Tag: Teacher compensation

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Latest Edu-Reads

My Bellwether colleagues are launching an early childhood newsletter. You should sign up!

Here’s Nisha Smales on the complex pathways early childhood educators take into the classroom.

Rising teacher pension costs are eating into expenditures on teacher salaries. Primarily, this seems to be about reductions in staffing rather than outright cuts to individual salaries.

The 13th annual CALDER conference has some interesting new research papers. I’m especially partial to this Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Mavzuna Turaeva study on between- and within-school segregation in North Carolina.

EdSource on dual enrollment gaps in California.

I’m (very!) late to it, but this Nat Malkus report on the evolution of career and technical education is fascinating. For example, check out Table 6 on the changes in CTE concentrators by gender.

“In Mississippi, nearly 33,000 students — almost all of them African American — attend a school district rated as failing, like Holmes. White students account for less than 5 percent of enrollment in these districts, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of state data.” That’s Bracey Harris taking a deep dive on academic segregation in Mississippi.

USA Today takes a look at private placements for public school students with a disability. They find, “In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers.”

John Arnold has a reminder on the long-term trends in childhood poverty rates:

“Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health. It can keep kids from getting the flu, prevent the spread of disease and keep infections at bay.” That’s from this old NPR story about a doctor who championed hand-washing before his time.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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The 13th annual CALDER conference is coming up in February. The agenda is here. It’s open to all who can make it in D.C. (plus free breakfast and lunch!), or there’s a webinar option for those who prefer to follow along remotely.

EdTrust has an important report looking at what’s driving inequities in access to advanced courses. They find that Black and Hispanic students perform well when given opportunities, but a lack of seats, and inequitable distribution in those seats, deny them equal opportunities. The report also comes with a nifty data tool to see how your state is doing.

Rachel Canter talks to Jennifer Schiess on the educational progress in Mississippi.

Mike Antonucci looks at how California school districts, “are approaching financial crisis even as California increased education expenditures by extraordinary amounts — about 50 percent in the last five years.”

“One of the most consistent findings in education research” is that Master’s degrees don’t make people better teachers. And yet we continue to reward teachers for earning Master’s degrees. Grace Gedye asks why, and Ben Miller looks at implications for the debt burdens we’re placing on teachers. And remember, these same useless Master’s degrees are also distorting the teacher “wage gap” data that get tossed around ad nauseam.

Taylor Swaak dives into a new report showing that 41 percent of New York City schools don’t represent their neighboring district’s student demographics.

A new policy brief by Melanie Rucinski and Joshua Goodman finds, “the lack of diversity in Massachusetts’ teacher workforce largely stems from early stages of the teacher development pipeline. Licensure exam takers and passers are substantially less diverse than the college-enrolled population, but among those who pass the exam there are few racial differences in rates of initial teaching employment or retention.” Listen to Rucinski talk about the paper on the latest Education Next podcast.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Mike Antonucci asks, if teachers unions are bargaining “for the common good,” what are the elected mayors and school boards on the other side of the table bargaining for?

A new paper finds that, “Social Security is the most equal form of retirement wealth and the most important source for most minority households,” and yet 40 percent of public school employees lack Social Security benefits.

“Just like an unpaid credit card balance that grows over time, the longer states delay paying off [their pension debt], the bigger the debt price tag becomes, consuming an ever-greater share of the finite pool of public dollars available for teachers and students.” Marguerite Roza quantifies the extent of that debt for California, Illinois, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont.

Julie Squire takes the high ground is glad to welcome Cory Booker back into the charter school tent (where he had been for most of his career!).

Speaking of zingers, Mike Petrilli notes that Montgomery County leaders talk a good game on equity, and yet the district, “doesn’t offer a single extra penny to teachers assigned to the district’s toughest schools — those serving large proportions of kids living in poverty who often come to school with unmet needs and below grade-level proficiency.”

Here’s an interesting report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household debt and credit. Two big takeaways: At least in the last 15 years, student loan debt delinquency rates are higher and much less volatile than other types of debt:

Two, delinquency rates are tied to age. Per the first graph, that’s largely tied to student loans, but older Americans have the lowest delinquency rates while the youngest adults have much higher rates of default:

 

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman