As an intervention concerning jobs, President Obama has proposed the strategic education target of saving teachers’ jobs and modernizing school buildings. Anyone whose argument suggests this target is not in line with the federal role is not paying enough attention to what is happening in the states. A recent survey of state budget directors indicated that both K-12 and higher education are due for even deeper budget cuts in 2012, promising further erosion of educational services. In K-12, the expansion of class size is already apparent to parents and students all across the country. In higher education, those courses not supported by heavy enrollment are extremely vulnerable to being dropped from the curriculum and thus, the instructor being dropped into unemployment.

In all of education, and especially for K-12, this matter is about more than jobs. Cuts in education staff equate to lost opportunities for students. Most students have one time to be a first-grader. For every first-grade classroom with 28 students instead of 20, we are then compromising the life chances of all 28 as they learn to read and as they learn what numbers really mean and how they work. For every high school that drops extracurricular activities or increases activity fees, some students will be denied the opportunity to learn leadership skills or to expand their circle of interests. Restoring 280,000 teachers to their positions will impact the lives of students in the immediate and long term.

The same might be said of improving school buildings. Failing to intervene and improve school facilities to a high level of capacity is to waste the investment already made in them and to compromise teachers’ ability to implement quality instruction. At this time of great economic crisis, rather than argue that federal money for school construction will only result in increased costs, we should reason that the Obama Administration view this intervention as an opportunity to build capacity rather than foment competition, to work together with the governors to design an plan to get money out the door, into the pockets of workers, and into the economy of local communities.

The President’s proposal is practical, principled and should be taken into serious consideration for the ultimate benefit of learners.

This month millions of students returned to school to face a new reality: more crowded classrooms, slashed services, and decimated academic programs. Many districts are eliminating art, music, foreign language, and afterschool activities. Almost every state and school district in the nation is facing these situations, the inevitable effects of repeated cuts in education funding. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, over the past three years school district layoffs have accelerated, more than tripling since 2008. This is not only a drag on our fragile economy, it’s a severe setback to students.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In the short term our schools need emergency federal help to repair some of these devastating cuts. Under the President’s proposal now before Congress, we could ensure that schools are able to save educators’ jobs, preserve the regular school day and school year, and restore important programs. And we could renovate and modernize school buildings in a state of disrepair, including community colleges. The average school in the U.S. is more than 40 years old, and conditions in many of these structures are a distraction or worse for students.

Education policies are not mere political rhetoric – they are choices that have real consequences. It’s time to put partisan bickering aside and get our country back to work.

My colleagues, members of the Teacher Leaders Network, and I have given the President’s plan mixed reviews. Generally, we felt the proposed bill is better than nothing, but not nearly enough. As one teacher put it, “Take the money and run. It will put people to work in the state I love best, and across the country. It will make cleaner and safer schools for kids and keep some programming alive. It's too little and too late--but waiting for a better bill is pointless.” Another colleague added, “I find it hard not to support the idea of using federal money to stabilize our teaching corps. It's good for schools and students, and the money will filter right through into the broader economy.”

For one Florida teacher, it was even more personal:

President Obama's last stimulus bill saved real people's jobs including mine. I think it is important to get that message out. Although I was a seasoned an award-winning teacher, I transferred from a charter to a public school in 2008. When it all "hit the fan," I was first on the "chopping block." The stimulus bill enabled the school district to avoid laying off any of its 5,000 plus teachers.

More than likely I would have been forced to leave education...Furthermore, my mortgage was completely upside down, which probably would have led to me walking away from my home. The stimulus saved my job and my home. I continue to positively impact my students and contribute to my community because of this.

Teacher leaders, who tend to be highly attune to education policy at the national and state level, were predictably suspicious of what type of strings might end up being attached to the Federal funds either by the Administration or Congress, or both. Certainly there would and need to be some, but a Vermont educator urged the Feds to “tread lightly.”

There was broader agreement on the urgent need for infrastructure upgrades in public schools across the nation which state and local budgets simply could not provide in the foreseeable future. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America’s schools a grade of D. That same report declares that “despite increases in spending for school facilities earlier in this decade, the money has disproportionately gone to the nation’s wealthiest school districts while the neediest students continue to endure the most decrepit facilities.”

When we consider the alternatives, my teacher-friend EV best sums it up:

Is a lost youth the answer to a better American tomorrow? If the answer is no, which I trust it is, then the strongest investment we can make is in those who teach the mind as well as the heart and spirit of our nation's future leaders. Do we create an underclass - as has happened elsewhere in the world - by choosing not to educate all of our children to their utmost ability to participate in a democracy, culture, business world, or pursuits towards happiness?

Just hours after the President Obama’s speech before the joint session of the Congress, the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) issued a press release headlined, "NASBE Supports Passage of the American Jobs Act."

