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Few would argue that the state of our education system has plenty of room for improvement. However, developing a plan to take schools in the right direction is easier said than done. The first challenge lies in identifying underlying problems keeping students from learning today. This challenge, in part, is due to the fact that the problems may change considerably depending on who is labeling them, whether it is students, parents, educators or lawmakers. Consider this list of 10 major challenges currently facing public schools, based on the perspective of many involved in the world of education today.
Classroom Size
Many areas of the country are facing classrooms that are literally busting out at the seams. A report at two years ago discussed how schools in Georgia, in the midst of major funding cuts for schools, had no choice but to lift all class size limits to accommodate students with the faculty the school system could still afford to keep. More recently, Fairfax County in Virginia has been looking into a proposal to increase classroom sizes in the face of significant budget cuts. The Board of Education in South Carolina is also weighing their options in this area.
Poverty
Technorati reported last fall that 22 percent of the children in the U.S. live at or below poverty level. American Graduate defines poverty as a family of four with an annual income level of $23,050 or lower. American Graduate also cites a report from the Southern Education Foundation, which shows in 17 states across the U.S., low-income students now comprise the majority of public school students in those states. Some estimates put poverty levels for public school students at 25% in the not-so-distant future.

Students living at or below poverty level tend to have the highest dropout rates. Studies show that students who do not get enough food or sleep are less likely to perform at their full academic potential. Schools know these truths first-hand, and despite efforts to provide students with basic essentials, teachers, administrators and lawmakers know there is simply not enough to go around.
Family Factors Technology
Kids Health Guide reports that students are more technologically advanced than many teachers today, putting instructors at a decided disadvantage in the classroom. However, a student's love of technology also tends to distract him from his schoolwork, according to NEA Today. When teachers don't have the techno-savvy to compete with those devices, by bringing education and technology together , it can be difficult to keep students' interest and attention to properly teach new concepts.

Technology needs to come into the classroom to keep up with the learning demands of the 21 st century. Schools that are already cash-strapped may find an unsurmountable challenge in coming up with the funding to bring computers and other forms of technology into their classes. Scholastic offers some tips for school districts that want to fit the bill for technology, including everything from asking individuals in the district for "big gifts" to going to Uncle Sam for the funding. The website also suggests negotiating prices on technology when possible and allowing student to bring their own from home.

Photo By Intel Free Press CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Bullying
is not a new problem, but it is one that has a profound impact on the learning aptitude of many students today. Technology has given bullies even more avenues to torment their victims - through social networking, texting and other virtual interactions. Cyberbullying has become a major issue for schools, as evidenced by the number of suicides that can be directly traced to bullying events . The fact that laws are still fuzzy regarding cyberbullying adds to the challenge - since parents, teachers and administrators are unsure of how to legally handle such issues.
Student Attitudes and Behaviors No Child Left Behind
NEA Today quotes Kansas special educator Shelly Dunham as saying, "Testing, testing, testing, what is the point of testing? Do we use the data to remediate those who do not measure up? No!" Many teachers believe they are forced to teach to the annual standardized tests, and activities like recess and lunch have been cut way down to make more time for academics in light of the new testing procedures.
Parent Involvement Student Health
has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., and the same poor eating habits that led to the obesity problem may also be contributing to lower student achievement. Obesity also increases a student's risk for other conditions, like diabetes and high blood pressure, which could result in higher absenteeism and more academic issues.

Photo By English: Lance Cpl. Ryan M. Joyner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Funding
Budget cuts have created huge problems for most public schools in recent years. Less funding means smaller staffs, fewer resources and a lower number of services for students. While some argue that throwing more money at the education problems won't make them go away, others assert that lack of funding caused many of the problems in the first place.

There are many problems in public schools today, but identifying those issues is half the battle. With a laundry list of challenges to face, now is the time for educators, parents and lawmakers to come together and begin to find solutions - for the benefit of all students in public schools today.

Questions? Contact us on Twitter. @publicschoolreview

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10 Major Challenges Facing Public Schools - PublicSchoolReview.com

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Are our public schools in a state of crisis? Learn about the 10 biggest problems with public schools today, both from the perspective of the administrators and the teachers

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How Brands Like Domino's Profit From School Lunch

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"Like trying to take a drink out of a fire hydrant:" Four principals on how Covid-19 is upending the start of a new year yet again.

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Meet the Young Activists Fighting to End Gun Violence

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From Parkland, Ferguson, Newtown, and beyond.

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wo weeks out from the Christmas break, and across the US the annual note from school PTAs reaches parents: it is time to recognise this year's efforts by teachers through contributions to the holiday fund. It's a solicitation that goes out every year, but this year the wording is particular. The past 12 months have been terrible, period, but particularly terrible for those working in schools. Please dig deep, we are advised; these are uniquely difficult times.

It's not only a whip-round but an invitation for thanks and praise that, in these endless, waning days of the pandemic, seems to belong to an earlier time. If we were frightened in 2020, there was also a sense of readjustment, much discussed, about what we owed to one another. There was a warm glow of mutual responsibility. Those taken for granted were lauded and rewarded. In New York, food delivery apps introduced a button for a 40% tip, and teachers and doctors were heroes. Nothing lasts, of course, but the collective sense of a near-death experience meant that - as many thought in the heat of the moment - some version of this gratitude would.

It didn't, obviously. Over the past year, gratuities winnowed back to 20% and griping about school schedules resurfaced. What's curious, perhaps, isn't the return to business as usual, but a decisive swing from valorising certain groups to effectively demonising them. Last month, in some school districts in the US, school closures were announced not as responses to rising Covid numbers, but to accommodate teacher burnout. Detroit public schools decided that, until the end of the year, they would close their classrooms every Friday and revert to online learning. In Florida, the school holidays were extended.

Seemingly on a dime, the mantra "teachers are great" flipped to "teachers don't want to work". People were furious.

Part of this dynamic is just basic energy flow. It's a feature of burnout that while one's own is deeply felt and definitely real, other people are mostly faking it. The state of burnout erodes tolerance. To nurse one's own bruised system relies on everyone else's being up and running. No one has the bandwidth to accommodate the needs of others, particularly if they make one's own life more difficult.

There's a question of association, too, perhaps. For a lot of people, school functionality is the single biggest barometer of where we are in the pandemic. Part-closures, teacher burnout, even solicitations for gratitude interfere with the sense that we are on the other side of this thing. No one wants to be reminded of the awful days of 2020, when our kids sat frozen for hours on Zoom. At every stage of the pandemic, there has been a second world war analogy waiting unhappily in the wings, and in this case it's Churchill being voted out of office in 1945.

According to the teaching unions in the US, reverting to a partly remote learning schedule is an effort to keep teachers from resigning. "What you hear from teachers is that it's been too much," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the New York Times. "And they're trying the best that they can." It's an appeal to reason that will get precisely nowhere with parents forced to scramble for childcare if their kids' school suddenly shuts every Friday.

Even without the practical implications of partial school closures - or indefinite mask mandates when all school-age kids in the US are vaccine-eligible - there is an emotional need served by pivoting to trashing those one latterly admired. A friend referred to it as "the pendulum of hate", and I suppose if nothing else it's a swing that falsely implies movement where there might actually be none. These people, once great, have now become tiresome, clinging to how things were when the rest of us have moved on. It's not the pandemic itself holding us back, but the more absorbable problem of truculent teachers and inflexible unions - a question of perception, not reality.

At this point, all that stands between us and the world as it was in 2019 is apparently a large dose of common sense and the exhortation to buck up. To think otherwise - to consider that we're all in the same boat, burnt out, fed up and incapable of returning to anything - is simply too dismal a possibility to allow.

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Teachers all over the US are burnt out, but parents' compassion has gone | Emma Brockes

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wo weeks out from the Christmas break, and across the US the annual note from school PTAs reaches parents: it is time to recognise this year's efforts by teachers through contributions to the holiday fund. It's a solicitation that goes out every year, but this year the wording is particular.

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Access to education shouldn't be determined by a child's gender, yet 130 million girls globally are out of school and 15 million girls of primary school age will never even enter a classroom.

Educating girls gives them the freedom to make decisions to improve their lives, which has deep social implications. Giving girls access to schooling is a central part of eradicating global poverty, according to the World Bank, which says better educated women tend to be healthier, participate more in formal labour markets, have fewer children and marry later. The UN's sustainable development goals call for gender equality and a quality education for all by 2030. So what action needs to be taken to overcome the complex global barriers to not only getting girls into school but also providing them with a meaningful education?

These questions were tackled by a panel of experts from the non-profit, academic and private sectors, at a Guardian roundtable event in New York, chaired by Guardian journalist Anna Leach and supported by anti-poverty NGO Opportunity International.

Child marriage

A key obstacle to girls participating in school life is child marriage. Every year 15 million girls under the age of 18 are married.

The reasons for child marriage and a lack of education for girls are complex and interlinked, said Heather Hamilton, deputy executive of Girls not Brides. "Both come from the base view of girls as not as valuable as boys," said Hamilton. "If we don't have local values changing, and support girls as valuable people in their own right ... we're not going to see the shift in outcomes," she added.

One project looking to tackle this is Girl Effect's Yegna, an initiative using music and radio to spread awareness of girls' rights in Ethiopia. It recently tackled child marriage through a radio drama. Research in the Addis Ababa and Amhara regions of the country found that while 53% of boys not aware of Yegna said they would report instances of child marriage, this jumped to 95% among boys who listened to the show. It's not action taken yet, admitted Natalie Au, global gender director of Girl Effect, but it's "an initial first step".

