Layoffs: 'Turning the corner'—or just plain cornered?

President Bush has been campaigning hard this summer, assuring people that “we’ve turned the corner,” “the economy is strong” and “there are jobs available all across the country.” It’s unlikely that these stump lines left many public school employees dancing in the aisles, however, and you can hardly blame them.

In many school districts, large and small, the jobs picture is stagnant at best and in many cases downright bleak. Public schools in Cleveland, Ohio, were slated to lose more than 1,000 teacher and paraprofessional jobs in the 2004-05 school year while, across the state, New Lebanon public schools were poised to lose 12 teachers, or 20 percent of the district’s teaching staff.

In Detroit, the school district in June announced plans to eliminate 900 certified teaching positions and 2,300 nonteaching positions. “The upcoming school year will be challenging to say the least,” says AFT vice president Ruby Newbold, who is president of the Detroit Association of Educational Office Employees and president of the Coalition of Detroit Public School Unions. The cuts are targeted at the frontlines, she stresses. “The majority of the layoffs came from school locations. Several schools lost their entire clerical staff to layoffs.”

Why is the reality of slack employment so at odds with the political rhetoric?

Part of the reason, explains AFT research and information services director Jewell Gould is that many districts have simply run out of one-time emergency funds that helped them weather shortfalls in the past few years of recession. And, unless you’re a district where finances have mended quickly thanks to rising real estate property values, chances are this current round of job reductions is cutting deep into essential services, Gould says. Other districts are grappling with enrollment reductions, declining state contributions to local education and sometimes just bad budget decisions at the district level.

But behind the particulars are some disturbing national trends that are inflaming the situation in school districts around the country. Skyrocketing health costs have hammered many districts and crippled their ability to hire employees. And the failure in Washington to develop a comprehensive national strategy to get healthcare costs under control—or even to give districts and other employers a level playing field with pharmaceutical companies when it comes to bargaining the cost of prescription drugs—means the problem won’t go away quickly. “When you’re dealing with healthcare costs that are rising 12 percent a year, your options can get exhausted very quickly,” Gould says.

Also a drag on employment have been reckless tax cuts pushed through Congress, which triggered automatic reductions in those states that base their taxes on the federal rate. Lost revenue pressured many states to roll back aid to local school districts.

And although districts face costly new federal mandates such as testing requirements and a public school choice option embedded in the No Child Left Behind Act, the nearly $500 billion federal budget shortfall that tax cuts produced has prompted federal lawmakers to shortchange NCLB and other key domestic programs. “The Bush administration has provided the smallest increase for education funding since 1996, frozen funding for after-school programs, inadequately increased Title I funding for the nation’s poorest schools, and failed to increase Pell Grant awards,” the Center for American Progress reports.

Sadly, previous episodes with public school layoffs show that their effects linger well into economic recovery. A 1991 study by New York University professors Robert Berne and Leanna Stiefel shows that thousands of teachers forced from New York City public schools in the budget cuts of the 1970s never returned to the classroom. “Better times did not result in enough expenditure growth to both preserve competitive salaries and recover positions,” Berne and Stiefel warned. Districts “faced with difficult choices in the current, prolonged economic slowdown should keep these results in mind.”