Within three business days the organization officially rescinded its support and removed its complementary press release entirely from the organization’s website.

When the only organization representing “State Boards as the preeminent educational policymaking bodies for students and citizens” abandoned its endorsement of the president’s act, it’s a sure signal that the White House’s ambitions for driving up debt, raising taxes and devaluing the dollar lack support as a strategy to improve the economy and turn around America’s schools.

Frankly, it’s too early to say whether the Obama’s latest spending plan will appreciably benefit education. Spending money the federal government doesn’t have and hasn’t yet printed has never improved a specific industry (much less the underlying economy) for long.

On Capitol Hill, Congressional leaders have had a chance to pick through the president’s plan line by line. House leaders today published a section-by-section critique giving at least some hint as to why major education groups, such as NASBE, might have rescinded its initially enthusiastic endorsement.

Specifically as it relates to public education, the House report finds:

· The original stimulus included $53.6 billion for the “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund,” which was generally used to subsidize states’ public education costs and supplement state budgets, rather than hire a substantial number of new employees.

· In a number of areas, cash-strapped state and local governments used the money to give employees raises. Meanwhile, these governments were shielded from budgeting within their means to meet funding gaps, delaying tough budget decisions that would have otherwise been essential.

· According to the Department of Education, the “one-time appropriation” in the stimulus bill was meant as “a historic infusion of funds that is expected to be temporary.” However, in 2010, the President signed into law an additional $10 billion “Education Jobs Fund” (H.R. 1586) to supplement states’ education costs further. Now the President is asking for more education subsidies to extend this supposedly “temporary” program.

· House Republicans agree with the 222 economists from across the country who stated in December 2009 that “The 2009 near-term ‘stimulus’ has proven to be an inefficient spur to job creation and does not merit repeating,” and concluded that “the country’s economic future depends on Congress’ ability to rein in the growth of federal spending.”

Today’s announcement by NASBE that it has rescinded its support for the Obama spending plan sends a clear signal America’s preeminent educational policy bodies prefer sound economic solutions to improve America’s schools.

I can’t look into President Obama’s heart, so I can’t tell you what motives are driving the American Jobs Act. I can, though, tell you this: One look at the facts about American education, and his proposal only makes sense if the goals are to energize union support, and perhaps use spending as some easy shorthand to tell voters that the President cares about kids.

The basic reality is that over the last several decades governments at all levels have conducted ever-bigger education money bombings with no positive academic impact. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, real per-pupil expenditures rose from $5,671 in 1970-71 to $12,922 in 2007-08 (the latest year with available data). On the federal level, between 1970 and 2010 per-pupil spending rose an astonishing 375 percent. Meanwhile, National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 17-year-olds – essentially, our schools’ “final products” – were almost completely flat. More money did not buy better results.

What did it buy? Exactly what President Obama seems to want to protect: staffing bloat. Between 1969 and 2008 American schools went from having 22.6 students per teacher to 15.3. District administrative staff went from 697.7 students per employee to just 363.3. In total, students per employee dropped from 13.6 to 7.8, all while academic outcomes froze. We got lots of jobs – many unionized – but nothing of educational value.

There is simply no way to look at the data and believe that $30 billion for school staffing will improve education. So it must only be about jobs, and ineffectual jobs at that.

That “ineffectual” part is the economic key. Stimulus supporters argue that paying for any job is good because employed people spend their dollars. But they ignore that the money must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is ultimately taxpayers who would either spend it themselves – including investing in new or existing companies – or put it in banks that would lend it. So the money would be spent one way or another, only taxpayers have huge incentives to employ it much more efficiently than do public schools, if for no other reason than they did the hard work of earning it. In the aggregate, that means we’d be better off just letting taxpayers keep their ducats.

What we’ve tried already supports this. Contrary to what Dan Domenech writes, public schools have gotten oodles of bailout money. The original stimulus included roughly $100 billion for education, the bulk of which went to public K-12 schooling, and in 2010 the President signed legislation giving states another $10 billion to keep school employment rolls engorged. And did unemployment plateau at about 8 percent, as the Obama team projected? You know the answer.

How about fixing dilapidated school buildings? Again, money is not the answer, unless the question is how do you win union friends and influence voters.

As I testified in 2008, for years school districts had been spending more on maintenance and construction than it was estimated they needed to bring all schools into “good overall condition.” Yet conditions seemed to keep getting worse.

What’s the problem? First, districts often put off maintenance so that small problems become bigger. And second, they often spend lavishly on School Mahals, a tendency embodied by L.A. Unified’s $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex.

