and jay mathews, education columnist for "the washington post." y, how big an are they facing right now? >> my view is it has no impact on the reform measures we're talking about. that most school districts will either freeze salaries or raise class sizes and that historically doesn't have much effect on student achievement. >> brown: before we get to reform effort, in the classroom and in terms of the numbers, the numbers are pretty big. >> well, you'll have one, two, maybe three more kids in the class. data we've got shows that kind of change in class size has no affect on achievement, no real affect on what goes on in the classroom. it's a fairly tr *euf kwralg effect. >> brown: what do you see? >> there are, of course, varying estimates as to the impact on the number of teachers likely to lose their jobs in this year. some people are saying 100,000 across the country. there was another city that came out with 300,000 across the country which does seem overwhelming, to be honest. but it does seem that there are some alternatives to just firing t