One of things New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner said yesterday in his RttT discussion was that ?we've never had so much money being devoted to innovation and so little money being available for basic services,? summing up nicely, it seemed, the horrible state of the economy and its impact on education.
But hold your horses, friends.?Steiner may be wrong about the ?so little money? part of things.
According to an amazing communiqu? from the Education Intelligence Agency, also yesterday, ?education hiring grew 2.3 percent during the recession.?? Referring to Congressional testimony by Arne Duncan in February, says EIA, the federal government's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ?funded? more than 300,000 education jobs.
What Duncan did not say, and probably did not know at the time, was that almost half of those education jobs didn't exist a mere four months before the stimulus package was introduced in Congress. While America was ?in the midst of the most severe financial crisis and economic recession since the Great Depression,? the nation's school districts were hiring principals, teachers, librarians and counselors at an accelerated rate, despite flat student enrollment.
Wonders never cease.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
