More than half of all the jobs claimed  325,000  were those of educators that states said they were able to keep on the job thanks to stimulus aid. But some school districts said that they might not have actually laid off teachers without the stimulus money. Many Head Start programs reported saving the jobs of employees who in fact had simply been given raises with stimulus money  putting their claims of 8,000 jobs under review. Many states and private companies seem to have used different criteria when estimating whether stimulus aid had saved jobs or not, and when calculating full-time positions.

The reports, for all their shortcomings, do provide the first check of how the stimulus bill is working so far. They suggest that more than half the jobs claimed so far are in the public sector  despite the fact that President Obama has said that he expects only 10 percent of stimulus jobs to be in the public sector.

A computer analysis by The New York Times of government reports showed that at least 30,000 of the jobs were being claimed in highway, street and bridge construction, and at least 14,000 were with transit agencies. The analysis found that the $5 billion push to weatherize homes, which was delayed in many states because of uncertainty over how much money the workers should be paid, had yielded only a little over 5,000 jobs so far, nearly half of which were in Ohio.

The reports, which have been posted on the government’s Web site, www.recovery.gov, provide unusual transparency for government spending, showing how much money each contractor has received and where the work has been done, right down to the ZIP code. But they seem to raise as many questions as they answer.

The reports make no distinction between a newly created job and a saved job. They do not specify whether a job is in the public or private sector. And descriptions of the work vary in detail, making it difficult to categorize some work and to compare how various programs are doing.