While inequity – long rooted in race, segregation and socioeconomics – has plagued education for decades, experts fear the problem has grown worse during the eight months since the pandemic began and shifted learning online.
“These gaps are not new in the U.S. education system,” said Emma Garcia, education economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “This is something we have lived with for a very long time because we failed to fix the system.”
Buffalo News
October 19, 2020
But a new report by the Economic Policy Institute gives us a closer look at just how much of a mess things are for Gen Z in particular. For people between the ages of 16 to 24, unemployment was around 24.4% this past spring, hitting a high of 26.9% in April. As of September, youth unemployment remains elevated far above the rate for the general population. For those between 16 to 19, it was 15.9% last month, and for those between 20 to 24, it was 12.5%. The national unemployment rate in September was 7.9%.
Refinery29
October 19, 2020
“It’s like the Great Recession. Once austerity took hold and we didn’t have stimulus, that set the pain for millennials in deep. Now we’re talking about doing it again to another generation,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
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There is room for hope. For younger kids, education losses could be reversed. Experts know how to bring kids back from a crisis, said Emma Garcia, an economist who specializes in education at EPI.
“You need flexible solutions, targeted programs,” she said, including extra resources to help with online learning to get through the pandemic and measures to help kids recover once we’re in a new stage. She detailed a raft of other proposals in a paper published last month.
“Otherwise it’s going to be 2030 and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, what happened to those students during the COVID pandemic?’” she said.
The economic effects of the coronavirus economy on young workers could persist for years, EPI’s Gould warned in a report released Wednesday.
Huffpost
October 19, 2020
Critically, this is not a full portrait of the care workforce. Thousands of workers also provide informal care in their homes and to family and friends—known as family, friend, and neighbor care (FFN). Few state or local governments offer any sort of compensation for this work. A 2013 Economic Policy Institute paper concluded that median wages for these workers, worked out in private transactions with parents or guardians, is just $7.53 an hour.
The American Prospect
October 19, 2020
A study published in January by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, found that parents collectively spend over $42bn on early childcare and education. Individually, households shell out between 10 percent and 28.6 percent of their income on childcare – an expense frequently larger than monthly housing expenses.
Al Jazeera
October 19, 2020
Jori Kandra is a research assistant and Julia Wolfe is a state economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
“Three states had more than half a million workers either receiving regular UI benefits or waiting for their claim to be approved: California (3.0 million), New York (0.8 million), and Texas (0.8 million),” according to Kandra and Wolfe. In the Golden State, there are 3,028,324 workers now receiving or who have applied for standard UI (15.5% of the workforce), while 3,693,588 are getting or have applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (18.9% of the labor force).
The Center Square
October 19, 2020
Sixty-nine percent of registered voters and 46 percent of Republicans support Medicare for All, according to a poll by the Hill and research company HarrisX from last spring. During the pandemic, roughly 12 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Santa Fe New Mexican
October 19, 2020
So while the Trump administration is more than happy to praise their own tax cuts as stimulative, they also opened up the taps on spending, reaching a budget deal with congressional Democrats in early 2018 that lifted caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act by some $300 billion.
“The big difference in 2017 and 2018 relative to the five or six years that came before was that fiscal policy was a lot more expansionary,” Josh Bivens, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider.
“It wasn’t the fiscal policy I would have chosen, but it proved that there was slack in the labor market, we got continued reductions in unemployment without a huge uptick in wage or price inflation,” Bivens said.
Business Insider
October 19, 2020
The debates in Washington over numbers high enough to be meaningless did nothing for the young Americans trying to get their lives going. And in the crucial half-decade after the recession began, a string of tools to boost the economy — including federal funds to help states employ teachers and first responders despite their budget cuts — were blocked in the name of keeping costs down. The Economic Policy Institute in 2012 projected that passage of the American Jobs Act alone would have added 1.6 million jobs to the economy.
MSNBC
October 19, 2020
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated that 1.5 million public sector workers — mostly in education — already lost their jobs by July on the state and local level and that a total of 5.3 million would lose their jobs through the end of 2021 without additional aid.
The Hill
October 19, 2020