Charter schools: the evidence on enrollment and achievement
When federal statistics showed test scores lower in charter than in regular schools, some charter school supporters insisted this must result from charter schools enrolling harder-to-teach minority students. Data show, however, that typical charter school students are not more disadvantaged, yet their average achievement is not higher. EPI's latest book, The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the evidence on enrollment and achievement, reviews the existing research on charter schools and suggests how such debates could be improved: by carefully accounting for the difficulty of educating particular groups of students before interpreting test scores, and by focusing on student gains, not their level of achievement at any particular time.

Informal work in the global labor market
The increasing international reliance on informal employment—often characterized by poor working conditions, low pay, and a lack of basic labor standards—is a barrier to raising living standards and reducing poverty in the developing world. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs, co-published by EPI and the Global Policy Network, analyzes in detail informal employment trends in five countries and outlines a comprehensive response that focuses on the working poor.

Bush Administration budget policy threatens Social Security & Medicare
President Bush's proposed budget for 2006 includes policies that significantly undermine future funding for programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Far from guaranteeing benefits to current retirees and workers over the age of 55, as the president has promised, the administration's budget policies threaten to under-fund these crucial programs. EPI's new Briefing Paper, Collision Course: The Bush Budget and Social Security by Max B. Sawicky, explains how the president's proposed budget puts Social Security and Medicare at risk.

Social Security and the income of the elderly
The current Social Security program ensures workers and their families a basic quality of life in retirement or in the event of disability or death. As such, 15 million people age 65 and older rely on Social Security benefits for over half their income. A new EPI Issue Brief by Jeff Chapman and Michael Ettlinger breaks down Social Security reliance state by state and explains that the elderly can ill-afford to risk their Social Security income by depending on privatization plans.

DataZone features updated national data online
New national data on wage and compensation trends taken from EPI's State of Working America 2004-05 can be found in EPI's Web feature, The DataZone. These updates can be viewed and saved as either Adobe Acrobat files or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

The lukewarm 2004 labor market
Despite some signs of improvement in last year's labor market, wages still fell, job growth lagged, and unemployment spells remained long. Read the full analysis in a report co-released by EPI and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

• On January 16, EPI President Lawrence Mishel's op-ed on the failure of charter schools appeared in the New York Daily News.
  
  
• On February 10, EPI economist Jeff Chapman testified before the finance committee of the Maryland State Senate in support of the state's proposal to raise the minimum wage.
  
  
• EPI economist Max B. Sawicky's op-ed on the unsustainable U.S. budget appeared in the February 7 U.K. edition of BBC News Online.
  
  
• An opinion piece by EPI senior economist Jared Bernstein on how policymakers ignore job-growth issues appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on February 23.
  
  
• On March 6, the South Bend Tribune published an op-ed by EPI economist William Spriggs about how the Bush Administration's plan to privatize Social Security plays down its benefits to widows and the disabled. His analysis also looks at Social Security payments by and benefits for black Americans.

The mission of the Economic Policy Institute is to provide high-quality research and education in order to promote a prosperous, fair, and sustainable economy. The Institute stresses real world analysis and a concern for the living standards of working people, and it makes its findings accessible to the general public, the media, and policy makers.