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1) Education Hiring Grew 2.3 Percent
During Recession. On February 25, 2010, U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
testified before the House Budget Committee. He opened his remarks with
this:
"It was just over a year ago that
Congress and President Obama worked together to complete the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). This legislation will
deliver nearly $100 billion to Recovery Act recipients, including States and
school districts, to help address budget shortfalls in the midst of the most
severe financial crisis and economic recession since the Great Depression.
To date, the Department has awarded more than $69 billion. For the quarter
ending December 31, 2009, recipients reported that assistance from the
Department of Education funded approximately 400,000 jobs overall, including
more than 300,000 education jobs, such as principals, teachers, librarians
and counselors."
What Duncan did not say, and probably
did not know at the time, was that almost half of those education jobs
didn't exist a mere four months before the stimulus package was introduced
in Congress. While America was "in the midst of the most
severe financial crisis and economic recession since the Great Depression,"
the nation's school districts were hiring principals, teachers,
librarians and counselors at an accelerated rate, despite flat student
enrollment.
The National Bureau of Economic Research
recently concluded that the
recession lasted from December 2007 until June 2009, which coincides
very well with the school years 2007-08 and 2008-09. According to the U.S.
Department of Education's own Common Core of Data, school districts in the
50 states and the District of Columbia employed 6,063,831 full-time
equivalent workers in 2007-08 and 6,201,006 in 2008-09 - an increase of
137,175, or 2.3 percent. It is ironic that this number almost exactly
matches the number of jobs
reportedly saved by the edujobs bill, which became law last August.
I have posted the
state-by-state numbers on the EIA web site. Thirty-eight states and the
District of Columbia increased their workforces during the 2008-09 school
year. Of the new hires, almost 80,000 were teachers.
This lends an entirely new perspective
to the battles going on in states right now over
how to spend the edujobs funds. States that did not lay off education
employees this year have to either use the money to support - for one more
year - those new hires from Fall 2008, or use it to take on even more
employees.
Whether we
can sustain public education employment at ever-higher arbitrary rates
remains to be seen. On the positive side, when we have one education
employee for every student, we will be able to settle that class size
reduction debate once and for all.
2) Poway School Staff Disaffiliates
from State Union. This sort of thing is pretty
rare in California, so it's worth noting the formation of the
Poway School Employees Association, a local-only union recently
recognized by the state as the exclusive representative of about 1,300
education support workers in the district.
The local had been affiliated with the
California School Employees Association, but
went public last March with its desire to become independent.
"Our chapter
has gotten virtually no support from CSEA in the last 9 years," said Dianne
Kodadek, who led the disaffiliation campaign. "In that time, we have had to
negotiate our own contracts and represent our own members, while sending
$330,000 each year to CSEA in San Jose and getting nothing in return."
PSEA won a representation election in
June, which was challenged by CSEA. The split, it's fair to say,
was not amicable. The local will draft a new constitution and hold
officer elections later in the school year.
3) Scheduling Note.
The next EIA Communiqué will appear on Tuesday, October 12.
4) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from September 28-October 4:
* Who
You Gonna Call? Ghost students in Indiana...
*
Haunting. ...and in Colorado.
*
Taxing. "It was Sanskrit to me."
*
Five-O Is a Lot of Blank Ballots. None of the above.
*
I Have an Alibi. Maybe the thieves thought that's where the money was.
5) Quote of the Week #1.
"There's just not much more you can take from schools. There's no more meat
on the bone. It's just amputation." - David Sanchez, president of the
California Teachers Association. (September 30
Education Week)
According to the U.S. Department of
Education, the number of education employees in California districts rose
from 561,220 in 2007-08 to 586,110 in 2008-09.
Quote of the Week #2.
"Organizers of Saturday's 'One Nation Working Together' rally at the Lincoln
Memorial are proud of their diversity. Before the event, they predicted it
would be the 'most diverse march in history.' It turned out they were right.
Looking around the rally, there were Teamsters Local 311, Service Employees
International Union Local 1199, Communications Workers of America Local
2336, American Federation of Teachers Local 1, United Auto Workers
Amalgamated Local 171, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and
representatives of many, many other unions. That's a lot of diversity." -
Byron York of the Washington Examiner. (October 3
Washington Examiner) |
