McIntyre hits Rouzer on education spending

McIntyre is the Democratic incumbent. Rouzer is a Republican challenger. 

From the script of the ad: 

We asked the McIntyre campaign to back up those claims. 

The problem here seems to be one of adding apples and oranges, mixing up total education spending versus K-12 education spending.

That said, this is more a math error than anything else. McIntyre could have made a plausible case that that Republican budget writers -- and therefore Rouzer -- cut $649 million in K-12 education spending from the K-12 budget, which would have still backed up the commercials central theme and been a pretty big number.

That's problematic for this ad because Republicans were not in charge of the budget in 2008 through 2010. Rouzer himself didn't start serving in the General Assembly until 2009 and voted against the budget in 2009 and 2010.

Also problematic: all 6,096 people were not teachers, they were school employees. They included support personnel as well as those who taught. 

According to a DPI spokeswoman, statistics on the number of public school employees aren't available yet for this year. However, if you look at a report attached to the press release referenced by the McIntyre campaign, you can see the number of school personnel fired as a result of the 2011-12 budget was about 2,400. The budget eliminated a total of 6,382 positions, but many of those were empty and not all were classroom jobs. According to DPI, 1,260 teachers lost their jobs as a result of the 2011-12 budget, with a total of about 2,282 teaching positions lost. 

Again, those are eye catching numbers, just not as big as the ones McIntyre used in his commercial.