While child marriage has cultural roots, poverty plays a huge role, said Dolores Dixon, executive director in Canada for Camfed, a non-profit working in African countries to support the education of marginalised girls. "Parents who can afford it would not necessarily hold back their children from going to school," said Dixon, "but if you can't afford it you will then have to make a choice ... they feel [marriage] is the best option within the limited options."

Young women who have been through Camfed's education programme, who themselves may have faced child marriage, can be important advocates, said Dixon. "Communities can relate to the examples and their experiences and they can also see role models in front of them," said Dixon.

Engaging these communities must be done sensitively. "It's not trying to turn everything upside down, because you will immediately face resistance," said Eva Halper, director of corporate citizenship at Credit Suisse, "it's finding the right way to approach those challenges from the bottom up."

Halper referred to a project run by education non-profit Room to Read in Tanzania. Girls in some communities there undergo lengthy initiation ceremonies when they reach puberty, after which they are considered adults able to work or marry. Room to Read's approach with the community, said Halper, "is not to say: 'Stop these initiation ceremonies - you can't do that' ... but to reach a compromise of please delay it."

Menstrual health management

The onset of menstruation is another key pressure point for girls' schooling, especially in the developing world. A lack of gender separate bathrooms, no access to sanitary products, teasing from classmates, unsupportive teachers - all can disrupt a girl's ability to participate in school.

"There is shame, there's fear, there's embarrassment," said Marni Sommer, associate professor in sociomedical sciences at Columbia University. "I've been in countries where girls thought if they told anybody [they were menstruating] they'd die." Sommer helped develop puberty books in Ghana and Ethiopia for girls to understand what's happening to their bodies, while also building literacy.

Columbia University and Unicef joined forces in 2014 to map out a 10-year agenda for menstrual health management (MHM), to help girls to manage their periods in school "in a comfortable, safe and dignified way". One of its achievements is to include MHM in all of Unicef's school Wash (water, sanitation and hygiene) programmes across 48 countries.

The project's inclusion of the private sector, social entrepreneurs, donors, researchers and governments has been key to its successes, said Nora Fyles, director of the secretariat for the UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI): "This is actually a story of how to do advocacy and come up with an agreement of what is reasonable in 10 years to achieve."

The value of working with different sectors was emphasised by Halla Holmarsdottir, vice-dean, Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo and Akershus University: "So often in education we talk to ourselves and there is such a need to talk cross-sector."

India, for example, has had a policy on MHM since 2013, said Archana Patkar, programme manager at the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), but through the ministry of water and sanitation, not health or education.

And we mustn't forget the role of men and boys when it comes to menstruation, added Patkar. Men in the governments of countries in Africa and south Asia, where WSSCC works, have been some of their biggest champions. "If you can actually talk about it with men and women, girls and boys, and replace that stigma, the silence and shame, with information and therefore dignity and pride ... this gives us an opportunity to really open up the space for conversations."

Once girls are in formal education, said Au, "that's better than being out of school, but what's that actual educational journey like for them?"

Keeping girls safe in school

Part of ensuring the education environment benefits girls is about making schools safe, supportive learning spaces. "Gender-based violence in and around school is a reality," said Fyles. The international education sector has spent so long trying to get children into school, especially in the developing world, only to realise girls are facing dangers there, she added. "[Girls] don't think about learning when they're trying to figure out what the next exit is or whether they can go to the toilet and be safe."

The global community has recognised the issue, said Fyles. The UN, for example, has included a commitment to address gender-based violence in its Education 2030 initiative.

"We know that there are some really, really negative experiences around school", said Bourne, who referred to a report that revealed female university students in Liberia were often harassed and pressured into "sex for grades" - where lecturers pressure students to perform sexual acts in return for good grades cards or passing assignments. "But we also need to remember that schools are also really powerful places to help challenge some of the gender norms and some of the social norms that we see around."

Part of that puzzle is providing teachers with the right training. "Teachers have their own agenda, their own experiences," said Holmarsdottir.

She described a school in South Africa where students had chosen a girl as head prefect only to be overruled by teachers who decided it was a boy's job. Teachers need to say to girls: "We do see that you have a role to play, we do want you to continue on, you are important," said Holmarsdottir.

More creativity is needed when considering how to reach girls in remote communities, such as in northern Nigeria, who simply cannot access formal education, said Au. "It's not just bums on seats in schools; we need to be a bit more innovative and progressive about how we go to where the girls are while also getting them into formal processes."

For Girl Effect this meant a project giving girls in northern Nigeria mobile phones to access stories on topics such as safety, relationships and friendships as well as connecting them with trained mentors. "It's a very alternative way for girls to be able to access information and explore their curiosities about growing up," she said.

Life skills such as communication, persistence and negotiation, also have a role to play, said Heather Simpson, chief programme officer of Room to Read. But it's an area often overlooked by ministries of education, she added. The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) in Malawi is one organisation implementing life-skills education with women mentors, who are also providing menstrual pads. "This is the kind of really integrated approach that we need to be supporting," said Hamilton.

"Girls are central to the global poverty story," said Dana Rice, managing director of philanthropy for Opportunity International. But change will be held back until there is a shift in cultural ideas of what a girl is. "It's about how girls value themselves, the voice that they have to articulate what they think, and communities really valuing them as contributors to their own development," said Au.

At the table

Anna Leach (Chair) Deputy editor, Guardian Global Development Professionals Network, Guardian News & Media

Archana Patkar Programme manager, Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council

Natalie Au Global gender director, Girl Effect

Halla B Holmarsdottir Vice-dean, Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo and Akershus University

Jo Bourne Chief of education, Programme Division, Unicef

Gemma Wilson-Clark Education Adviser, Department for International Development

Nicole Brzeski Co-founder and executive director Global First Ladies Alliance

Dolores Dickson Executive director, Camfed Canada

Nora Fyles Director of the Secretariat for the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative

Eva Halper Director, corporate citizenship, Credit Suisse

Marni Sommer Associate professor, sociomedical sciences, Columbia University

Heather Simpson Chief programme officer, Room to Read

Dana D Rice Managing director, philanthropy, Opportunity International

Heather Hamilton Deputy executive director, Girls Not Brides

Hajra Zahid Programme manager, education and learning, Mastercard Foundation

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Educating girls: the key to tackling global poverty

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Access to education shouldn't be determined by a child's gender, yet 130 million girls globally are out of school and 15 million girls of primary school age will never even enter a classroom. Educating girls gives them the freedom to make decisions to improve their lives, which has deep social implications.

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Language: English | French

Abstract

Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child's educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.

Keywords: Education, Interventions, Poverty, School readiness

Résumé

Depuis dix ans, l'écart des revenus s'est creusé entre les familles canadiennes, ce qui est une triste réalité. L'éducation est l'un des principaux domaines sur lesquels influe le revenu familial. Souvent, lorsqu'ils commencent l'école, les enfants de familles à faible revenu accusent déjà un retard par rapport à leurs camarades qui proviennent de familles plus aisées, tel que le démontrent les mesures de maturité scolaire. L'incidence, l'importance, la durée et le moment de la pauvreté ont tous une influence sur le rendement scolaire de l'enfant, de même que les caractéristiques de la communauté et les réseaux sociaux. Cependant, tant au Canada que sur la scène internationale, il est possible de réduire les effets de la pauvreté au moyen d'interventions soutenues. Les pédiatres et les médecins de familles ont de nombreuses occasions d'agir sur la maturité et la réussite scolaire dans le cadre des soins de premier recours.

Poverty remains a stubborn fact of life even in rich countries like Canada. In particular, the poverty of our children has been a continuing concern. In 1989, the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by 2000 ( 1). However, the reality is that, in 2003, one of every six children still lived in poverty. Not only have we been unsuccessful at eradicating child poverty, but over the past decade, the inequity of family incomes in Canada has grown ( 2), and for some families, the depth of poverty has increased as well ( 3). Canadian research confirms poverty's negative influence on student behaviour, achievement and retention in school ( 4).

Persistent socioeconomic disadvantage has a negative impact on the life outcomes of many Canadian children. Research from the Ontario Child Health Study in the mid-1980s reported noteworthy associations between low income and psychiatric disorders ( 5), social and academic functioning ( 6), and chronic physical health problems ( 7). Since that time, Canada has developed systematic measures that have enabled us to track the impact of a variety of child, family and community factors on children's well-being. The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) developed by Statistics Canada, Human Resources Development Canada and a number of researchers across the country was started in 1994 with the intention of following representative samples of children to adulthood ( 8). Much of our current knowledge about the development of Canadian children is derived from the analysis of the NLSCY data by researchers in a variety of settings.

One of the key areas influenced by family income is educational outcomes. The present article provides a brief review of the literature concerning the effects of poverty on educational outcomes focusing on Canadian research. Canadian data are placed in the perspective of research from other 'rich' countries. We conclude with some suggestions about what we can do, as advocates and practitioners, to work toward reducing the negative impact of economic disadvantage on the educational outcomes of our children.

