Just days after I wrote about how teachers enjoy exceptional job security, even in hard economic times, the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) lays off 375 teachers. The 135 stories about it found by Google News emphasize the harship and turmoil that these layoffs are causing.
I wouldn’t want to minimize that suffering in any way, but it is worth noting that the layoffs were not caused by tough economic times. Instead, the teachers were let go to address an $84 million deficit that “was caused by a massive miscalculation in the budget.” It seems that Dallas public schools had to fire 375 teachers because they couldn’t do the budget math properly. Maybe they could even out their errors by issuing a press release about the layoffs filled with grammatical mistakes.
So I guess teachers can lose their jobs. But, to put it in perspective, this was only 3% of DISD’s teaching workforce and a tiny fraction of the nation’s 3 million public school teachers. My point that teachers are remarkably insulated from economic downturns still holds, even if a number of teachers in Dallas lost their job due to gross budget mismanagement.
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