Media clips
-
Emma Garcia, a researcher in education policy a the Economic Policy Institute, agrees that this is an opportunity for the a decade-long movement to modify standardized testing in a way that considers so-called “whole-person” assessment,” which includes social and emotional skills, as well as socio-economic contexts.
Rather than assessing student’s outcomes, Garcia says, the focus should be on their effort and learning, regardless of their output. This way, grading becomes primarily a way to collect information on the needs students will have once they are able to go back to school.
Quartz April 29, 2020 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D. C.-based think tank, recently published an article headlined “Access to the online learning amid coronavirus is far from universal, and children who are poor suffer from a digital divide. ”
EPI reported the digital divide is based on family income.
Nearly 16% of eighth graders overall, and almost 25% of eighth graders who are poor, do not have a desktop or laptop computer at home on which they can follow their classes, EPI reported.
The Economic Policy Institute also noted that 7 percent of eighth graders who are poor do not have access at home to the Internet or hotspots, which can be expensive and essential to online learning. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic students have lower rates of home internet access than their peers who are White and Asian.
Only a fifth of teachers considered themselves proficient in integrating computers into classroom instruction.
“The shares of students with teachers who don’t consider themselves proficient but have received some training in applications and computer use is higher,” EPI reported. “Yet that still leaves nearly 24.1 percent of eighth -graders with teachers who are neither proficient in nor trained in software applications.”
The Charleston Chronicle April 29, 2020 -
Data on per capita income and poverty rate are also from the 2018 ACS. Data on the percentage of workers employed in high-risk industries is a 24/7 Wall St. calculation using 2018 annual employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and identification of high-risk industries from the March 2020 paper “COVID-19: A Fiscal Stimulus Plan” published by Moody’s Analytics, an economics research firm. Data on projected unemployment rate by state for July 2020 came from an April 2020 report published by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.
The USA Today April 29, 2020 -
America’s billionaires have been greasing the system in their favor well before the pandemic started, with a decades-long campaign to lower their taxes while giving less of the profits back to their employees. In 1990, according to IPS, the total combined wealth of U.S. billionaires was $240 billion. As of April 15, that number had swollen to $3.2 trillion—more than the GDP of the UK—with $300 billion of just in the first three months of 2020. Meanwhile, according to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1979 and 2018 worker productivity—how much value a worker produces in their job—increased by 70 percent, but hourly wages have only inched up by 11 percent. That difference has just been pocketed by employers, shareholders, and CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And as the IPS explains, billionaires “do not rely on income from the work they do to generate additional wealth,” meaning their excess wealth, on its own, yields more returns on investment.
GQ April 29, 2020 -
As the U.S. continues to shelter in place, clear disparities are arising among racial and ethnic groups and their ability to work from home. The Economic Policy Institute shared startling data revealing how hard-hit African American and Hispanic workers are compared to other racial and ethnic groups.
Less than 20% of black workers and only 16.2% of Hispanic workers are able to work from home, according to the EPI data. Compare that with nearly 30% of whites and 37% of Asian workers. Workers who are non-Hispanic or Latino come in at 31.4%.
The Marketing Insider April 29, 2020 -
MarketWatch reported, “As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the economy and sets mass layoffs in motion, an estimated 3.5 million U.S. workers were “at high risk” of losing health insurance through their jobs in the last two weeks, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.”
April 29, 2020 -
Furthermore, the United States doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave, which again disproportionately impacts lower-paid employees. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 90% of America’s top quartile of wage-earners are granted paid sick leave. In comparison, only 47% of the bottom quarter of American workers are afforded the same luxury.
Forbes April 29, 2020 -
But that figure is an undercount: Up to 13.9 million more Americans could not file for the benefits, according to a new survey from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“We’re missing data on millions more people who have lost their job and have unsuccessful with unable to apply or haven’t applied yet,” Elise Gould, an EPI economist, told Business Insider.
Policymakers have “made great headway” in expanding unemployment benefits during the crisis, Gould said, but the assistance is not coming quickly enough since state unemployment offices are overwhelmed with applications.
More importantly, Gould said, there’s too little funding at the state and local level.
“That has been under-appreciated and will continue to cause problems that would be avoidable,” Gould said.
For every 10 jobless Americans who applied for unemployment insurance, four tried to but “could not get through the system to make a claim,” the EPI found. “Two additional people did not try to apply because it was too difficult to do so.”
Since March 15, “an additional 8.9 [million to] 13.9 million people could have filed for benefits had the process been easier,” wrote EPI economists Ben Zipperer and Gould. That means about half of potential unemployment recipients are not getting aid.
“We want to do whatever we can to help state and localities get through that period – and not clamp down on the recovery,” Gould said.
Business Insider April 29, 2020 -
Trump’s commitment to American workers is belied by his lack of support for existing programs that would improve their situation, e.g., opposing increases to the federal minimum wage and a stronger unemployment insurance system. His budget proposals have pushed drastic cuts to the enforcement arms of the Department of Labor that protect the wages, hours, health and safety of U.S. workers. Last summer, the Economic Policy Institute published an analysis by Daniel Costa that found “spending on immigration enforcement in 2018 was an astonishing 11 times greater than spending to enforce labor standards — despite the mandate labor agencies have to protect 146 million workers employed at 10 million workplaces.”
The Hill April 29, 2020 -
SPP has been around for a while. It got its start in the early 1990s, drawing on funding from Ford, Annie E. Casey and Mott. As the network steadily grew, it came to fulfill a role in the states similar to that of left-leaning national think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute and CBPP itself. SPP now operates across 40 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. It has attracted funding from places like OSF, RWJF, Kellogg, the Sandler Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the Stoneman Family Foundation and the Spitzer Charitable Trust. Of its original funders, Ford and Annie E. Casey still support SPP.
Inside Philanthropy April 29, 2020