Summer may be the season for beating dead horses (not literally). If so, I’ll take the indulgence of bringing some extra attention to a thorough and commonsense debunking of the $23 billion education jobs bill by the Washington Post‘s Charles Lane. Thankfully, Congress appears to have retreated from adding one more profligate and ineffective bailout onto the backs of the American people and from further increasing our schools’ obligation to the federal treasury.
Even so, Lane takes valuable pains to do the math, to discredit bill proponents’ claims and to deflate the NEA scare tactics with facts and context:
…Notably, however, even these sources usually describe the threatened positions as “education jobs” – not teachers. That’s because the figures actually include not only kindergarten through 12th grade classroom instructors, but also support staff (bus drivers, custodians, et al.) and even community college faculty. And 300,000 is the upper end of a range that could be as low as 100,000. Nationwide, there are about 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers.
Moreover, springtime layoff notices are a notoriously unreliable guide to actual job cuts in the fall, because rules and regulations in many public school systems require administrators to notify every person who might conceivably be laid off — whether they actually expect to fire them or not….
And so it goes. Certainly worth a full read. (Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency capably did similar work a week ago. Bottom line? Even the scarcely believable worst-case scenarios only would send our nation’s class sizes back to the dreadful dark ages of 1996 or 1997.) Piling on, Alexander Russo reminds us with a helpful graphic of the other options school districts are pursuing to tighten their belts apart from teacher (and other education employee) layoffs.
Finally, Robert Enlow makes a terrific point in a May 25 USA Today op-ed: If the feds are determined to travel the route of wild spending, misguided “stimulus” and generational debt, the least they could do is attach the money to needy students in the form of vouchers. Still, I much prefer the message: No more bailouts, please. Let’s find a smarter way to deal with the short-term shortages while building long-term reforms. Sharing in a little of the pain now beats the alternative we all face.
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