More Stimulus Math: Cooking the Books on Stimulus Jobs

Earlier this year the federal government sent $3 billion tax dollars to the state of Illinois to provide financial support for education as part of the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, a.k.a. “the stimulus,”. Not for building schools, mind you. There is money for that elsewhere in the $787 billion spend-a-thon. This is for good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic. Of course, there are many reasons this is antithetical to the temporary economic jump-start concept behind the stimulus, but that is not the point here.

The State of Illinois dutifully began doling out this newfound largess to boost funding for low income schools under the Title 1 program, and to fund special education under the IDEA Part A program. One can see the rationalization to increase funding for schools in poor areas in a recession, but it’s a bit of a stretch to see how the economic downturn has increased demand for special education. But, again, that is not the subject of this piece.

As the Obama Administration has ramped up its efforts to portray the stimulus as an unqualified success that has rescued us from certain doom, they have resorted to the kinds of shoddy claims that smack of political desperation.

Reports by the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and others questioned the veracity of the administration’s claim that 650,000 jobs were created or saved thus far by the stimulus. The response from the White House stimulus czar, Ed DeSeve, was to essentially admit that the numbers they were shouting from the rooftops were inaccurate. But DeSeve noted that the stimulus was enacted, “to create jobs, not count them.” Nor, one might remind his czarness, was it enacted so that the administration could just make up job numbers from thin air.

One of the more telling media reports on the stimulus appeared in the Chicago Tribune which studied the administration’s claim that stimulus spending saved or created over 14,000 education jobs in Illinois. They were able to do a more precise analysis since school districts were instructed to report exactly how many jobs were preserved by new federal funding and how many new positions were funded by the stimulus and the results were compiled by the always trustworthy Illinois state government.

The results, in some instances, were nothing short of astounding–defying the very laws of mathematics and economics. One school district that employs a total of 290 teachers was listed as saving 473 teaching jobs thanks to the Obama administration, all for only $4.7 million tax dollars. Another district saved 665 jobs with stimulus money, even though a district official told the Tribune that their entire headcount is only 600 workers. And in a feat that Doug Henning would appreciate the state reported that the Wilmette Public Schools saved 166 jobs while the district superintendent told the Tribune that “the number should be zero.”

The Tribune does report that the Chicago Public Schools did not submit any stimulus job claims to the State Board of Education, which admittedly could represent a large number of potential layoffs prevented by the $293 million the city received from the stimulus. But this also indicates the overall unreliability of the numbers that the State of Illinois compiled and, thus, the dubious nature of the administration’s overall claims.

The White House asked the administration of Governor Pat Quinn to compile these numbers for the feds. Quinn’s people gave the task to the State Board of Education. Along the way, it would appear that one of two things happened.

It could be that in dealing with an unprecedented task the attempts made by the state to capture this data went horribly awry, resulting in completely unreliable numbers that must be summarily dismissed. In which case the state should seek independent auditors to develop a methodology to calculate more accurate data and it should be scrupulously reviewed and verified prior to its being released.

On the other hand, the political operatives who run the White House may just be engaged in wanton misrepresentation and will conspire with their allies to put forth any number they feel like to try to justify what increasingly appears to be a failed stimulus package. They are asking states, most of which are politically aligned with them, to produce numbers justifying the expenditure of billions. The states, as well as all the other stimulus recipients, have skin in this game too. This possibility is all too plausible given the track record of the players involved and it makes it all the more important that the people demand a thorough examination by independent reviewers of the way these numbers were calculated and how the entire effort was directed.

Either way, incompetence or malfeasance, the administration has put forth fictitious data to try and gain political advantage and this White House has further eroded the trust it asked for from the American people. Another example of the change we were all hoping for.