Teacher pink slips claim by Duncan not backed by evidence

By Lyndsey Layton and Karen Tumulty,

Feb 27, 2013 07:53 PM EST
The Washington Post Wednesday, February 27, 12:53 PM

The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.

“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

When he was pressed in a White House briefing Wednesday to come up with an example, Duncan named a single county in West Virginia and acknowledged, “whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know.”

And, as it turns out, it isn’t.

Officials in Kanawha County, West Virginia say that the “transfer notices” sent to at least 104 educators had more to do with a separate matter that involves a change in the way West Virginia allocates federal dollars designated for poor children.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...87aa2a-8113-11e2-b99e-6baf4ebe42df_story.html