POVERTY AND READINESS FOR SCHOOL

School readiness reflects a child's ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills ( 9). It is well documented that poverty decreases a child's readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods. Six poverty-related factors are known to impact child development in general and school readiness in particular. They are the incidence of poverty, the depth of poverty, the duration of poverty, the timing of poverty (eg, age of child), community characteristics (eg, concentration of poverty and crime in neighborhood, and school characteristics) and the impact poverty has on the child's social network (parents, relatives and neighbors). A child's home has a particularly strong impact on school readiness. Children from low-income families often do not receive the stimulation and do not learn the social skills required to prepare them for school. Typical problems are parental inconsistency (with regard to daily routines and parenting), frequent changes of primary caregivers, lack of supervision and poor role modelling. Very often, the parents of these children also lack support.

Canadian studies have also demonstrated the association between low-income households and decreased school readiness. A report by Thomas ( 10) concluded that children from lower income households score significantly lower on measures of vocabulary and communication skills, knowledge of numbers, copying and symbol use, ability to concentrate and cooperative play with other children than children from higher income households. Janus et al ( 11) found that schools with the largest proportion of children with low school readiness were from neighbourhoods of high social risk, including poverty. Willms ( 12) established that children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) households scored lower on a receptive vocabulary test than higher SES children. Thus, the evidence is clear and unanimous that poor children arrive at school at a cognitive and behavioural disadvantage. Schools are obviously not in a position to equalize this gap. For instance, research by The Institute of Research and Public Policy (Montreal, Quebec) showed that differences between students from low and high socioeconomic neighbourhoods were evident by grade 3; children from low socioeconomic neighbourhoods were less likely to pass a grade 3 standards test ( 13).

POVERTY AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Studies emanating from successive waves of the NLSCY have repeatedly shown that socioeconomic factors have a large, pervasive and persistent influence over school achievement ( 14- 16). Phipps and Lethbridge ( 15) examined income and child outcomes in children four to 15 years of age based on data from the NLSCY. In this study, higher incomes were consistently associated with better outcomes for children. The largest effects were for cognitive and school measures (teacher-administered math and reading scores), followed by behavioural and health measures, and then social and emotional measures, which had the smallest associations.

These Canadian findings are accompanied by a large number of studies in the United States that have shown that socioeconomic disadvantage and other risk factors that are associated with poverty (eg, lower parental education and high family stress) have a negative effect on cognitive development and academic achievement, smaller effects on behaviour and inconsistent effects on socioemotional outcomes ( 17- 19). Living in extreme and persistent poverty has particularly negative effects ( 18), although the consequences of not being defined below the poverty line but still suffering from material hardship should not be underestimated ( 20). Furthermore, American studies found strong interaction effects between SES and exposure to risk factors. For instance, parents from disadvantaged backgrounds were not only more likely to have their babies born prematurely, but these prematurely born children were also disproportionately at higher risk for school failure than children with a similar neonatal record from higher income families ( 18).

It is worth noting that international studies have consistently shown similar associations between socioeconomic measures and academic outcomes. For example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessed the comprehensive literacy skills of grade 4 students in 35 countries. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessed reading, math and science scores of 15-year-old children in 43 countries ( 21). At these two different stages of schooling, there was a significant relationship between SES and educational measure in all countries. This relationship has come to be known as a 'socioeconomic gradient'; flatter gradients represent greater 'equity of outcome', and are generally associated with better average outcomes and a higher quality of life. Generally, the PISA and the NLSCY data support the conclusion that income or SES has important effects on educational attainment in elementary school through high school. Despite the results shown by the PISA and the NLSCY, schools are not the ultimate equalizer and the socioeconomic gradient still exists despite educational attainment. Test results can be misleading and can mask the gradient if the sample does not account for all children who should be completing the test. A study ( 13) completed by the Institute of Research and Public Policy demonstrated only small differences between low and high socioeconomic students when test results were compared in those students who sat for the examination. However, when results were compared for the entire body of children who should have written the examination, the differences between low and high socioeconomic students were staggering, mainly due to the over-representation of those who left school early in the low socioeconomic group.

Longitudinal studies carried out in the United States have been crucial in demonstrating some of the key factors in producing and maintaining poor achievement. Their findings have gone well beyond a model that blames schools or a student's background for academic failure. Comparisons of the academic growth curves of students during the school year and over the summer showed that much of the achievement gap between low and high SES students could be related to their out-of-school environment (families and communities). This result strongly supports the notion that schools play a crucial compensatory role; however, it also shows the importance of continued support for disadvantaged students outside of the school environment among their families and within their communities ( 22).

A Human Resource Development Canada study ( 23) titled "The Cost of Dropping Out of High School" reported that lower income students were more likely to leave school without graduating, which agrees with international data. In a nonrandom sample for a qualitative study, Ferguson et al ( 24) reported that one-half of Ontario students leaving high school before graduating were raised in homes with annual incomes lower than $30,000. Finally, in Canada, only 31% of youth from the bottom income quartile attended postsecondary education compared with 50.2% in the top income quartile ( 25). Once again, the evidence indicates that students from low-income families are disadvantaged right through the education system to postsecondary training.

REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF POVERTY

The negative effects of poverty on all levels of school success have been widely demonstrated and accepted; the critical question for us as a caring society is, can these effects be prevented or reversed? A variety of data are relevant to this question, and recent research gives us reason to be both positive and proactive.

Early intervention

There is a direct link between early childhood intervention and increased social and cognitive ability ( 26). Decreasing the risk factors in a child's environment increases a child's potential for development and educational attainment. Prevention and intervention programs that target health concerns (eg, immunization and prenatal care) are associated with better health outcomes for low-income children and result in increased cognitive ability ( 27). However, it is the parent-child relationship that has been proven to have the greatest influence on reversing the impact of poverty. Both parenting style ( 28) and parental involvement, inside and outside of the school environment ( 29), impact on a child's early development. Characteristics of parenting such as predictability of behaviour, social responsiveness, verbal behaviour, mutual attention and positive role modelling have been shown to have a positive effect on several aspects of child outcome. Parental involvement, such as frequency of outings ( 29) and problem-based play, creates greater intellectual stimulation and educational support for a child, and develops into increased school readiness ( 26).

Interventions act to advance a child's development through a range of supports and services. Their underlying goal is to develop the skills lacking in children, that have already developed in other children who are of a similar age. There is general agreement that interventions should be data driven, and that assessments and interventions should be closely linked. A primary evaluation of a child and family support systems is, therefore, pivotal in the creation of individualized interventions to ensure success in placing children on a normative trajectory ( 30). Ramey and Ramey ( 30) determined that interventions have sustained success for children when they increase intellectual skills, create motivational changes, create greater environmental opportunities and/or increase continued access to supports.

Karoly et al ( 31) reported the magnitude of effects that early intervention programs have on children. Measured at school entry, they found a pooled mean effect size of around 0.3, with many programs having effect sizes between 0.5 and 0.97. This means that for many interventions, children in the program were, on average, one-half to a full standard deviation above their peers who were not in the program. Interestingly, they found that interventions that combined parent education programs with child programs had significantly higher effect sizes. Furthermore, interventions that continued beyond the early years showed significantly lower fade-out effects. The results strongly support the notion that early interventions should include the whole family and be continued beyond the early years. Constant evaluation of interventions should be completed to ensure that the benefits for children are maximized using these key components.

Highly regarded early interventions

The High/Scope active learning approach is a comprehensive early childhood curriculum. It uses cooperative work and communication skills to have children 'learn by doing'. Individual, and small and large group formats are used for teacher-and-child planned activities in the key subject areas of language and literacy, mathematics, science, music and rhythmic movement. There has been ongoing evaluation of the approach since 1962 using 123 low-income African-American children at high risk of school failure ( 32). Fifty-eight children received high-quality early care and an educational setting, as well as home visits from the teachers to discuss their developmental progress. By 40 years of age, children who received the intervention were more likely to have graduated high school, hold a job, have higher earnings and have committed fewer crimes.

Similar positive effects of preschool intervention were found in the evaluation of the Abecedarian project ( 33). This project enlisted children between infancy and five years of age from low-income families to receive a high-quality educational intervention that was individualized to their needs. The intervention used games focused on social, emotional and cognitive areas of development. Children were evaluated at 12, 15 and 21 years of age, and those who had received the intervention had higher cognitive test scores, had greater academic achievement in reading and math, had completed more years of education and were more likely to have attended a four-year college. Interestingly, the mothers of children participating in the program also had higher educational and employment status after the intervention.

One of the oldest and most eminent early intervention programs is the Chicago Child Parent Center program. The intervention targets students who are between preschool and grade 3 through language-based activities, outreach activities, ongoing staff development and health services. Importantly, there is no set curriculum; the program is tailored to the needs of each child ( 34). One crucial feature of the program is the extensive involvement of parents. Multifaceted parental programs are offered to improve parental knowledge, their engagement in their children's education and their parental skills. An evaluation of the Chicago Child Parent Center Program was completed by Reynolds ( 34) using a sample of 1106 black children from low-income families. They were exposed to the intervention in preschool, kindergarten and follow-up components. Two years after the completion of the intervention, the results indicated that the duration of intervention was associated with greater academic achievement in reading and mathematics, teacher ratings of school adjustment, parental involvement in school activities, grade retention and special education placement ( 34). Evaluation of the long-term effects of the intervention was completed by Reynolds ( 35) after 15 years of follow-up. Individuals who had participated in the early childhood intervention for at least one or two years had higher rates of school completion, had attained more years of education, and had lower rates of juvenile arrests, violent arrests leaving school early.

