According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, inflation-adjusted wages for young high school graduates declined by 11.1 percent between 2000 and 2011, and the real wages of young college graduates declined by 5.4 percent. EPI also saw evidence among millennials of a hesitation to seek new employment opportunities, with 30 percent fewer voluntary quits each month.

Researchers know a lot about how various factors associated with income level affect a child’s learning: parents’ educational attainment; how parents read to, play with and respond to their children; the quality of early care and early education; access to consistent physical and mental health services and healthy food. Poor children’s limited access to these fundamentals accounts for a good chunk of the achievement gap, which is why conceiving of it instead as an opportunity gap makes a lot more sense.

But we rarely discuss the impact of concentrated poverty—and of racial and socioeconomic segregation—on student achievement. James Coleman’s widely cited 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity has drawn substantial attention to the influence of family socioeconomic status on a child’s academic achievement. However, as Richard Kahlenberg, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, notes: “Until very recently, the second finding, about the importance of reducing concentrations of school poverty, has been consciously ignored by policymakers, despite publication of study after study that confirmed Coleman’s findings.”

It’s time that we stop ignoring it. The past few decades have seen increasing income polarization, with the top 1 percent reaping the vast majority of societal gains, the middle class shrinking, and those at the bottom losing ground. As a result, concentrated poverty is more potent and relevant an issue than ever. Add to that the fact that 2012 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of William Julius Wilson’s groundbreaking book, The Truly Disadvantaged, and we have every reason to reexamine the life realities, impacts and policy implications of segregation and entrenched, concentrated US poverty.

“Given the track record of Foxconn on labor rights…we would all be wise to be skeptical until we see evidence that this is going to translate into something meaningful,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium.

According to the University of Singapore sociologist Qi Dongtao [PDF], 73.7% of the Chinese workforce belongs to a single union: The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which often appears to work against its own members on behalf of employers or the Chinese Communist Party. If Foxconn factory workers were granted an active decision-making role in their union, it would represent a significant break from national historical precedent—however, merely holding elections does not make this inevitable.

Isaac Shapiro of the Economic Policy Institute said two important questions remain unanswered: “One, what type of authority would these committees [of elected workers] have? Two, how would you ensure that they are truly independent of management and can do what they want without repercussions?”

Did you know that about 26 percent of black retirees and 25 percent of Latinos depended on Social Security for 100 percent of their income in 2011? That compares to just about 10 percent of Asian retirees and 14 percent of their white peers. One of my best and smartest sources, Algernon Austin at the Economic Policy Institute, (EPI) has done the research. Something serious to think about this morning. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/more-americans-worried-about-having-enough-for-retirement/

Rather than represent an area of possible compromise, the chained CPI has inspired the stiffest opposition from liberals to date. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that Nather did not consult, released a letter of opposition to the chained CPI this past autumn signed by 250 Ph.D. economists and 50 additional social insurance experts.

A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

Here are three charts from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. When you look at the level of poverty in the United States compare with other developed countries, it is not pretty:

Economic Policy Institute

When you focus on child poverty, you go from bad to worse:

Economic Policy Institute

And how much of an investment does the United States government make in reducing poverty, compared with other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries?

“We have an unemployment crisis that is almost entirely due to a lack of demand in the economy,” Nicholas Finio of the Economic Policy Institute said. “In the current economic environment, the most important thing for job growth is fiscal stimulus, such as fiscal relief to states in budget crisis, infrastructure investment, and direct job-creation programs in areas particularly hard-hit by unemployment. Unfortunately, the labor secretary doesn’t have the ability to create fiscal policy, but the new secretary can be an important voice in pointing out that we still have a terrible unemployment crisis.”

“It’s mathematically impossible and an absurd objective if you’re trying to get there entirely with spending cuts from the starting point of our deeply depressed U.S. economy,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a former researcher for the House Budget Committee who now works as an analyst at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.

But here’s what a new study from the Economic Policy Institute tells us about America’s education system: Every one of those common assumptions is simplistic, misguided, or downright wrong.

When you break down student performance by social class, a more complicated, yet more hopeful, picture emerges, highlighted by two pieces of good news. First, our most disadvantaged students have improved their math scores faster than most comparable countries. Second, our most advantaged students are world-class readers.

Why break down international test scores by social class? In just about every country, poor students do worse than rich students. America’s yawning income inequality means our international test sample has a higher share of low-income students, and their scores depress our national average. An apples-to-apples comparison of Americans students to their international peers requires us to control for social class and compare the performances of kids from similarly advantaged and disadvantaged homes.

That’s precisely what Martin Carnoy, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and Richard Rothstein have done in their new paper, “What Do International Tests Really Show About U.S. Student Performance?” Carnoy and Rothstein dive into international standardized tests and compare U.S. performance, by social class, to three post-industrial countries (Germany, the UK, and France) and three top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea).

Lower education levels also correlate with lower health, leading to a “health drag” on the economy, says Elaine Weiss, an education expert at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. 

Critics of the account-based plans complain that the account-based plans reward healthier employees while putting those who are poorer and suffer from chronic diseases at risk. This is because the emphasis in these plans tends to be on preventative medicine. “Well visits tend to be covered but not pharmaceuticals, and those who can’t afford to pay out of pocket stop taking their pills,” says Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.

“The answer is very clear: We need substantial additional stimulus to support the economy,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-of-center think tank. “We are choosing, as a country and as a town [Washington], not to do it, with millions of jobless workers.”

