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.