White House claims stimulus saved 250K jobs in education

Federal stimulus dollars are responsible for saving more than 250,000 teaching and education jobs this year, White House officials announced Monday.

States suffered considerably as a result of last year's economic meltdown, and most local lawmakers authorized substantial cuts in areas like education to keep their budgets out of the red. But the report released Monday from the White House's Domestic Policy Council suggests those reductions in education dollars would have been far worse without federal stimulus cash, more than $276 billion of which was allocated to education-related fields, according to the report.

"Initial reporting from states shows that education stimulus dollars have created or saved over 250,000 education jobs across the nation and have been invested in the kinds of reforms that will help today's students compete in a global economy," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday in a statement.

"Early feedback from states also tells us that many districts are using stimulus dollars in ways that will move us beyond the status quo," he added. "There is a lot more work to be done, but we applaud those districts that have successfully used stimulus funding to stave off catastrophic layoffs and invest in critical reforms."

Monday's preliminary numbers spell good news for the Obama administration, which spent most of last week deflecting criticisms about another report that predicted stimulus cash had only created 30,000 federal contract-based jobs. In the days after that estimate became public, Republican leaders have pounced on the White House and charged the federal stimulus was a failure.

Nevertheless, the White House will release more detailed estimates at the end of October, once it completes its initial data reporting and review process.