Teacherpocalypse 2010: The Ed Job Bill that Won't Die

The education jobs bill just won't die.

It bounces around in the congressional equivalent of New York City's (soon to be defunct) Rubber Rooms, ranking somewhere between useless and fairly harmful, yet also impossible to get rid of.

The Senate is scheduled to vote tonight on a $10 billion version of the education jobs bill. (The bill also has an extra $16 billion in Medicaid funding for states.) It's less than half of the original $23 billion proposal Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said was necessary to stave of Teacherpocalypse 2010—a threatened 300,000 teacher firings nationwide—but still plenty of money to let states avoid soberly facing budgetary facts for another quarter or two.

Adding insult to futility, the House has already skipped town, so the soonest it can consider the bill be September, after the school year is underway.

For more on this subject, check out Lisa Snell's post at the Reason Foundation blog, which was picked up the excellent site edReformer.