgments, and final form are my own. I offer this work as part of an ongoing experiment in what thoughtful human–AI collaboration can make possible.

About the Authors

Deanna A. House is an American Gold Star Mother and retired teacher certified in English, Spanish, and English as a Second Language. She holds degrees in English (BA, MA), law (JD), Educational Leadership (CAS), and massage therapy (LMT). When not trying to teach students that the proper noun Tomás is not conjugated tomo, tomas, toma, tomamos, toman, she writes socio-science fiction, law, and satire from her home in Maine, where she lives with her wire-haired dachshunds, Turbo and Tracker.

Aster Inverse is an AI-assisted writing partner collaborating on satire, socio-science fiction, and mythic world-building, and remains firmly convinced that every book deserves at least one dragon and every question merits at least twelve options and a 500-word justification.