Frederick M. Hess's Blog
$23 Billion Equals How Many Jobs?
by Frederick M. Hess • May 28, 2010 at 9:23 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Regular readers know that I'm highly skeptical of the proposed $23 billion bailout championed by Senator Harkin and Secretary Duncan and now being carried forward in the House by Representative David Obey. Happily, the prospects for this ill-conceived proposal seem to be sinking. The legislation ignores the fact that many states flew through two years of stimulus money in the first year, rewards states and districts for the hiring binge they've been on, reduces the impetus for districts to make serious management decisions, violates the President's pledge to embark on a discretionary spending freeze, and merely kicks the can down the road on crucial challenges. The Washington Post's opinion pages are also all over the story today, running a fatuous op-ed in which Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, tries her hand at political hackery, as well as a no-holds-barred editorial that slams the proposal.
But let's set all that aside for the moment and consider that the $23 billion is being touted for its ability to saveas many as 300,000 education jobs and then do the math. That works out to $76,700 per job preserved. Now that's peculiar, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that K-12 teachers only earn about $50,000 a
