Teacher Layoffs a Crisis? Not So Much
You’ve no doubt heard about the massive upcoming teacher layoffs and that $23 billion is need right now to save public education. Chris Lane at the Washington Post says you can calm down. It’s just hype.
For one thing, the predicted “as many as” figure of 300,000 teachers affected is misleading:
Start with that scary number of 300,000 teacher layoffs, which has been bandied about in numerous newspaper articles. The sources for it are interested parties: teachers unions and school administrators, whose national organizations counted layoff warning notices that have already been sent out this spring and extrapolated from there. 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. As the New York Times recently reported: “Everywhere, school officials tend to overestimate the potential for layoffs at this time of year, to ensure that every employee they might have to dismiss receives the required notifications.”
The proposed spending bill allots the money in a rather curious manner:
By the way, the bill distributes funds to states according to how many residents they have, not how many threatened layoffs.
If we frame the argument in terms of kids instead of teachers, a natural concern would be the ill effects of a great increases in class size. I went to Catholic elementary school in the days when 50 in a class was not unusual and I think I turned out pretty well. But no one would sensibly argue for classes that large today. Lane notes, however, that that’s not really a problem:
But what about class size? Well, 300,000 teacher layoffs would increase the national student-teacher ratio in public schools from 15.3 to 1, to 16.6 to 1 – roughly where it was in 1997. And 100,000 teacher layoffs would increase it to 15.6 to 1 – the 2005 level. Neither number portends educational apocalypse, especially when you consider how uncertain the links are between class size and student achievement. Student-teacher ratios shrank by roughly 10 percent nationally between 1996 and 2008, but reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress stayed essentially flat. Newark, for example, has a student-teacher ratio of only 10.7 to 1 – and the poorest test-score results of any public school system in New Jersey.
Finally, Lane notes that folks are asking why people who hold school jobs should be more protected from job loss than other workers in our economy.
Indeed, given that the unemployment rate among health and education workers is only half that of the work force as a whole, you could argue that it’s the teachers’ turn to absorb some of the pain that they have been spared to date.
If, as Lane demonstrates, students won’t be hurt and if teachers can make some sacrifices to avoid the layoffs of their colleagues– something teachers in some places have already done– it’s hard to make a case for the necessity or reasonableness of the spending bill.