The key thing nobody seems to be focused on: wages – Economic Policy Institute

“There are very few occupations or industries where unions are strong enough where they can set standards,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “There are no standards being set, so companies can push down on wages for all workers, union and nonunion alike.” When the Detroit automakers secure two-tier contracts, that enables them to pay new hires $16 an hour, far less than the $28 an hour earned by longtime workers. This also pushes down labor’s share.

Costa has a background in immigration law and tends to dig into the economics of immigration from a labor perspective.

“It’s absolutely status quo,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said about Friday’s jobs report. “If we were at full employment, that would be fine. But status quo at a time like this represents ongoing suffering for millions of Americans.”

Research by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that job losses in the public sector have done more to hinder the country’s economic recovery than just inflate unemployment numbers: they have also had a noticeable ripple effect through the economy at large. “If a teacher loses his or her job, they’re going to have less money in their pockets,” said EPI’s Heidi Shierholz. “So they’re going to buy fewer goods and services in the private sector.” Furthermore, she said, job losses in the public sector mean that state and local governments spend less to accommodate their staff. For example, if a local police force employs fewer police officers, then the municipal government buys and maintains fewer police vehicles. “When we start to hire teachers back, that also probably means that other kinds of spending will also come back,” said Shierholz.

Economist Heidi Shierholz, lead author of a study last May on the labor market prospects for the college graduating class of 2012, speculates that rising levels of student debt and declining family wealth played a role.

“We could be having some adjustments (in which) those who are sheltering in school are being offset by those who can’t find a job so they have to quit school,” says Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. Similarly, she says, “if your parents just saw the value of their house (drop), they might be much less able to help you finance college.”

Shierholz, who has not reviewed the Pew study, cautioned that job opportunities for young people “remain very much at crisis levels” and that the data support anecdotal stories of recent graduates struggling to find work.

“There’s a much bigger group (of young adults) who are neither working nor in school,” she said. “And it does beg the question, how are they getting by?”

Here are the top 10 items on an education wish list for the holiday season and the new year. It was written by Greg Kaufmann, who reports on poverty for the Nation, and Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.

Many see the wisdom of leveraging networks, but job hopefuls and employed workers alike often talk about social roadblocks. One is just numbers: Few blacks are in top positions empowered to make hiring decisions, notes Algernon Austin, director of the race, ethnicity, and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.

Studies have suggested that social and professional networks, much like residential neighborhoods, are largely segregated, further limiting a black person’s access to those who are in a position to hire. “We don’t have as many people who have the opportunities to be in a position where they can both offer jobs to others or recommend places where others can work,” Williams says.

Austin projects the jobless rate for blacks will exceed 10 percent well through 2015, continuing a 50-year trend he wrote about for BET.com. In his commentary, he draws a connection among weak school performance, joblessness, higher crime rates, and poverty.

Meanwhile, the numbers of working poor are on the rise, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. Workers earning less than $11 an hour — the equivalent of about $23,000 a year for those working full time — rose to 28 percent of the nation’s workforce last year, up from 23 percent in 2006, he said.

“The impact on educational achievement is going to be one of the biggest scars left from the recession,” Mishel said. “From everything we know, high persistent unemployment will do more damage to the educational prospects of low-income students than all the positive outcomes from educational reforms that people talk about.”

The proposed change to Social Security is particularly controversial in progressive policy circles. Last month, a group of 300 economists and policy experts—including former Clinton administration Treasury official Brad DeLong, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Economic Policy Institute president Lawrence Mishel—signed a statement opposing the specific Social security cut that the White House is proposing, saying there’s “no empirical basis” for the change, and that it “could exacerbate, rather than correct, an existing problem.”

Meanwhile, analysts note, efforts aimed at fostering equality are waning. “There are really few public-policy resources to address the problem head-on,” said Algernon Austin, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute. “Support for affirmative action has gone from tepid to very weak.”

Austin and other researchers said a federal direct-jobs program could address the disparity, but support for such large-scale initiatives is hard to find in the current political environment.

She may still be in for a tough slog. Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the basic issue plaguing involuntary part-time workers like Gray is the same one plaguing the overall labor market: There’s just not enough demand to compel employers to add to their labor costs substantially.

Shierholz said she expects involuntary part-time workers to gradually see improvements but “it is a going to take a long time.”

“I think by far the dominant reason that we aren’t seeing employment in both dimensions — full (time) people or ramping up hours for workers that already are there — is just a demand problem,” she said.

“There is a huge amount of focus on progressive taxes in our policy world but progressive taxes are not much of a solution to this,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We need to get unemployment down rapidly. We need to greatly change our labor standards. We need to raise the minimum wage.”

He’s right: The middle class crisis — and its resulting income inequality — is the most important economic story of our time. There are a million ways to tell it, and here’s another: an annotated slide show, culled from the amazing 2012 edition of the State of Working America from EPI.

The mounting concentration of wealth is even more dramatic. A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that between 1983 and 2010 about three-quarters of all new wealth accrued to the wealthiest 5 percent of households. Over the same period, the bottom 60 percent actually became poorer.

More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union.

“This is something that has been happening and building for years and is now really rooted in the economy, and it’s vicious,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. “There’s a remarkable disconnect. The problem isn’t a lack of the economy producing sufficient income to make everybody’s living standards improve—it’s that the economy is structured so that the majority don’t benefit.” Or, to state the point more cautiously, the majority doesn’t benefit from productivity gains very much—certainly, less than our parents and grandparents did.