Later intervention

A common question concerns the stage at which it is too late for interventions to be successful. Recent findings (N Rowen, personal communication) from an uncontrolled community study in Toronto, Ontario, have suggested that a multisys-temic intervention as students transition to high school can produce dramatic results. The Pathways to Education project began because of a community (parents) request to a local health agency to help their children succeed in high school. The community consisted mainly of people from a public housing complex, with the majority of families being poor, immigrants and from visible minority groups. The Pathways project grew out of a partnership between the community, the health centre and the school board, and was funded by a variety of sources. The core elements of the program include a contract between the student, parents and project; student-parent support workers who advocate for the student at school and connect parents to the project and/or school; four nights a week of tutoring (by volunteers) in the community; group and career mentoring located in the community; and financial support, such as money for public transit and scholarship money for postsecondary education dependent on successful academic work and graduation. The Pathways project has been running for six years, and the results for the first five cohorts of students have been exciting. In comparison to a preproject cohort, the absentee and academic 'at-risk' rate (credit accumulation) has fallen by 50% to 60%, the 'dropout' rate has fallen by 80% to a level below the average for the board of education and the five-year graduation rate has risen from 42% to 75%. Of the graduates, 80% go on to college or university, compared with 42% before the Pathways project. While these initial results must be replicated in other communities, they suggest that, even at the high school level, interventions can be startlingly effective, even in a community with a long history of poverty, recent immigration and racism. As the proponents of Pathways move to replication, they will need to be careful to untangle the effects of community commitment, school board collaboration and the rich set of collaborations that have been a hallmark of this first demonstration project. Nevertheless, Pathways has made it clear that Canadian communities possess the capacity to change the education outcomes of their children and youth. While it takes resolve and resources to achieve such effects, initial analysis suggests that over the lifetime of the students, each dollar invested will be returned to Canada more than 24 times ( 36)!

Schools make a difference

Canadian and international research on educational outcomes has revealed important data on the effects of schools and classrooms. Frempong and Willms ( 37) used complex analyses of student performance in mathematics to demonstrate that Canadian schools, and even classrooms, do make a difference in student outcomes (ie, students from similar home backgrounds achieve significantly different levels of performance in different schools). Furthermore, schools and classrooms differ in their SES gradients (ie, some schools achieve not just higher scores, but more equitable outcomes than others). These general findings were corroborated by Willms ( 38) using reading scores from children in grade 4 and those 15 years of age from 34 countries. Once again, it was demonstrated that schools make a difference and that some schools are more equitable than others. According to Thomas ( 10), activities other than academics, such as sports and lessons in the arts, have been shown to increase student's school readiness despite SES. These activities should be encouraged in all schools to maximize school readiness. A key to making schools more effective at raising the performance of low SES students is to keep schools heterogeneous with regard to the SES of their students (ie, all types of streaming result in markedly poor outcomes for disadvantaged children and youth).

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Balancing the consistent evidence about the pervasive negative impact of poverty on educational outcomes with the hopeful positive outcomes of intervention studies, what can we do in our communities to attenuate the effects of poverty and SES on academic success? Here are some important actions:

Advocate for and support schools which strive to achieve equity of outcomes;

Advocate for and support intervention programs that provide academic, social and community support to raise the success of disadvantaged children and youth;

Make others aware of the short-, medium- and long-term costs of allowing these children and youth to fail or leave school;

Never miss a personal opportunity to support the potential educational success of the children and youth who we come into contact with;

Advocate for system changes within schools to maximize educational attainment (eg, longer school days and shorter summer vacations); and

Advocate for quality early education and care to minimize differences between children's school readiness before entering school.

Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings. Golova et al ( 39) reported intriguing results from a primary care setting. They delivered a literacy promoting intervention to low-income Hispanic families in health care settings. At the initial visit (average age 7.4 months), parents received a bilingual handout explaining the benefits of reading aloud to children, literacy-related guidance from paediatric providers or an age-appropriate bilingual children's board book. Control group families received no handouts or books. At a 10-month follow-up visit (mean age 17.7 months), there was no difference between groups on a screening test for language scores; however, intervention families read more often to their children, reported greater enjoyment of reading to children and had more children's books in their homes. Given this suggestive finding, there are a number of points that paediatricians and family doctors should consider as they deliver primary care:

Observe and encourage good parenting - mutual attention and contingency of interaction (taking turns and listening to each other), verbal behaviour (amount of talking and quality), sensitivity and responsiveness (awareness to signs of hunger, fatigue, boredom and providing an appropriate response), role modelling and reading to their children;

Encourage parents to increase their knowledge of child development, particularly age-appropriate needs of and activities for their children. Explain to them, for instance, how ear infections can severely affect a student's language development, and that good nutrition and hygiene can lower the frequency and severity of infections;

Encourage parents who do not have their children in institutionalized care to attend parent-child centres and programs. These programs usually do not charge fees and require no formal arrangements. Examples are the Ontario Early Years Centres, the Aboriginal Head Start Program in Northern communities, and programs related to the Alberta Children and Youth Initiative;

Indicate the importance of parental support and networks - keep a message board in your office and post a list of community-based organizations in your neighborhood; and

Keep in mind that poverty is not always obvious. One in five low-income families is headed by a parent who works full-time all year; thus, it is often difficult to tell if a family is in need ( 40).

REFERENCES

6. Lipman EL, Offord DR. Disadvantaged children. In: Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination. Canadian Guide to Clinical Preventive Health Care. Ottawa: Health Canada; 1994. pp. 356-68. [ Google Scholar]

7. Cadman D, Boyle MH, Offord DR, et al. Chronic illness and functional limitations in Ontario children: Findings of the Ontario Child Health Study. CMAJ. 1986;135:761-7. [[ PMC free article] [ PubMed] Google Scholar]

20. Gershoff ET, Aber JL, Raver CC, Lennon MC. Income is not enough: Incorporating material hardship into models of income association with parenting and child development. Child Dev. 2007;78:70-95. [[ PMC free article] [ PubMed] Google Scholar]

28. Chao R, Willms D. The effects of parenting practices on children's outcomes. In: Willms D, editor. Vulnerable Children. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press; 2002. pp. 149-66. [ Google Scholar]

29. Hango D. Parental investment in childhood and educational qualifications: Can greater parental involvement mediate the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage? Social Sci Res. 2007 (In press) [ Google Scholar]

37. Frempong G, Willms D. Can school quality compensate for socioeconomic disadvantage? In: Willms D, editor. Vulnerable Children. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press; 2002. pp. 277-304. [ Google Scholar]

Articles from Paediatrics & Child Health are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

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The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children

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Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind ...

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Brenda Molina, 33, of Manassas Park, Va., reads with Emiliano Martinez, 9 months, of Manassas, at the Georgetown South Early Head Start Child Development Center. Molina spends her time teaching infants, the youngest participants in the Head Start program. (Maddie Meyer/The Washington Post)

If you have young children, chances are you've been to a pediatrician's office and have left with a new book in hand. This is often part of a program, recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics, designed to promote literacy by providing families with age-appropriate books.

Although such programs are uncontroversial and popular, the reasoning behind them - a focus on what poor children and families lack - is misguided.

Over the past 60 years, this emphasis has derailed policies meant to advance early-childhood education. Even more important, it has substituted unfounded critiques of parenting for more significant- and difficult - discussions about how to combat poverty and channel meaningful investments in anti-poverty programs and early education.

Since the 1960s, policymakers, educators and researchers have shared a perception that poor families, often from minority backgrounds, were fundamentally different from middle-class families. While rejecting racist theories of biological difference, researchers in the 1960s focused on the home environment of poor families, particularly families of color, to map out what led to their children's academic struggles.

The result was a theory of "cultural deprivation," which holds that poor families lack the norms, values and skills to succeed within mainstream society. Poor families - and in particular, mothers - were viewed as lacking the skills necessary to instill a love of language and learning in their children.

This theory produced a gulf between what poor families needed and what policymakers believed they needed. Although poor families often lacked food, decent jobs, housing and health care, many programs focused on a perceived lack of motivation, work ethic or love of reading. This gap fueled long-standing stereotypes that blamed poor families for their misfortunes.

The result: public policies that perpetuated stereotypes of low-income families and minorities. These policies often led to ineffective programs.

Consider, for example, Head Start, a program started in 1965 to counter the effects of poverty by providing a stimulating educational environment conducive to child development. One psychologist earnestly wrote that in these compensatory preschools, the teachers' role was to do the "kind of things a 'good' mother does" with her infant. Preschool was touted as beneficial to families from inadequate homes, essentially intending to provide the children with an experience similar to that of having a middle-class mother.

But this approach was a double-edged sword. If preschool was useful only as a remedial step for "deprived" children, it was difficult to argue that it was beneficial for children from all backgrounds. This sacrificed an opportunity to build consensus behind the need for universal early-childhood education.

Ultimately, it undermined burgeoning bipartisan support for early-childhood education. In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. He acknowledged the benefits of preschool for poor families, but argued that Project Head Start already met this need. Middle-class families, Nixon argued, did not need such educational interventions, and accordingly could make their own private arrangements for child care as necessary.

By stigmatizing early-childhood education as a solution for perceived deficits of poor families, an important opportunity to provide early education to the nation's children was missed. And since then, scholarship and policy for early education has continued to be hamstrung by focusing on perceived parenting problems, rather than on the real effects of poverty, racism and environmental hazards such as lead.