Of course, building something brand new, equipped with more superfluous lights and whistles than the original starship Enterprise, doesn’t make practical sense if you could keep the old buildings fully functional at a fraction of the cost. But practical and political are totally different animals. Keeping the boiler in good repair simply doesn’t make for politician-aggrandizing, ribbon-cutting photo-ops. But undertaking a big addition or renovation, which Obama’s bill would pay for, absolutely does.

And let’s not forget: All the labor would likely have to be hired at union rates, in keeping with standard federal requirements. So jobs yes, but not more jobs in exchange for market wages.

Ultimately, the President’s bill would do nothing for education and would hurt the economy, because government spending more almost by definition means a nation wasting money.

A long line of economists, some of them Nobel prize winners, have proven that the quality of human capital, meaning basically the amount of education the work force has, is a major driver of economic growth. Thirty years ago, the average American worker had more education than workers in any other country in the industrialized world. Since then, one nation after another has overtaken us.

Differences in the amount of education and training among individuals are accounting for increasing differences in personal income as well as national income, and employability. This is because labor markets now cut across nations, meaning that growing numbers of large and even some small employers all over the world can source their employees anywhere on the globe they want to. Everything else being equal, when faced with a choice between two equally skilled and educated workers, they will take the cheaper one. One thing that is making this possible is the fact that more and more work is being done on computers and being sent to the next worker or to the machine that cranks out the product or to the final customer by internet, so it really does not matter where the worker is.

Generally, the highest skills are in the greatest demand and the lowest are in surplus, which drives the wages of the highest skilled up and the wages of the lowest skilled down and creates an increasing number of job openings among the higher skilled and a declining number of openings among the lower skilled in high wage countries like our own.

In the United States, more jobs by far are lost to automation than outsourcing. Most of those jobs entail some kind of routine work, work that can be captured in an algorithm. Jobs that cannot be captured in an algorithm tend to be jobs that require more education and training.

So yes, there is a connection between skills and jobs and it is growing tighter every day. A great national education system does not guarantee full employment and high wages, but a poor one guarantees a poor economy and a low standard of living for all but a few.

Because this recession began with a collapse of the housing market, it has had a particularly devastating effect on school budgets, because schools are largely funded with real estate taxes. About 80 percent of school budgets are accounted for by teachers’ compensation. So teachers are right in the bull’s-eye of this financial crisis. But it is not just the current teachers who are affected. Consider what incentive young people making career choices have to go into teaching. It used to be that young people making career choices looked at teaching as one of the most secure jobs in the United States. Newly marrieds figured that if he lost his job, she would have one if she went into teaching and the family would be all right. Now teaching turns out to be one of the most vulnerable jobs of all. If young people choose teaching now, they know they’ll have a terrible time getting a job and a worse time keeping it. Teachers’ starting pay is in the basement and their benefits are a major target of the budget cutters. If the United States does not do something about this, we will condemn a generation of our students to being taught by teachers who believed that the only professional school they could get into was a teachers college. Stemming the tide of that disaster, as the President has proposed, will not turn that situation around, but it will ameliorate it, and that is well worth doing.

Putting money into the pockets of school teachers and the people who build and maintain school buildings will create jobs where none were before or prevent jobs from being lost that are about to go on the chopping block. So far so good. But that would be true for any jobs in the economy. The advantage in creating and preserving jobs in the education sector is that it will prevent a serious decline in the amount and quality of the education of the average American worker, and may even increase it, and there is a great deal of evidence that that may be the single most important thing we can do to prevent a steady slide toward increasing unemployment and lowered wages in the long haul.

When I heard the makeup of the President's double-secret, anxiously awaited plan to create millions of jobs and make America happy again, I unaccountably found myself flashing on the scene in "Knocked Up" where Seth Rogen has just met Katherine Heigl. The overmatched Rogen is on the dance floor, shimmying and pumping his arm in his "rolling the dice" move. Watching the sorry spectacle, one friend notes, "Dude, I think he's doing the dice thing too much." The other thinks for a moment and nods, then notes, "That's really all he's got."

What to make of Obama's call for a third round of emergency, stopgap school funding (with tens of billions of funds for slapdash school construction and repair, a request that he couldn't even get through the heavily Democratic Congress of 2009)? What to say about the President's call to help school districts again put off dealing with the fact that, during the bubble years, they allowed cost structures to exceed their real resources?

I could repeat what I wrote last year about "Edujobs," explaining how it undercuts supes, school boards, and unions leaders who are trying to rationalize outlays and benefits. I could repeat some of the concerns I raised when ARRA was being debated in spring 2009. I could explain how this is merely another push to kick the can down the road on hard but important choices, meaning schools and districts will just delay the day of reckoning, while locking in another year of problematic benefit obligations. I could point out that it means treating schools as a jobs bank rather than organizations that stand to benefit from streamlining (hard for me to think of anything less likely to breed professional respect for teachers than treating schools as a make-work jobs program).

