The teacher shortage doesn’t affect all communities equally. According to the Economic Policy Institute, high-poverty districts face vacancy rates nearly three times higher than affluent districts. Rural schools struggle with recruitment and retention, while urban districts often face high turnover rates. These areas usually struggle to compete with the higher salaries of suburban schools.
Forbes
March 10, 2025
A Colorado law passed in 1943 amid intense big-business and white-supremacist campaigns to block worker organizing has suppressed unionization in the state, according to a new report.
Jennifer Sherer, deputy director of state policy and research at the Economic Policy Institute and the report’s co-author, said state lawmakers have an opportunity to level the playing field at a time when a growing number of workers are looking to unions to improve working conditions, wages and address rapidly growing economic inequality.
“Colorado is one of the states in the country that still has a very old law on the books that creates obstacles for workers who want to form unions,” Sherer pointed out. “This year, the Legislature is looking at finally repealing that very old law.”
Public News Service
March 10, 2025
References:
Harmful Colorado bill would lower the minimum wage for tipped workers in Denver and other cities, Economic Policy Institute, Feb. 26, 2025. Source link.
Colorado Sun
March 10, 2025
Cites EPI data on number of federal workers in New York.
Crain's New York
March 10, 2025
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, credited the Section 232 tariffs of Mr. Trump’s first administration for somewhat reviving the primary aluminum industry.
New York Times
March 10, 2025
Another critical strategy involves bolstering data-driven research to quantify the positive impacts of Medicaid and SNAP on public health, economic stability, and educational outcomes. Nonpartisan economic policy organizations like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Economic Policy Institute and the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Poverty all provide credible data so our policies can be informed by facts instead of fiction. This evidence can inform policy debates and shape public opinion, illustrating the long-term costs of short-sighted cuts.
Forbes
March 10, 2025
WOODS: Data quality is also about what gets measured. Elise Gould is a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. It’s a think tank that advocates for low and middle-income working families. It’s also part of a lawsuit seeking to bar DOGE from accessing systems at the Department of Labor, which oversees the BLS.
WONG: Elise recently went to look up government data on poverty levels by race, and the information was gone. It later came back, but Elise says that if the administration decides it no longer wants to track, say, unemployment rates by gender or race, that would be a blow to her work.
ELISE GOULD: What I look for in the labor market is how is it affecting workers and their families? And you want to know how that affects, not just the average, but different groups of people. Race and ethnicity and gender are very key indicators to know how people are doing in the economy. And we think having that complete picture is very important to have evidence-based policy making.
NPR Planet Money
March 10, 2025
Since then, the U.S. manufacturing sector shrunk. New increases in tariffs could slash gross domestic product and cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs, the Economic Policy Institute pointed out in a 2020 study. Higher prices, lower profits, less investments into the future, reduced competitiveness, lower growth – you get the idea.
LA Business Journal
March 10, 2025
“Unfortunately, this is the calm before the storm as trouble is clearly brewing and the pain will be felt across the economy in coming months,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
While Gould stressed that “it’s too soon” for jobs data to reflect the impact of the Trump administration’s effort, in concert with billionaire Elon Musk, to gut the federal workforce—which has impacted some 100,000 government employees thus far—she said emerging numbers are still cause for concern.
Common Dreams
March 10, 2025
According to CNBC, the jobless rate for Black workers overall dropped from 6.2% in January to 6% in February. Although Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, indicated that the full effect of the government layoffs is not yet reflected in the data and that unemployment numbers are generally volatile from one month to the next, the positive numbers for Black men cannot be ignored.
Black Enterprise
March 10, 2025