Earlier this week the White House released a report that said that the stimulus package has saved or created 250,000 education jobs so far. Fortunately the roundness of the number suggests its level of accuracy. But, lets assume for a minute that the number is right. The question to ask, is what did schools do with the rest of the money? Education will receive $100 billion in stimulus funds in total. According to the report, almost $68 billion of that funding has already been obligated. So, my math suggests that each job that was saved cost $270,000. That seems like a lot to me. According to the NEA average teacher salaries are $52,308. Throw in 30 percent benefits, and you have $68,000 per teacher. Now this is average teacher salaries, and most of the jobs saved were the youngest teachers because most districts let teachers go based on seniority, so the actual cost of saving a first year teachers job should be less. Even at the average salary level, those 250,000 education jobs saved for the next two year would cost around $34 billion. That is about half of the education stimulus funding. What happened to the other half? Schools were suppose to do a lot with these funds – both saving jobs and supporting education reforms. But most antidotes on how the funding has been spent was that the funding was used to maintain the status quo. Even if some districts did implement meaningful education reform, what reforms do not involve staffing costs and jobs created or saved? When the stimulus funds were originally released, districts were strongly encouraged to spend the funding on one-time expenses (information systems, low performing school turnaround, professional development) in order to avoid a cliff effect when the funding went away. It would appear that a lot of funding is being spent on these activities, otherwise where did the funding go? It will take a couple of years for the expenditure data to come in to accurately answer these questions, but for now it does not seem like enough jobs for the money.
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5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
5/8/2012 | Kevin Carey discusses the problem of rising tuition and student loan interest rates with The Nation. 
5/4/2012 | Stephen Burd talks to Education Week about student loan debt and help from Congress.
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The United States and Canada do not need stimulus packages to aid in the increase of employment. What both countries need is a complete overhaul of their economic systems, beginning with the production of goods which both nations consume regularly, and ending with de-addicting themselves from Human Growth Dependent economies. If Scandavian Nations were as dependent as North America is on the addition of more consumers to the economic picture every decade in order to maintain a stable economy they would long ago have ran out of room to build homes. We don’t need any more debates by Liberals or Conservatives on the issue of growth; this is as futile as was the issue of Abortion in the 1980’s. Obviously, that issue was never solved, and so far neither has the issue of job creation and economic stimulation. Both of these issues are just an obfuscation by politicians to further their own ends and those of their wealthy friends. North America, as a whole, was a far better place to live when its population was under 300 million people. If we want the crisis to continue and get even worse, as say it is in places like China and India, then let us continue to increase our North American population and not our diversity of economic productivity. I’m Shepherd Halvorsen, and I know for certain what is wrong with North America. You should too!
The United States and Canada do not need stimulus packages to aid in the increase of employment. What both countries need is a complete overhaul of their economic systems, beginning with the production of goods which both nations consume regularly, and ending with de-addicting themselves from Human Growth Dependent economies. If Scandavian Nations were as dependent as North America is on the addition of more consumers to the economic picture every decade in order to maintain a stable economy they would long ago have ran out of room to build homes. We don’t need any more debates by Liberals or Conservatives on the issue of growth; this is as futile as was the issue of Abortion in the 1980’s. Obviously, that issue was never solved, and so far neither has the issue of job creation and economic stimulation. Both of these issues are just an obfuscation by politicians to further their own ends and those of their wealthy friends. North America, as a whole, was a far better place to live when its population was under 300 million people. If we want the crisis to continue and get even worse, as say it is is places like China and India, then let us continue to increase our North American population and not our diversity of economic productivity. I’m Shepherd Halvorsen, and I know for certain what is wrong with North America. You should too!
While we are dealing with items within the vicinity of How much is too much to pay for saved jobs?, Even in a world where jobs are hard to come by, it is possible to easily get high paying low stress jobs. All you have to do is attract it to your life using the power of your mind.
There is a difference between the funds being obligated, and the funds being used. Once the allocation have been determined, school district will budget the funds and retain or hire teachers using the funds, resulting in jobs being saved or created. At the same time the feds don’t let districts draw down the funding, leave it in their accounts until they actually need it. So, a district may have committed a portion of their stimulus, Title I, or special education allocation to teacher’s salary for the 2010-11 school year, but the funds will not be transferred to the district until they need them in 2010-11. California recently got in trouble for transferring some of the stimulus funds too early. So of the funds that have already been obligated, those funds may be saving jobs for both the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school year.
My memory may be faulty, but I thought the stimulus is spread over two years, and it’s not being drawn down at the rate expected.
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