Consider the idea behind the approach of handing out books. This program touts the concept of a "word gap" between children from low-income and more privileged families. This practice is based on a famous 1995 study that counted words spoken by parents to their children, and contended that by age 4, more advantaged children had heard 30 million more words than their poorer peers. The idea of the "word gap" quickly became a buzzword, serving as the rationale for numerous programs such as Reach Out and Read and certain others within Head Start in an attempt to assist poor families in "closing" this gap.

Yet the word-gap study, as scholars have repeatedly shown, was deeply flawed. It was based on a small, unrepresentative sample. In counting words, it relied on a strict criteria by which to define and measure vocabulary. And a new study has recently found that a "word gap" doesn't actually exist: In fact, in some working-class families, children were exposed to more words than their more advantaged peers.

Like those theories of "deprivation" from the 1970s, this word-gap concept points to deficits in children's home lives as the reason for their scholastic disadvantage, rather than asking how poverty shapes those home lives, as well as children's ability to learn and thrive. The result is a practice - handing out books - that doesn't even attempt to solve the economic struggles poor families face.

In a country where more than 40 percent of children live in low-income families, we should ask how communities are failing struggling families. Providing books to children is likely a valuable intervention, but this should be just a beginning. To tackle poverty and educational issues, programs need to focus on providing access to food, housing, education and health care - all necessary to thrive - and not the potential inadequacies of parents.

Instead, we're moving in the wrong direction. Congress recently struggled to renew the Children's Health Insurance Program, which offers health insurance to low-income families. Throughout the country, policymakers are erecting new barriers to accessing public aid, ostensibly to address deficits in motivation, self-sufficiency and work ethic. From Medicaid work requirements to the House version of the farm bill - which links food-stamp eligibility to employment - this portrayal of poor people as lacking in work ethic and motivation, rather than lacking in food, money and employment opportunities, has pernicious effects.

While handing out books is a good thing - and something that we should continue to do - it's time to stop blaming poor families for their circumstances. Children can't learn without food, adequate shelter, good health and quality schools. By focusing on the perceived inadequacies of their parents, we're failing as a society to attack the far more severe impediments to closing education gaps - in part because it's easier to blame poor people than to have hard conversations about unfairness and inequity in our society.

guidelines or contact the commenting team here.

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Perspective | What we get wrong about the poverty gap in education

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If you have young children, chances are you've been to a pediatrician's office and have left with a new book in hand. This is often part of a program, recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics, designed to promote literacy by providing families with age-appropriate books.

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Dmitry Baraishuk is a Partner and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Software Development company with 16+ years of EdTech.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming one of the disruptive factors in the educational area. AI in the education market has been forecasted to grow by 45.12% annually and reach $10.38 billion by 2026.
Challenge: Filling Skill Gaps By Integrating, Upskilling And Reskilling
In general, e-learning makes education available anytime and anywhere, which has become crucial in the pandemic and remote work era. Corporations, education tech startups, training companies, universities, schools and students - all parties get a lot of prominent benefits from online learning, like covering larger audiences online. At the same time, AI boosts e-learning to a new level by addressing challenges that are not obvious at first glance.

Studies show that 9 in 10 executives recognize or expect staff skill gaps over the next five years, and less than half of them know how to overcome this challenge. Fifty-six percent of respondents noted that one of the most popular tactics for addressing the skill gaps is upskilling or reskilling across the organization.

However, approximately 70% of HR professionals are not content with how their organizations address their internal mobility purposes.
Challenge: Matching The Right Talent To The Right Roles On A Scale
An AI-driven individual career path builder can help acquire the necessary skills through a learning experience platform (LXP). An employee, when looking for new opportunities, can use the tool for a clear understanding of the open positions within their organization and the required skills for each role. AI algorithms analyze an individual's current skill set, match the skills against the job requirements, emphasize the missing ones and advise the appropriate courses to fill in these skills gaps.

Corporations, training companies and education tech startups are leveraging AI-based tools for workforce skills assessments that help match the right talent to the right roles on a scale.

How does it work?Humans need to describe the skills only once. Then the machine will parse the data by itself. An AI-based algorithm automatically ranks the job-ready skills of every employee, analyzing their profiles and competency matrix.
Challenge: Ensuring Faster Knowledge Acquisition And Improving Learning Outcomes
Thanks to the implementation of AI in learning and development (L&D) and talent management departments, the manager will get a list of candidates with their ranked level of skills. Additionally, the data will be mapped with the competencies the company needs.

Automatic personalized AI-powered learning path building with targeted content recommendations can help every employee or student in a few ways. For instance, after a learner has passed an initial knowledge check or skills assessment, AI builds a personalized learning path that starts from the most ready-to-learn topic.

Additionally, while going through the topic, a trainee is offered a series of questions with hints and detailed explanations in case of incorrect answers. So the learners complete a certain number of topics and pass the determined amount of hours. After that, the AI knowledge checker automatically reassesses learners to show what topics they've retained.
Challenge: Measuring The Effectiveness Of Training Programs
The materials with which a trainee has done well will go to the mastered category, and the topics where they have struggled will move back to the learning path to be reviewed again.

An AI-driven learning progress tracking tool is able to check whether employees or students are mastering or missing the needed competencies. That measures the impact of learning and optimizes it accordingly.

How does it work? The software aggregates data about trainees' performances and their grades from a learning management system (LMS), including overall scores and competencies, missing assignments or past due assignments.
Challenge: Forecasting Future Learning Outcomes And Potential Problems
An AI-powered progress tracking tool analyzes the progress of every learner based on their individual activities and performance. Educators and L&D teams see the gathered data in a single dashboard and get intuitive reports. Also, the system flags students at risk or low-performing employees, allowing educators and L&D managers to follow up quickly.

The AI-powered predictive analytics tool gathers data about past and current activity. Based on the gathered data, the software builds patterns of learning behavior for each learner and projects future proficiency for final assessments. The system automatically generates precise reports and sends them to educational staff, so they can uncover pitfalls in a timely manner. As a result of early interventions, learners' success rates and retention increase.

L&D departments and educators use predictive reports to help their employees or students make proficiency gains earlier in the learning cycle and address knowledge gaps. The AI-based system also might provide alerts to inform mentors of events that may require their intervention or a discussion.
Conclusion
In addition to the listed challenges, AI in education can address other issues, such as increasing user retention and course completion rates in language learning or reallocating the time of L&D, HR and educational leaders to meaningful and strategic tasks by passing routine tasks to AI chatbots.

Nowadays, you can experience a billion competing products, and the lion's share of them promise much but deliver little. Realizing what solution is working and what is not for you is crucial.

When investing in an AI-powered LMS, it is important to get proper consulting from e-learning experts. That will help you understand how to integrate AI into your current LMS or maybe create an LMS from scratch.

One of the primary steps is to choose the type of e-learning software that will perfectly suit the target audience and the learning goals, such as AI LMS, LXP, learning mobile or web applications.

Implementing AI features converts a traditional admin-centered LMS into a learner-centered LXP. AI in LXP performs as a recommendation engine, replacing a unified curriculum with personalized learning content.

The core idea of e-learning mobile and web applications is making the process available anytime and anywhere through personal devices.

To get early results, test easy-to-apply solutions. Additionally, it might be more cost-effective not just to replace your legacy systems with completely new ones but to think about opportunities to utilize them in new environments.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: What Challenges In Education Can AI Solve Today?

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Dmitry Baraishuk is a Partner and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Software Development company with 16+ years of EdTech. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming one of the disruptive factors in the educational area. AI in the education market has been forecasted to grow by 45.12% annually and reach $10.38 billion by 2026.

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7 Benefits of AI in Education

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are key drivers of growth and innovation across all industries, and the education sector is no different. According to eLearning Industry, upwards of 47% of learning management tools will be enabled with AI capabilities in the next three years.

While AI-powered solutions have been in the EdTech space for some time, the industry has been slow to adopt them. However, the pandemic drastically shifted the landscape, forcing educators to rely on technology for virtual learning. Now, 86% of educators say technology should be a core part of education. AI has the power to optimize both learning and teaching, helping the education sector evolve to better benefit students and teachers alike.

AI Benefits for Students

When we break it down, a student's goal is simple: obtain a degree or diploma proving their knowledge. AI can help students achieve this goal by streamlining the education process. By providing access to the right courses, improving communication with teachers and freeing up more time to focus on other aspects of life, AI can make a significant impact on the students' educational journey. A few examples are:

Personalization: Personalization is one of the biggest trends in education. With the use of AI, students now have a personalized approach to learning programs based on their own unique experiences and preferences. AI can adapt to each student's level of knowledge, speed of learning and desired goals so they're getting the most out of their education. Plus, AI-powered solutions can analyze students' previous learning histories, identify weaknesses and offer courses best suited for improvement, providing many opportunities for a personalized learning experience.

Tutoring: While it's not uncommon for students to require extra help outside of the classroom, many teachers don't have the free time for students after hours. AI tutors and chatbots are a perfect solution in these scenarios. While no chatbot can truly replace an educator, AI tools can help students sharpen their skills and improve weak spots outside of the classroom. They provide a one-on-one learning experience without having the teacher there to answer questions at all hours of the day. In fact, an AI-powered chatbot can answer student questions at a response rate of 2.7 seconds.

Quick responses: There is nothing more frustrating than asking a question only to have it answered three days later. Teachers and faculty are often bombarded with repetitive questions on a daily basis. AI can help students find answers to their most commonly asked questions in seconds through support automation and conversational intelligence. Not only does this free up a lot of time for educators, but it also helps students spend less time tracking down answers or waiting for a response to their questions.

