The Impact of EduJobs

On Aug. 10, President Obama signed into law a state-aid bill, providing $16.1 billion to states for Medicaid and $10 billion to prevent teacher layoffs. The emergency measure provided much-needed help to states — all of which save for Vermont are required to run balanced budgets — with yawning budget deficits. But the bill gives states less than requested and ultimately not enough to prevent cuts. Taken together, the states are still something like $120 billion in the red.

That means layoffs. And, given just how many teachers and other educational employees states have on the payrolls, they are receiving some of the worst of it. This morning’s major jobs report shows that more than 50,000 local-government educational employees lost their jobs in September alone.

Here’s total private-sector education employment. A slight downturn, but no real problem there:

And here’s state-level education employment. Again, not much to worry about:

Then there’s local-government education employment, which falls off a cliff:

Today, there are about as many local-government education employees as there were in early 2006, when there were 543,000 fewer schoolchildren. All in all, local governments have shed more than 200,000 education employees since 2008.