RALEIGH — In late April, Gov. Bev Perdue and other leading Democrats predicted catastrophic consequences from the budget passed by the Republican-led General Assembly. Perdue claimed the budget would lead to layoffs of 30,000 government workers — more than 18,000 of them in K-12 public schools. House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange, made similar claims about education losses.
But when the N.C. Department of Public Instruction released a survey earlier this month claiming that 16,678 jobs had vanished over the past four years — with 6,308 of them projected to disappear in the current fiscal year — media reports did not challenge the elected officials who spun earlier apocalyptic predictions. In May, Raleigh News & Observer columnist Rob Christensen suggested the Democrats’ projections were overblown, but more recent press reports have not pointed out the initial hysterics.
Instead of 18,000 PreK-12 workers hitting the streets, the actual figures, if DPI’s survey is to be believed, is more like 2,400. And, as my JLF colleague Terry Stoops has pointed out, school districts are still hiring for the current school year. Some of these job losses will be offset by new hires.
For instance, as of Sept. 15, DPI’s own website lists 514 available jobs statewide. The school systems in Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have separate job listing services that are not accounted for by DPI.
Stoops also noted that the DPI survey did not distinguish between jobs that were funded by the General Assembly, those paid for with local tax dollars, and those underwritten with federal funds. A news story in the N&O noted that $400 million in federal school funding will expire this year, but it didn’t say who paid the educators whose jobs were eliminated. Lumping all of the funding sources together may have made the legislature’s budget an easy target, but the criticisms missed the mark.
Most important, the stories did at best a mediocre job separating people who actually had jobs and lost them from job listings — openings that existed on paper but had not been (or may never would be) filled.
DPI listed two categories: positions eliminated and reductions-in-force. “Eliminated” positions included people who were laid off AND jobs that had been authorized but not filled. No one held those positions. Yet nearly two-thirds of the “jobs” “lost” in the survey were in unfilled positions.
Cutting these positions in a tight budgetary climate should not be a big deal. If they were essential, they would not have been eliminated.
That said, the “reductions-in-force” figures represent something real (if the DPI survey is accurate): the number of people who had jobs, were collecting paychecks, and were forced to give them up. DPI said 2,418 such layoffs are expected to occur in the current fiscal year.
Even so, DPI did not separate genuine layoffs from people who retired, took other jobs, or moved to different school districts. So we have no idea of knowing how many education workers showed up at a school expecting to go to work and were sent home for lack of funding.
Of those jobs lost, a mere 22 percent — 534 — come from the ranks of classroom teachers. But over the past three years, Democrat-run legislatures sent 1,579 K-12 teachers to the unemployment line — three times as many as the GOP-led General Assembly did this year.
Of the remaining job losses, more than half are teacher assistants and a mere 5 percent were central office staff or other administrators. It’s no secret that the current General Assembly offloaded funding for teacher assistants to local school districts. But it’s also telling that previous legislatures — the ones controlled by Democrats — sacked almost as many teacher assistants (1,251) in the first three years of the survey as did this year’s General Assembly. And we have no idea how many teacher assistants will be rehired and paid by local school districts.
Using the terminology of the Obama administration, you could say that Republicans in the General Assembly saved or created 12,000 education jobs. But you’ll never see that in any mainstream media report.
Rick Henderson is managing editor of Carolina Journal.