But there is no decreased demand. In fact, in many communities there is increased demand. Education (like health care) is not amenable to overly simplified economic models, because (like health care) it's not an optional expense. The right answer might be to increase teacher salaries, bringing compensation on par with other professionals and thus attracting more qualified people, who in turn produce better-educated students, who in turn improve the local economy, providing greater tax revenue and more money to pay for the higher salaries.

You're making the mistake of inferring demand from the budget, which is exactly the overly simplistic economic analysis I was warning about. If inflation raises the price of all goods, does that show increasing real demand? Of course not. In this case, not only are there not fewer kids demanding education, there are actually more of them, and offering (proportionate to the tax revenue available) the same 'price' as they were before. The fact that the tax revenue contracted does not in any way indicate a lessening in real demand, any more than inflation reflects a real increase in demand.

This is economically incompetent and probably ideologically motivated. All that you can conclude from the DoE statement is that if 280,000 teachers employed under the Jobs Act were to find themselves unemployed, then they would be unemployed. They say absolutely nothing about the demand curve before or after the Jobs Act. Other comments pointed out the economic circumstances that would have made Federal funding of a public good necessary to make up for the local government shortfall. My condolences to your deceased neurons.