As I note in my new book, “Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice,” one of the dark stains on the Obama legacy is the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of corporate education reform, which is characterized by high-stakes standardized testing, charter schools, school closures, attacks on teachers unions, and others. This has been lavishly funded by Wall Street financiers, foundations and billionaires. In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute’s Broader, Bolder Approach to Education published a report concluding that market-oriented reforms “delivered few benefits” and “often harm the students they purport to help.”
Salon
February 26, 2016
When the AFL-CIO canvassed the Rust Belt cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the researchers found that Republicans and some Democrats in the traditional labor strongholds were drifting toward the golden-haired Manhattan real estate icon. The key factor? Economic insecurity. “It’s the first time within the Republican field that someone has reached out with an economic message that resonates with these voters,” said Robert E. Scott of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. At times, Scott said, that means scapegoating immigrants and foreigners. “But frankly, some of those issues are related to trade and the insecurities of the working class,” Scott said. Recently published studies have found that as many as 2 million American manufacturing jobs have been lost to China since 2000. “Growing trade deficits are the single largest cause of the elimination of jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, and the number one culprit is China,” Scott said. In the past two decades, the trade deficit with China has increased more than tenfold.
International Business Times
February 26, 2016
Most recently, Walmart heir Alice Walton donated $353,000 to the “Hillary Victory Fund,” which is backing her presidential run, a Walmart lobbyist held a Mexico fundraiser for her and the consulting firm of her campaign’s top strategist lists Walmart as a client. Before that, Clinton was a member of Walmart’s board in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As PBS Frontline documented, that was when Walmart began offshoring its supply chain to China. A recent study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that Walmart’s shift to China ended up eliminating more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States.
International Business Times
February 26, 2016
The figure below plots the 20th-percentile wage for blacks in recent years, using data from the Economic Policy Institute (this is a good proxy for low-wage work; 80 percent of blacks earn more while 20 percent earn less). In 2015, as the tightening job market finally gave them a smidgen of bargaining power, these workers’ wages were finally starting to trend up (low inflation helped, too).
The Washington Post
February 25, 2016
The second initiative is a re-launch of a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a group which first started in 2008 and has pushed for more comprehensive, “whole-child” strategies for educating students in poverty that was meant to be a counter-force to the “no-excuses” strategy, which tended to focus on reforms related to the teaching profession. Leaders of the group say there is new momentum for their policy agenda, including passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act which requires states and districts to judge schools’ success on a broader set of metrics than test scores.
Education Week
February 25, 2016
To put that into perspective, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that the typical three-person household in Longmont, Colorado should set aside $66,000 a year to cover annual necessities, including housing, food, child care, transportation, healthcare, other necessities, and taxes.
Business Insider
February 25, 2016
The last two years haven’t really fixed that: Overall between 2007 and 2015, low-wage occupations grew as a share of the labor market by 0.6 percent, middle-wage occupations shrank by 4 percent, and high-wage occupations grew by 0.3 percent. And people are still mostly making less money than they were before the recession: Median wages for low and middle-earning occupations sank 1.5 and 1.8 percent respectively, according to a breakdown by the Economic Policy Institute’s Dave Cooper. “We don’t think there’s evidence of any major shifts in the composition of jobs in recent years that’s different from the longer-term trends,” Cooper wrote in an email. “And consequently, changes in the composition of the workforce should not be used to explain the broader wage trends – there’s been poor wage growth across the board due to overall weakness in the labor market.”
The Washington Post
February 24, 2016
For a number of years, a national campaign called the Broader Bolder Approach to Education has been working to better the conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn. A project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, Broader Bolder has long recognized that the impact of social and economic disadvantage on many schools and students is profound and can’t be alleviated with academic “accountability” systems. Now, with a new K-12 federal education law taking effect, the campaign is relaunching with new leaders and an expanded mission. Here is a post about what 21st Century school reform should look like to really even the education playing field, as reflected in the Broader Bolder Approach’s new mission. It was written by Elaine Weiss, the program’s national coordinator.
The Washington Post
February 24, 2016
A report from the Economic Policy Institute in 2005 studied the workforce qualifications in early-childhood education and found a decline in the percentage of the field’s teachers and administrators with college degrees—from 43 percent in 1983-1985 to 30 percent in 2002-2004—because of low wages and benefits.
Education Week
February 24, 2016
“There are a significant number of young people who need opportunities to increase their education levels, gain access to the labor market,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute. “They’re important to the economy, to this country. Demographics are changing, people of color are making up a larger share of the population and labor force. We cannot afford to ignore or overlook this part of the population.”
CNBC
February 24, 2016