Media clips
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But others criticized attempts to shape the results to serve a particular reform agenda and downplayed the significance of the test. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute and Martin Camoy of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education attacked Duncan for holding a day-long event with policy experts whom they argue share the administration’s thinking.
“Those with different interpretations of international test scores will see the reports only after the headlines have become history,” they wrote in a blog post.
Both authored a study last year pointing out that PISA doesn’t provide data broken down by socio-economic groups until well after the initial release, and the level of inequality in the U.S. helps explain its mediocre scores. When controlling for income, the U.S. ranks far better, they argued. The OECD, in turn, acknowledges differences in background have a “significant impact.”
Governing December 5, 2013 -
Critics of the media circus surrounding PISA Day, like the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank, contend that politicians, business leaders, and journalists like to focus on PISA rankings because PISA is the test on which American students do the worst—and thus the results paint a portrait of failing American schools that are responsible for our economic woes. These critics point out that some nations that have historically done well on international exams, like Iceland, were especially hard hit by the recession, and thus there is little reason to believe that better performance on these tests would aid the U.S. economy. After all, we are already producing more college graduates than we can employ in good jobs.
Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy write:
Today, threats to the nation’s future prosperity come much less from flaws in our education system than from insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure: regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did.
That statement contains a lot of sense, and gets to an important underlying point: that test results and education policies are too often considered in isolation from other social and economic realities.
Slate December 5, 2013 -
This graph, from the Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper, neatly illustrates the minimum wage’s precarious relationship to the poverty line. The dotted blue line at right shows what would happen if Congress were to pass the current bill proposed by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller (their bill would gradually raise the wage in three steps):
All of the historic dollar values are converted into 2013 dollars. Historically, the poverty line has remained relatively constant.
It’s important to note that families living just above the federal poverty line are still struggling by many measures. But as long as the federal government bothers to identify a basic income threshold essential to scrape by, it seems only fair to hold the same government to that standard in its minimum wage policy.The Atlantic December 5, 2013 -
But despite his skepticism, Baker said there was reason to be encouraged. He and other liberal activists applauded Obama’s embrace of the minimum wage ahead of an expected Senate vote to raise pay to more than $10 per hour.
Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, said he was also pleased to see Obama insist on the need for broad-based wage growth — something absent from his summertime economic push.
The Hill December 5, 2013 -
After proposing an increase to $9 in February, Obama last month endorsed a Senate bill that would raise the rate to $10.10 over two years.
“The president is talking about what I think the country ought to be talking about,” says economist Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based research group that focuses on the needs of lower-income workers. “It does reflect a shift in the center of gravity.”
Bloomberg December 5, 2013 -
As the president pointed out:
“The problem is, that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a two in three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than one in 20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working American, 12th Edition,” released last year, echoed that sentiment, finding that “U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies.”
The New York Times December 5, 2013 -
The following hard-hitting post on the release of the PISA scores was written by Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers, and Martin Carnoy, education professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. It explains what international test score results really mean and what they don’t mean, and also explains why the authors believe the U.S. Education Department is attempting not only to inform the public about the results but “to manipulate public opinion.” This piece will appear on the EPI website.
The Washington Post December 2, 2013 -
“I personally have Clinton fatigue,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, noting that it was a Clinton team that has been running Obama’s economics. “A Clinton administration seems like a continuation of the same team.”
Some consider the debate an opportunity for Hillary Clinton to embrace a more populist message. Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who was her New York campaign manager in 2000, was just elected mayor of New York on an inequality agenda.
The Washington Post December 2, 2013 -
For the past two years, unemployment has been higher for only one other racial or ethnic group: blacks. Unemployment for Native Americans has remained above 10 percent for five years, weighing in at 11.3 percent for the first half of this year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers.
The Washington Post December 2, 2013 -
Now, Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitt have released a new study that questions SBTC as an explanation for increasing wage inequality. Mishel et al. argue that “job polarization,” the premise that more jobs have been created in low-wage sectors and high-wage sectors, thus driving wage inequality, doesn’t actually explain the problem. On the one hand, high-wage occupations have not significantly expanded their share of the workforce since 2000. On the other, low-wage jobs have not increased as a total share of employment since 1979.
Salon December 2, 2013