Education Graduates will face Tough Jobs Market

Education majors will face tough jobs market. All across America Teachers are being laid off. Two things come to mind stop encouraging children to get abortions and teaching about birth control more children will be born and enrollments will start to grow. If Unions were not so greedy they would not be facing a budget crisis.


Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers


The following piece appeared on MSNBC.com.

U.S. schools in ‘category 5’ budget crisis
Thousands of teachers face layoffs as recession meets falling enrollments

By Alex Johnson
Reporter
msnbc.com
updated 8:48 a.m. ET, Thurs., March. 18, 2010
At the center of the country’s school funding crisis are little boys and girls like Kyle Wolfe, a 3-year-old pupil in Rising Stars, a pre-kindergarten program for at-risk children in communities near Rockford, Ill.

“I can’t even begin to describe the way Kyle has grown since starting this program,” said his mother, Carolyn.

Last week, the Harlem School District Board of Education, which serves the communities of Loves Park, Machesney Park and southern Roscoe, voted to eliminate Rising Stars because the state of Illinois hasn’t made good on the grants that support it. The vote means the nearly 400 youngsters the program serves “will be entering kindergarten delayed academically and socially,” said Lynn Wade, a pre-K teacher at the Donald C. Parker Early Education Center in Machesney Park.

No one disputes that Rising Stars is “an excellent program,” said Julie M. Morris, the school district’s superintendent. The decision to kill it “has nothing to do with how the program is run or what it provides to our students.” It’s just money.

Thousands of administrators and school board members across the country are making similar agonizing choices. While the recession has put a squeeze on all types of government programs, none has felt its impact more than education — the largest item in most states’ budgets.



Now, many states have nearly exhausted their windfalls from the federal economic stimulus plan, and with falling housing values shrinking property tax revenue — the largest source of public school funding — the question for state and local officials planning budgets for the next school year is: Will it be bad — or horribly bad?

For schools, historic decisions
The retrenchment is coming as the Obama administration seeks to overhaul education law in a way that makes schools compete for federal grants. But critics say the focus should be on expanding funding for all schools, not imposing even higher standards while redistributing less money.

“Resources must be adequate and equalized across schools,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said last week in congressional testimony on the plan.

Citing research by the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, he said that “almost no states are currently funding their educational systems adequately, and most states are around 25 percent short of funding their systems at a level adequate.”

Cuts that have been announced this year are staggering:

The Kansas City, Mo., School District is closing nearly half its 61 schools, with almost 300 teachers among those losing their jobs once 29 campuses go dark.
The Montgomery, Ala., Public School Board voted last week to lay off more than 600 employees, including 415 teachers, in what it said was just the first phase of staff reductions.
In the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the Illinois 46th District school board this week approved a proposal to lay off more than 1,000 employees — about 25 percent of the district’s staff — to help make up a projected deficit of $44 million. More than 700 teachers would lose their jobs, including all first-, second- and third-year instructors.
Statewide, Illinois schools face budget cuts as high as 17 percent to make up a $1.3 billion education deficit, Gov. Pat Quinn warned last week.

In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly L. Hall said this week that after years of cutbacks, her district’s 2010-11 budget will be almost 11 percent below its level of seven years ago.

Calling the impact a “category 5” crisis, Georgia’s state superintendent, Kathy Cox, said, “It’s going to be very tough next year. The stimulus came in and helped, but the cliff is coming."

To view the rest of the story visit the MSNBC website.