It’s small wonder there’s a rampant teacher shortage in Illinois and across the nation. Increasing public school enrollments, declining numbers in teacher-education programs, low pay, stress and burnout are creating an environment in which Illinois is short 1,800 teachers now, a gap that experts predict will grow to 20,000 in five years. It could be 10 times that nationally, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Education Week
January 8, 2020
Virginia is the 12th wealthiest state in the country, but Virginia public school teachers make $8,483 less than the national average, ranking Virginia 32nd in teacher pay in the nation, according to the National Education Association. Comparing Virginia teachers’ earnings with their professional peers, the situation is even bleaker. A report by the Economic Policy Institute, a DC-based think tank, found that in recent years Virginia teachers’ pay “has fallen 31 percent lower than the wages of other college-educated workers” in the state. The report noted that Virginia teachers rank the third-worst in the nation in salary match-ups with similarly educated non-teaching professionals. In addition, a 2018 report by the Education Law Center at Rutgers University ranked Virginia 49th in teacher wage competitiveness out of 51 states and the District of Columbia.
Blue Virginia
January 8, 2020
Teachers’ salaries have never been competitive with other professions, but now we have evidence of a continued decline over the past 20 years. The Economic Policy Institute has documented the salary decline compared with other college graduates:
St. Louis Post Dispatch
January 8, 2020
Indeed, the source of the “teacher pay gap” statistic is an annual report by the energetically progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI). To determine that teachers are paid 21.4 percent less than their peers, the EPI report compares income with years of education and basic demographic information (such as age and marital status), and then attributing any salary differentials to the profession. Yet, as noted above, applying the same methodology to other professions yields some pretty bizarre results. Using the EPI model, for instance, analysts Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine calculate that nurses are “overpaid” by 29 percent, firefighters by 25 percent, and aerospace engineers by 38 percent — while telemarketers are “underpaid” by 26 percent.
The Hill
January 8, 2020
As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump’s tax cuts last week, “the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not—and will not—happen.”
Common Dreams
January 8, 2020
This was up significantly from just a couple of years earlier. During the 2015-16 school year, for example, teachers spent an average of $460 each on classroom supplies, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis. Teachers in several states, including Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Rhode Island, as well as Washington, D.C., spent more than $500 each that year.
Washington Examiner
January 8, 2020
Data from the Economic Policy Institute finds teachers in Hawaii spend over five hundred dollars a year out of their own pockets, on school supplies. To help out, American Carpet One gave out over 600 carpets to teachers, for their classroom on Saturday.
KITV
January 8, 2020
“The Trump administration rule is very, very weak,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “It is palatable to people who don’t want workers to have overtime protections.”
Cronkite News
January 8, 2020
An Economic Policy Institute report in April says 8.2 million workers are being left behind under the new rules under the Trump administration, compared with 2016 overtime threshold rules proposed and then blocked in federal court in Texas during the Obama administration.
The Salem News
January 8, 2020
Even with the increase on Jan. 1, just 15 percent of salaried workers nationwide will be eligible for overtime pay, down from 63 percent in 1975, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for low-income workers. The bump grants new or strengthened overtime protections to 120,000 workers in Massachusetts, according to the institute. And the proposal to raise the cap to $64,000 in Massachusetts by 2024 — a pair of bills are under consideration by the Ways and Means committees in the House and Senate — would benefit an additional 300,000-plus salaried workers, according to strategic researcher Jeremy Thompson, a former senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
Boston Globe
January 8, 2020