Universal 24/7 access to learning: AI-powered tools make learning accessible for all students, anytime and anywhere. Each student learns at their own pace, and 24/7 access makes it easier for students to explore what works for them without waiting on an educator. Additionally, students from all over the world can gain access to high-quality education without incurring traveling and living expenses.

AI Benefits for Educators

Most teachers and faculty aren't afraid to admit they struggle with time management, which is understandable given the number of tasks on their daily to-do lists. Educators want to spend more time educating students one-on-one, diving into research and continuing their own education, but don't have the availability to do so. AI can help free up educators' time by automating tasks, analyzing student performance and closing the educational gap. Here's how:

Personalization: Just as AI can personalize students' learning courses, it can do the same for educators. By analyzing the students' learning abilities and history, AI can give teachers a clear picture of which subjects and lessons need to be reevaluated. This analysis allows teachers to create the best learning program for all students. By analyzing each student's specific needs, teachers and professors can adjust their courses to address the most common knowledge gaps or challenge areas before a student falls too far behind.

Answering questions: With access to a school's entire knowledge base, AI-powered chatbots can answer a variety of generic and repetitive questions students typically ask without involving a faculty member. In bypassing the educator, AI leaves more time for them to focus on lesson planning, curriculum research or improving student engagement.

Task automation: The power of AI can automate the most mundane of tasks, including administrative work, grading papers, assessing learning patterns, replying to general questions and more. According to a Telegraph survey, teachers spend 31% of their time planning lessons, grading tests and doing administrative work. However, with support automation tools, teachers can automate manual processes, leaving more time to focus on teaching core competencies.

From online textbooks to fully remote lectures, the advancements in edtech are ten-fold. Today, AI plays a role in helping students and teachers optimize and automate both learning and teaching tasks. As the AI industry expands, and innovation is at the forefront, we'll see improved learning outcomes for all students and educators.

About the Author

David Karandish is Founder & CEO of Capacity - an enterprise artificial intelligence SaaS company headquartered in St. Louis, MO. Capacity's secure, AI-native support automation platform helps teams do their best work. Prior to starting Capacity, David was the CEO of Answers Corp. He and his business partner Chris Sims started the parent company of Answers in 2006 and sold it to a private equity firm in 2014 for north of $900m. David sits on the boards of Nerdy (an on-demand, real-time learning platform in the ed tech space), Create a Loop (a computer science education non-profit tackling the digital divide by teaching kids to code), and Prepare.ai (a non-profit providing educational resources and strategic guidance about Artificial Intelligence to individuals, communities, and companies). David lives in St. Louis with his wife, Erin and four kids. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and playing ukulele.

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7 Benefits of AI in Education -- THE Journal

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Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are key drivers of growth and innovation across all industries, and the education sector is no different. According to eLearning Industry, upwards of 47% of learning management tools will be enabled with AI capabilities in the next three years.

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What Students Are Saying About How to Improve American Education (Published 2019)

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An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math. Teenagers told us what’s working and what’s not in the American education system.

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Here's Why The U.S. School System Is Broken

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In education, we don't always talk about what we're really talking about.
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The next four years offer the prospect of renewed debates about many aspects of public education policy. As we watch this new batch of fireworks launch, it will be useful to remember that virtually all of our debates are the outgrowth of four fundamental issues.
How To Fund Public Education
In the U.S., we like the idea of public education, but we don't much care for funding it. Our use of real estate taxes to fund education has guaranteed that folks mostly pay for school for their own neighborhood, wealthy or not-so. There are some state-level mechanisms to help equalize that, but not all are effective.

Critics of public education often cite the increased costs of public education, but at least some is the result of slowly, reluctantly, providing better funding for previously underserved populations. And we're still not there; for Pennsylvania alone, recent estimates are that nearly $5 billion are needed to fully fund all public schools. Sometimes the inequities are between districts, and in some cases, inequities exist within districts (e.g. the Pinellas County district in Florida that first segregated its students, then segregated the dollars that went to them). Throughout our history, many white citizens have resisted mechanisms that require them to finance education for Black students (Schoolhouse Burning and Overturning Brown are just two books from 2020 that lay out some of that ugly education history). Segregation of students and of finances has been a problem in our past, and we have not solved it in our present. On top of that layer the fact that some students, for a variety of reasons, simply cost more to educate than others.

Many reform initiatives of the past decades have declared themselves about "making schools better" or "reducing inequity" while the rest of that statement-"without spending more money"-remaining unspoken. The argument is that spending more money won't help, and while it's true that spending the money badly will not help, the research is clear- school funding matters when it comes to student success.

Vouchers and charter schools are both attempts to look like we're addressing educational inequity without actually spending any more money. "Let the money follow the student," is the slogan, and it completely skips over the question of whether the money is enough. The blanket is not big enough to cover the bed, but school choice advocates argue that by cutting the blanket up, moving the pieces around, and perhaps setting up some extra cots, the too-small blanket will become large enough to cover everyone. Meanwhile, there's no serious research to indicate that choice schools do more with less.

The funding issues also affect teachers, because teachers are the major cost in education. So we see frequent attempts to lower labor costs in education. Have Teach for America style staff that turns over every few years. Create pedagogy-in-a-box programs that don't require a trained teacher to deliver. Replace part or all of the staff with computerized programs-especially shiny new ones with AI. It all cuts costs.

All of it comes back to a fundamental issue. The U.S. system demands a Lexus on a Kia budget, and many of our citizens really don't want to pay to educate Those Peoples' children. This desire to do school on the cheap serves to limits the range of solutions considered for every single problem in education. As long as we are unwilling or unable to say that we will pay whatever it takes to create a top-level education system that serves every student, these debates will continue.
Equity and Justice; Race and Religion
We have many, many ideas about equity and justice in this country, with new rounds of old arguments opened in recent years. Under Betsy DeVos, the department began "efficiently" closing out complaints related to race, and reversed Obama-era guidance meant to address racial inequity in school discipline. At the same time, she has shifted focus to what she perceives as a different brand of inequity-that related to religion. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue has further eroded the wall between church and state and paved the road for more use of taxpayer dollars to fund private, religious schools.

Both of these debates about fairness and justice-religion and race-are roiling in the country right now, and public schools are always a reflection of society. A Biden administration is far more likely to focus on trying to right historic and systemic inequity for BIPOC students, but the Trump administration has installed a wide net of judges who are seen as more sympathetic to conservative causes. We are likely to see initiatives aimed at addressing injustices, both real and perceived, promoted through a variety of avenues.

A nation's schools don't exist in a vacuum. Every single argument we have in our world about justice, equity, values, racism, and decency is going to spill over into schools, and that's going to be reflected in policy debates.

How To Read Students' Minds

This is a challenge for every policy maker and every classroom teacher-how do you know what students have actually learned?

All of assessment is about trying to design an assessment task that will show us what the student did or did not grasp. The list of factors that can interfere with these acts of hopeful psychic divination is long. The student may not understand the task. The student may simply be distracted or focused on other factors. The student may run afoul of the medium through which she's supposed to show her stuff; she may have trouble writing papers, or multiple choice questions might throw her. Or the assessment task itself may be poorly designed.

This is a daily challenge for teachers, but it becomes even more troublesome when policy makers start talking about "accountability." For the past few decades, reformers have wanted to measure both what is in students' brains and how much of it a particular teacher put there in a particular year. What they've settled on is an annual battery of multiple choice questions about reading and math. It is not a great instrument, but policy makers (and people who write about policy) have pretended that it is a real proxy for "student achievement," and that they can use special formulae to find out how much teachers contributed to that cranial content.

At all levels, the desire to have a solid answer to "how well is this working," is natural, right and normal. But just as you can't know exactly what your in-laws think of you, how your boss really feels about your last conference, and why your partner is still with you, you cannot ever know exactly how much learning has been packed into a students' head. It's a question we have to ask over and over, but we can never have absolute faith in the answer we get, and we must keep looking for better ones.

How Much Versus When

We know two things for certain in education. 1) Every student has her own pace and speed to work. 2) The system wants students to acquire certain learning by deadline.

Both are true, and both cannot be the foundation of the system. So we end up telling students, "Your job is to get to Cleveland from New York City. You can use any means of transportation that you have access to-drive, fly, bike, walk if you wish-and take any side trips along the way. But you have to get there in twelve hours."

From time to time, there is a revolt against the idea of seat time. If a student can grasp the educational goal in three months, why make her sit in class for nine months? And if a student has sat in a seat for nine months, does that really mean she's learned anything at all? Why not come up with a master list of Things To Learn and as soon as the list is checked off, send the student home?

The debate involves many educational issues, but the current pandemic mess has highlighted one real reason we don't do this-sending students home from school on a varied and unpredictable schedule creates a whole new set of problems for families.

Nevertheless, the idea of alternatives to seat time will continue to be a debate partly because it has merit and partly because it is an opportunity for many folks to make money. Competency based education, various forms of personalized learning, and any edu-product that can have AI attached to it are hot growth industries. Remote learning during the pandemic has intensified the attention to the seat-time versus mastery debate; expect that debate to keep raging.
What Do Students Need To Know
The advent of Common Core turned "college and career ready" into a well-worn educational cliche, and yet, all these years later, we don't really know what it means. What exactly does a student need to know or be able to do in order to be college and career ready? Is there a list of knowledge and skills that is essential to every student, whether she intends to be a welder or a physician or a banker or an author or a stay-at-home mom?

