[See update within text of story.]

Four months ago, 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 yesterday 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 mention those earlier apocalyptic predictions. In May, the News & Observer’s Rob Christensen said the Democrats’ projections were overblown, but yesterday’s reports didn’t take those elected officials to task for overhyping the situation.

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 minimized with new hires.

(Download a PDF of the survey results here.)

As of this afternoon, DPI’s own website lists 526 available jobs statewide, and the school systems in Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have separate job listing services.

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. The N&O’s story 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 an easy target of the legislature’s budget, but the criticisms missed the mark.

Most important, the stories also did at best a mediocre job distinguishing between people who actually lost jobs from job listings that existed on paper but had not been (or may never have been) 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, and perhaps even funded, and were not filled. No one held those positions. 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. They must not have been essential or 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. As I stated earlier, however, school districts are still hiring several hundred people, so any actual reduction in force will be much lower than that.

[UPDATE: In an email to Stoops, DPI spokeswoman Vanessa Jeter confirmed that vacant positions were not considered “eliminated” jobs. That’s appropriate. Nor were they included in the survey. What that means is school districts statewide could have hundreds of vacant positions that will be filled, significantly offsetting any total job losses.]

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. Indeed, the GOP may be a greater advocate of public education (or at least protector of teacher staffing) than its Democratic predecessors. But you’ll never see that in any mainstream media report.

Rick Henderson is managing editor of Carolina Journal.