With the passage of the recent state government bailout, government workers are breathing a sigh of relief. As Governor O’Malley said, “the Education and Medicaid Jobs bill will ensure that teachers in our classrooms do not fall victim to the uncertainties of a recession.” The rest of us (you know, those who are paying taxes to pay for teachers and other school employees) will continue to face the uncertainties of a recession, though.

Would it really be a huge tragedy if teachers were laid off? This is an unthinkable proposition for many, although I’m unsure why. As some have pointed out, if this bailout bill wasn’t passed, maybe 100,000 school employees would have lost their jobs. There are around 6 million people employed by schools, though, so this number is an incredibly small percentage of the total.

Independence Institute analyst Ben DeGrow further notes:

A modest 1 percent rollback in the public school work force may create individual hardships (just as do job losses in the private sector), but it adds up to only a very small reversal of a long-term, and likely unsustainable, trend. For decades our elementary and secondary schools have focused on adding teachers and support personnel, a hugely expensive strategy that scarcely has moved the needle on student achievement. Nationally, public school enrollment has grown about 9 percent since 1970, while the number of paid staff has grown 85 percent (including a 50 percent increase in teachers) during the same time.

Research by the online Education Intelligence Agency shows that from 2003 to 2008, 38 states increased their teacher work forces at a greater rate than student enrollment. In Iowa and Kentucky, one new teacher was hired for every two new students over the five-year period. In states like Michigan, Maryland and Pennsylvania, the number of teaching positions grew at substantial rates while the number of students actually declined.

I’m not wishing for teachers to be laid off or fired. I don’t want anyone to lose his or her job. But there really is no good reason to think that school workers’ jobs are sacrosanct. Maryland has added many new jobs in the schools since 2003 and if some of these positions were eliminated, I’m certain we would see no ill effect in our children’s education. But thanks to the votes of Maryland’s Congressional delegation (save Roscoe Bartlett), our tax dollars are now being used to ensure that school workers’ don’t face the economic hard times every other one of us are facing. I’m not as sure as the governor that this was a good idea. Then again, I don’t depend on teachers unions for a large block of votes for re-election.