Common Core pretended to know the answer, but it was simply the answer that the writers of Common Core thought should be correct. There is no research base, no peer-reviewed study, no repository of scientific evidence to show a list of qualities and capabilities that are a requirement for a good, successful, happy life. We probably can't even agree on what those three terms mean and if they all belong in that sentence.

We have always argued about what an education is for. There is always pressure for schools to focus on employable skills, to crank out meat widgets and worker bees to better satisfy the needs of business, but that, of course, is precisely the sort of education that wealthy and privileged parents would never settle for when it came to their own children. Shouldn't education be about more than job training?

What is the point of school? We don't debate this as often as we should, but our differing opinions about the answer underlie most of our other education policy debates.

These five fundamental issues are the foundation of every K-12 education policy debate, even if they remain unspoken (the "let's keep it cheap" argument, in particular, is the quiet part that folks rarely want to say out loud). Our choice is to address them directly, or to just haggle at the margins. We'll see what the future holds.

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These Five Issues Are At The Heart Of All K-12 Education Policy Debates

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The next four years offer the prospect of renewed debates about many aspects of public education policy. As we watch this new batch of fireworks launch, it will be useful to remember that virtually all of our debates are the outgrowth of four fundamental issues.

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(Xaume Olleros/Bloomberg)

Everybody knows that nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but teachers don't expect to be penalized for their chosen profession. A new study finds that what is called the "teacher pay penalty" - the difference between teachers and comparable public workers - is bigger than ever.

In 2015, the weekly wages of public school teachers in the United States were 17 percent lower than comparable college-educated professionals - and those most hurt are veteran teachers and male teachers.

The study was done by Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel and published by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Mishel, a nationally recognized economist, is president of EPI and helped build it into a premier research organization focused on U.S. living standards and labor markets. Allegretto is an economist at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. She co-authored two editions of The State of Working America while working as an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Here are key findings from the study:

Average weekly wages (inflation adjusted) of public-sector teachers decreased $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, from $1,122 to $1,092 (in 2015 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of all college graduates rose from $1,292 to $1,416 over this period.

For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression adjusted for education, experience, and other factors) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s: It was ‑1.8 percent in 1994 and grew to a record ‑17.0 percent in 2015.

The relative wage gap for female teachers went from a premium in 1960 to a large and growing wage penalty in the 2000s. Female teachers earned 14.7 percent more in weekly wages than comparable female workers in 1960. In 2015, we estimate a ‑13.9 percent wage gap for female teachers.

The wage penalty for male teachers is much larger. The male teacher wage gap was -22.1 percent in 1979 and improved to ‑15.0 percent in the mid-1990s, but worsened in the late 1990s into the early 2000s. It stood at ‑24.5 percent in 2015.

While relative teacher wage gaps have widened, some of the difference may be attributed to a tradeoff between pay and benefits. Non-wage benefits as a share of total compensation in 2015 were more important for teachers (26.6 percent) than for other professionals (21.6 percent). The total teacher compensation penalty was a record-high 11.1 percent in 2015 (composed of a 17.0 percent wage penalty plus a 5.9 percent benefit advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher compensation penalty grew by 11 percentage points from 1994 to 2015.

The erosion of relative teacher wages has fallen more heavily on experienced teachers than on entry-level teachers. The relative wage of the most experienced teachers has steadily deteriorated-from a 1.9 percent advantage in 1996 to a 17.8 percent penalty in 2015.

Collective bargaining helps to abate the teacher wage gap. In 2015, teachers not represented by a union had a ‑25.5 percent wage gap-and the gap was 6 percentage points smaller for unionized teachers.

Introduction and key findings

An effective teacher is the most important school-based determinant of education outcomes.1 Therefore it is crucial that school districts recruit and retain high-quality teachers. This is increasingly challenging given that the supply of teachers has been greatly affected by high early to mid-career turnover rates, annual retirements of longtime teachers, and a decline in students opting for a teaching career.2 At the same time, many factors are increasing the demand for teachers, including shrinking class sizes, the desire to improve diversity, and the need to meet high standards. In short, the demand for teachers is escalating, while simultaneously the supply of teachers is faltering.

The supply of teachers is diminishing at every stage of the career ladder. On the front end, fewer students are entering the profession. Generally speaking, the small fraction of the most cognitively skilled college students who elect to become teachers has declined for decades (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004). Several factors have helped to drive this trend. Over the long run, employment opportunities for women have greatly expanded, and thus the teaching profession can no longer rely on what was a somewhat captive labor pool. At the same time, teachers are less satisfied and more stressed as standardized testing has been elevated as a tool for student, school, and teacher evaluations.3

On the back end, teachers are aging and retiring along with the workforce overall. Teacher retirements recently peaked, going from 35,000 in 1988-1989 to 87,000 in 2004-2005 (and down very slightly to 85,000 in 2008-2009) (Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey 2014). Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey (2014) argue that retiring teachers, who represent fewer than one-third of those who leave the profession, are not the primary driver behind teacher shortages. Regardless, they do represent a nontrivial annual reduction in the teacher workforce. Moreover, as teachers retire, they are replaced by newcomers, and the high attrition rate among this group is a particularly critical issue.

Teacher staffing is significantly affected by early and mid-career teachers who leave the profession for non-retirement reasons. Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey (2014, 7) document that "from 1988-89 to 2008-09, annual attrition from the teaching force as a whole rose by 41 percent, from 6.4 percent to 9 percent," a trend driven primarily by non-retirement turnover. They conclude that teachers, who represent one of the largest occupations in the nation, have been leaving at relatively high rates, and these rates have steadily increased in recent decades. The increasing rates of attrition foster a growing instability in the teaching profession that affects classroom efficacy.

More recently, the outward flow of teachers was worsened during the Great Recession and the ensuing slow recovery. Many states made austere cuts in public spending, which included major teacher layoffs. Eight years after the economic implosion, many states have yet to return to their prerecession teacher levels, even as demand has increased.4

Darling-Hammond et al. (2016, iii) in their study of California aptly summarized the overall situation:

At the same time, there are many important factors placing pressures on the current and future demand for teachers overall, and in selected fields and for selected purposes. First, rigorous national standards and school-based accountability for student performance have raised the demand for talented teachers.

Second, an increasingly diverse workforce and student population should be met with a more diverse teacher workforce, increasing the demand for certain types of teachers. As shown in Allegretto and Tojerow (2014), whites are overrepresented as teachers (compared with their representation in the overall workforce and, especially, the student population). Conversely, blacks are underrepresented as teachers and Latinos even more so. As Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey (2014) note, there have been successful recruiting efforts of minority teachers, and these teachers are more likely to work in underserved urban communities with high poverty rates. More such efforts are required. It is also curious that nearly three-fourths of teachers are female, and that share has actually increased over time as the small share of male teachers has shrunk. One may think that more male teachers would benefit all students, but the lack of males in the profession is not well understood.

Furthermore, many locales' mandate to shrink class sizes also affects teacher demand. Class sizes in many schools across the nation are far too large. Lastly, broadening the scope of teacher demand is the constant need to fill specialized positions, such as in math, science, and special education-positions that are increasingly difficult to fill.5 These are among the many reasons we may expect demand for teachers to continue to outstrip supply.

To address teacher shortages, it is necessary to focus on both recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers. Many policies are needed to accomplish this goal, and providing appropriate compensation is a necessary, major tool in addressing shortages. As Darling-Hammond et al. (2016, 18) note:

The compensation issues affecting the worsening teacher shortage concern relative teacher pay-that is, teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers. For over a decade, starting with How Does Teacher Pay Compare (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004), we have studied the long-term trends in teacher pay. We followed this up with The Teaching Penalty, published in 2008 using 2006 data, and have updated our findings occasionally in other papers.6 Our body of work has documented the relative erosion of teacher pay. In 1960, female teachers enjoyed a wage premium compared with other college graduates. By the early 1980s, the teacher premium became a penalty, and the female teacher pay gap post-1996 has widened considerably.

Here we extend our analysis through 2015 and update our work on both wages and total compensation (wages plus benefits). (Note that throughout this report, "pay" is used as a generic term to refer to wages or compensation.) With this update, we continue to document trends in relative teacher pay and sound the alarm regarding the long-run growth in the wage and compensation penalty (also referred to in this report as a wage or compensation "gap")-the percent by which public school teachers are paid less than comparable workers. Specifically:

Data sources

We first provide a brief overview of the two sources of data used in this analysis. For our wage analysis we use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), and we use the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey to analyze benefits. Both are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

For our wage analysis we use CPS data on individual workers from 1979 through 2015. The CPS is a monthly survey of more than 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for the BLS. We specifically employ the "Outgoing Rotation Groups" sample, or CPS-ORG. The CPS-ORG is one of the data sources most widely used by economists to study wages and employment. The CPS-ORG data are particularly useful due to their large sample and information on weekly wages. We pool monthly data into a series of annual data with over 150,000 workers for each year. This analysis restricts the sample to all full-time workers age 18 to 64 (defining "full time" as working at least 35 hours per week). Teachers are identified using detailed Census occupation codes, and include only elementary, middle, and secondary teachers (pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers, adult educators, and special education teachers are excluded). We also focus only on public school teachers (private school teachers-who on average earn less than public school teachers-are excluded).7 We also restrict our analysis to data reported by survey respondents and thus do not include imputed data. A more extended discussion regarding the CPS-ORG data can be found in Appendix A of this paper and also in Appendix A of Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008).

