For months, Republicans and Democrats have engaged in a public debate about the impact of the new state budget on North Carolina’s public schools. In late August, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction released its first-ever public school employment report. The controversial report appeared to validate the arguments of those on the Left.
Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that DPI produced a sloppy, politically motivated report designed to manufacture headlines and mislead the public, rather than provide insight into the complex issue of public sector employment.
In their report, state education officials proclaimed that public schools have “cut more than 8 percent of staff since 2008-2009.” Although Republicans have controlled the General Assembly for less than one of the four years in question, the mainstream media primarily blamed Republican legislators for these “draconian” cuts to public schools. I suspect the idea that Democrats would respond to the state’s fiscal crisis by cutting education spending — which they did between 2008 and 2011 — did not compute for North Carolina’s media establishment. Thus, many left it out of their stories.
From a research standpoint, the DPI report answers few questions about the actual state budget impact on public school employment. For example, the report did not categorize jobs by the three main funding sources for public schools: state, local, and federal. We do not know how many public education jobs were eliminated due to the loss of millions in federal stimulus funds.
Similarly, the report did not reveal how many school districts lost positions because of cuts to their county’s budget. State education leaders suggested that the legislature was at fault, but changes to the state budget were one part of a much bigger story.
Moreover, there were several methodological problems inherent in the kind of self-reported data generated by DPI’s online survey. Those responsible for completing the survey at the school district level easily could have interpreted questions differently in different school districts. Indeed, major inconsistencies were inevitable because the survey included no definitions of terms and few instructions.
Even if respondents had a uniform understanding of the survey questions, there is no objective way to audit surveys of public sector employment. Federal agencies compare results of their surveys of private employers with unemployment insurance records. No comparable data sources exist for public sector employment.
One possible way to gauge the reliability of the data is to compare it to other statistical resources published by DPI. As one would expect, large, multiple discrepancies exist between the survey data and other DPI publications. Predictably, the August school employment report showed much higher job loss figures than any publication DPI released to the public last year.
One final problem is that data for the current 2011-12 school year are incomplete. At the time of the report’s release, school districts were still hiring teachers, administrators, and staff. In other words, we currently cannot determine the effect of the new state budget on public school employment, if any, because it will take the state months to conduct their annual (and more reliable) public school personnel count.
Our state education leaders had an opportunity to conduct a careful assessment of the relationship between state, local, and federal funding changes and public school employment. They blew it.
Instead, they chose to use taxpayer-funded resources to try to embarrass Republican members of the General Assembly. Yet, in their attempt to humiliate Republican legislators with a slipshod jobs report, they reminded North Carolinians that party politics, not educating children, is their chief concern.
Dr. Terry Stoops is director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation.