The Eternal Stimulus

Here's Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency with some fascinating data about how little teachers (and government employees in general) have been affected by the horrible recession we're still in – but guess who's getting the bailout?

 

What's a measly $10 billion out of nearly $700 billion in annual spending on public education anyway? Well, it's the notion that the people who are drowning in the ocean are bailing out the people in the lifeboats.

 

A few weeks ago, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government ginned up a neat little report, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, on the nation's job situation. Figure 1 is a depiction of the change in employment since the start of the current recession. The blue, yellow and green lines are the public sector. The red line is the private sector.

 

 

There's more. After 30 months of recession, local government education employment (the category where most teachers and support employees reside) has yet to approach a one percent decline.

 

Of the 35 states for which we have data, 13 lost jobs in the education sector from the spring of 2009 to the spring of 2010. Mississippi was unchanged. The other 21 states had education employment increases - including New Jersey, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

 

It is highly likely that many of the teachers who were laid off this year - whose jobs we are now trying to save - were only hired because of last year's stimulus money. They are essentially wards of the federal government. If this is the road to economic recovery, then we should simply hire as teachers all of the nation's unemployed.

 

After such a huge victory in the Senate, you might think the teachers' unions would be content to get out with the $10 billion, but they're already raising the specter of perpetual bailouts. Richard Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers, said the additional money only allows districts to delay the inevitable for a year because revenues are not suddenly going to rebound anytime soon.

 

The federal government is now firmly in the business of hiring and paying your local school teachers according to the flawed and self-interested projections of district administrators and teachers' unions. It won't be so easy to go back.

------------------------

www.eiaonline.com/communique.htm

 

The Eternal Stimulus. Only now, as the edujobs bill has overcome its largest obstacle in the Senate, are people beginning to ask questions about how this is all going to work.