President Obama’s speech on Sept. 8 addressed how Congress can prevent more layoffs and create more employment opportunities for Americans. One of the aspects of the $300billionplan is that it aims to stop the teacher layoffs, specifically, and improve schools and the educational system as a whole by retraining teachers and/or rehiring them.

He also made a comment about the disappointing condition of many public schools in America and suggested that fixing them would help improve student education while creating more construction jobs.

Here are some examples of how the teacher layoffs and school budget cuts have affected New York City public schools:

• According to the huffingtonpost.com article on how the plan will affect teachers, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said “A couple hundred thousands of teachers have lost their jobs.” This could cause the morale of the teachers who didn’t get laid off to go down because they could be worried about being next which would affect their effectiveness as teachers.
• With the city constantly growing in population, and knowing after the latest census that there are about 8.2 million people in the city, the layoffs of teachers have created a unbalanced teacher to students ratio. Also the laid off teachers haven’t been readily replaced, and overall 2,600 less teachers were hired when the city expects 10,000 more students enrolled in public schools.
• The budget cuts have caused the maintenance of public schools to be put on hold, since schools don’t had the money to fix them up, hence the Obama proposal to find ways to get construction jobs available to fix them.
• Schools are unable to provide school supplies to kids, unless teachers who are/were afraid of losing their jobs supplied some for their classes.