But, ultimately, this all seems like too much analysis for what struck me as a transparently political move that's unlikely to go anywhere. Mostly, I found myself looking at the well-intentioned guy making the same pitch I found so lacking in 2009 and 2010 and thinking, "Sheesh, that's really all he's got."

We here at AASA have been surveying our superintendent members since the beginning of the economic recession three years ago. We played a role in providing, at that time, president-elect Obama with data that assisted with the development of that first stimulus package. We were disappointed when the dollars that had been earmarked for school renovations was removed from the package. This spring a survey of our members again showed that over 170,000 eduction jobs would be eliminated as a result of budget cuts. We have carefully tracked the reductions in programs and services and the increases in class size that continue into this school year. The American Jobs Act promises to provide the dollars that will keep teachers in the classroom and bring about much needed repairs to our educational facilities. Unfortunately, as we now see with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it appears likely that our representatives in Congress will not be able to put politics aside long enough to do what is right for America and right for our children. It's ok to bail out Wall Street, our banks and our automotive industry, but not the children of America that are themselves the victims of poverty and a worsening economy. Leave educators to close the achievement gap in crowded classrooms and crumbling schools and then let's continue to blame them for failing.

How strong is the link between K-12 education and jobs?

There is probably a link between the quality of education and teacher layoffs, as Arne Duncan says. But the layoffs of all public employees, teachers included, will be an additional drag on the economy, not only because the quality of public services may decline, but because those public employees themselves will no longer have paychecks to spend, so their unemployment will have a negative multiplier effect in the economy generally.

Yet the impact of jobs on K-12 education does not primarily result from larger class sizes or, as Duncan worries, from the loss of courses in art, music, and physical education. (That Duncan considers these "electives" is a problem in itself, worthy of a separate discussion.) The biggest impact of jobs on education will come from how parental unemployment affects children's readiness to learn.

As I argue in an EPI blog today, the achievement gap will likely grow over the next decade, because of the differential labor market experience by parents of different groups, and the consequential impact on achievement of family economic stress. Education policy will be powerless to prevent this growth in the achievement gap.

A recent Economic Policy Institute analysis suggests the impact of our stagnant employment rate on children's welfare. Consider, for example, the unusually severe labor market adversity experienced by black families, and how this is likely to affect the black-white achievement gap that receives so much well-deserved attention in education policy.

* Although the national unemployment rate for whites is now 8%, for African-Americans it is 17%.

* Although the underemployment rate (including those who have given up looking for work, and those who have taken part time jobs because full time work is unavailable) for whites is now 13%, for African-Americans it is 25%.

* Although 8% of white children had an unemployed parent during an average month in 2010, 16% of African-American children had such a parent.

* Because African-American children are more likely to be in single parent homes than whites (24% vs. 67%), they are also more likely to have been in homes where no parent was working at some time during the past year.

Parental unemployment has a demonstrable impact on student achievement. When parents suffer unemployment, parents' stress increases and they are more likely to discipline their children arbitrarily, leading to children themselves attending school in greater stress and less able to perform to the top of their ability. When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to lose health insurance; their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care, are more likely to suffer from untreated asthma, toothaches, and earaches, and uncorrected vision problems, all of which contribute to school absenteeism and less ability to perform in schools. When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to lose their homes, or fall behind in rent, leading to more frequent moves and interrupted schooling for their children. When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to shift their youngest children from more expensive (and higher-quality) early childhood programs to less expensive (and lower-quality) programs.

Even children of employed parents are suffering from the weak labor market: 38% of families have suffered an erosion of wages, hours worked or benefits. Many have also lost health insurance in the last year. All of these adverse impacts of the recession disproportionately affect African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income families.

Even if the modest job creation policies now being advanced by President Obama were to be enacted, and unemployment were to fall somewhat, the accumulated effects of the economic crisis will permanently damage a generation of children. The first five are the most important years of a child's development. When parents are in economic crisis during their children's infancy and early childhood, the damage to children's healthy maturation permanently diminishes their future prospects. Today's disparate experience of unemployment by parental group will be reflected not only in their young children's relative school readiness, but in an achievement gap of high schoolers a decade hence and then in disparate adult earnings throughout their working careers.

Education policymakers devote great time and effort these days to a variety of school interventions – improving teacher quality, creating common standards, offering greater school choice. These may make a difference, but will be overwhelmed by the immediate and long-term consequences of our failure to attack unemployment with sufficient vigor. As a result, our achievement gaps will grow and whatever positive effect new school interventions may have will be swamped by the array of calamities accompanying persistent high unemployment - parental stress, housing instability, inadequate health care, and other impacts of reduced income on parental ability to nurture their children and deliver them to school ready to learn.