Mike Collier reads ‘fired teachers’ into a fact check that didn’t go there

Addressing members of a Texas tea-party group, state Sen. Glenn Hegar of Katy said he was proud state lawmakers didn’t drive up education aid, as Democratic nominee Mike Collier says in the ad posted with this story.

Hegar, the Republican nominee for state comptroller, made his comments in a videotaped interview in 2013 which we partly transcribed before rating True a claim by Collier that Hegar was proud of billions of dollars in education spending cuts legislated in 2011.

Read that fact check here or to the right.

In sharing our research, though, Collier incorrectly tweeted that Hegar was proud of cuts “that fired 11,500 teachers.” We heard no mention of fired teachers in the tea-party video interview of Hegar nor did our fact check get into that issue.

We have delved into teacher firings before. In July 2012, we rated Half True a statement by Julián Castro, then the mayor of San Antonio, that Gov. Rick Perry’s administration had left 12,000 teachers without a job. Castro’s figure, reflecting on the legislative cuts signed into law by Perry, relied on an out-of-date, what-if projection — not actual teacher job losses. Still, school districts shed nearly 11,000 teaching positions in the first school year affected by aid reductions signed into law by Perry. And while it’s uncertain how many of the eliminated positions resulted in unemployed teachers — retirements also came into play — we found it reasonable to speculate that many teachers were left jobless.

What else do you hear?