There are several measurement and data issues regarding the CPS that require some further discussion. First, as in our earlier work, we justify our choice of comparing weekly, as opposed to annual or hourly, earnings. Second, we discuss the method and data used in our benefits calculation.

Weekly wage

Our analysis of the relative wage of teachers relies on comparisons of weekly earnings, and not on annual or hourly earnings as analyzed by some researchers. As discussed in our prior work, we elect to use weekly wages to avoid measurement issues regarding differences in annual weeks worked (teachers' traditional "summers off") and the number of hours worked per week that arise in many studies of teacher pay. It is often noted that the annual earnings of teachers cannot be directly compared with those of non-teachers, given that teachers are typically only contracted to work a nine-month year. But differences arise over exactly how much time teachers devote to their position outside of their nine contracted months of teaching-and they are afforded little time off during the teaching year compared with other professionals. Teachers also spend some of their summer months in class preparation, professional development, or other activities expected of a professional teacher. Similarly, attempts to compare the hourly pay of teachers and other professionals have resulted in considerable controversy by setting off an unproductive debate about the number of hours teachers work at home versus other professionals.8 Importantly, decisions regarding pay interval (weekly, annual, or hourly) become mostly irrelevant when considering changes in relative pay over time. Changes in relative wages can be expected to be similar as long as the relative work time (between teachers and comparable professionals) remains constant.9

Benefits

Our analysis examines the relative wages of teachers but also examines how differences in benefits affect total compensation. We utilize the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) survey from the BLS to analyze the benefits of teachers compared with the benefits received by other professionals. The ECEC is a quarterly survey that reports employers' average hourly cost for total compensation and its components. It provides cost data in dollar amounts and as percentages of compensation. The ECEC decomposes total compensation costs into wages and benefits. Data are reported separately for broad benefit categories such as paid leave, supplemental pay, insurance, retirement and savings, paid holidays, health insurance, defined benefit pension, and workers' compensation. The ECEC reports compensation statistics for public- and private-sector workers and also provides data by occupation, including "primary, secondary and special education" teachers specifically. This allows us to compare relative teacher benefits. Our estimates of relative teacher wages and benefits give us a measure of relative total compensation of teachers as compared with other professionals.

Recent trends in relative weekly wages

We begin by analyzing average weekly wages (adjusted for inflation) for teachers and comparable workers. Figure A presents average wages for full-time workers age 18-64 for three groups: all workers, college graduates (not including public school teachers), and public school teachers. In 1979, all workers earned (in 2015 dollars) an average of $825 per week, compared with $911 and $1,159 for public school teachers and other college graduates, respectively. As noted in Appendix A non-imputed data are not available for 1994 and 1995; data points for these years have been extrapolated and are represented by dotted lines in the figure.

Figure A:

In 1979 teachers earned 10.3 percent more than all workers-which includes all levels of education. The gap between the higher wages of teachers compared with all workers widened to nearly 26 percent before narrowing to just 5.7 percent in 2015. The average weekly wage for all workers increased from $891 to $1,034 from 1996 to 2015-while teachers' wages decreased $30 per week, from $1,122 to $1,092. Thus, in 2015 teachers earned, on average, $59 more per week as compared with all workers-down from a $231 difference in 1996.

The most relevant comparison, however, is between teachers and other college graduates. In 1979 teachers earned 21.4 percent less than other college graduates. The gap between teachers and other college graduates narrowed into the mid-1990s but then widened considerably during the tight labor markets of the late 1990s into the early 2000s.10 There was a 53 percent jump in wages for non-teacher college graduates from 1979 to 2002 during an unusual recent time of exceptional wage growth. This was a time when inflation-adjusted wages grew strongly among low-, middle-, and high-wage earners-but this was not the case for teachers. This is due to the long-term contracts teachers have and the fact that public-sector wages are not as volatile (both up and down) as private-sector wages. The gap has been fairly consistent throughout the 2000s; teachers' wages slightly declined, as did wages for other college graduates. In 2015 the teacher wage disadvantage compared with other college graduates was 22.8 percent, or $323 per week-substantially higher than the 13.1 percent disadvantage in 1996.

Relative teacher wages

Next we turn to regression analysis to determine the relative wages of teachers. Regression-adjusted estimates account for any changes in the composition of the workforce and among college graduates over time. This typical wage model controls for education, age as a quartic, gender, marital status, geographic region, and race/ethnicity. To present wage gaps in percentage terms we exponentiate the estimated coefficients and subtract 1. We also expand our analysis to examine trends by gender.

Overall results

Relative trends in teacher wages are presented in Figure B (all estimates are listed in Appendix B). The overall wage gap grew from ‑5.5 percent to a record ‑17.0 percent from 1979 to 2015. The gap was fairly stable from 1979 to the mid-1990s but then grew more negative, especially from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s-confirming what we presented in Figure A. After some variability in the mid-2000s, the increasingly negative teacher wage gap continued worsening from 2010 through 2015-particularly for female teachers. It is noteworthy that the wage penalty lessened in the early portion of the Great Recession as private-sector wages fared worse than those in the public sector. This trend was more than reversed in the recovery beyond 2011 as state and local austerity sapped teacher wage growth while private-sector wage growth accelerated.

Figure B

As illustrated in Figure B, teacher wage differentials vary greatly by gender. The wage gap currently stands at -13.9 percent for women. As a profession, teaching was relatively good for females in 1979, as they made 4.2 percent more than other comparable female college graduates. Our earlier work examining prior decades also found a wage premium for female teachers-14.7 percent in 1960, 10.4 percent in 1970, and 2.9 percent in 1980 (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008, 7). This earlier work combined with the results in Figure B offers a very long trend in teacher wages-as the wage gap for females moved from a substantial wage premium to a large wage penalty.

Referring to Figure B, female teachers earned wages comparable to those of other college graduates in the mid-1990s. By 2000, however, female teachers were earning 5.7 percent less than comparable workers, and by 2008 were earning 9.7 percent less. Wages for female teachers fared somewhat better in the early part of the recession, but beginning in 2011 the wage penalty for women increased annually until it reached its largest deficit of 13.9 percent in 2015.

The teacher wage gap has always been largest for male teachers-it was -22.1 percent in 1979 and grew to -24.5 percent in 2015. The larger male teacher wage gap reflects that teaching has been a predominantly female profession. Consequently-because of gender discrimination and more limited options-wages have been less than those of male-dominated professions. Men in predominantly female professions will thus earn substantially less than men in male-dominated professions. The gap lessened from 1990 to 1996, but increased quickly during the late 1990s, when wages of college graduates increased considerably and teachers' wages stagnated. The large wage penalty that male teachers face goes a long way toward explaining why the gender makeup of the teaching profession has not changed much over the past few decades (three-fourths of teachers are female).

Given this strong growth in the teacher wage penalty among women, and the large but mostly stable penalty among men, it is not surprising that the overall teacher wage penalty also reached a historic high in 2015: 17.0 percent. The overall teacher wage penalty was modest in the mid-1990s, at roughly 4 percent, but grew to 10.2 percent in 2000 and grew further to 13.8 percent in 2008 before edging up to its historically high level in 2015.

Results by age cohorts

As suggested, the erosion in relative teacher wages documented in Figure A has consequences for teacher quality through its effects on recruitment and retention. The wages provided to younger teachers will have the most effect on teacher recruitment, so it is important to examine wage trends by age cohort. Therefore, we examine relative teacher wages by age using three age cohorts: "young" (age 25-34), "middle" (age 35-44), and "senior" (age 45-54). We examine 1996 to 2015 since, as explained in Appendix A, this period is not affected by significant coding changes or imputation issues and is unaffected by the 1994 CPS redesign.

We start by analyzing all teachers and then look more closely at female teachers, given that they comprise most of the teaching profession.11 Figure C reveals that the teacher wage penalty, for all three cohorts, worsened from 1996 to 2001-again, during the tight labor markets that especially benefited other college graduates. The picture is a bit mixed thereafter. For young teachers, post-2001 the wage gap lessened slightly until 2011 and then grew until reaching ‑16.4 percent in 2015, returning to its 2002 level.

Figure C

The post-2001 wage gap for the middle group of teachers has been somewhat flat, but over the entire 1996-2015 period the gap doubled from ‑10.5 percent to ‑21.7 percent. The erosion of relative teacher wages has fallen most heavily on experienced teachers. Year after year, the most experienced teacher cohort has undergone a prolonged deterioration in relative wages throughout the entirety of our analysis. In 1996, senior teachers had a wage premium of 1.9 percent. The senior gap generally increased without any of the sustained periods of modest improvement the other two cohorts experienced. By 2015 the senior teacher wage gap had grown to ‑17.8 percent-which is between the gaps of the other two cohorts.

The results from our age cohort analysis on females are presented in Figure D. Generally, the pattern and trends are qualitatively analogous to those reported for teachers overall (Figure C)-which is expected given that most teachers are female. But because the male teacher wage gaps are significantly more negative than those for female teachers, the results for female teachers alone are less negative than overall.

Figure D

Again, from 1996 to 2015, the wage gaps have grown more negative for each of the three cohorts, and the gaps have converged over time. For the younger cohort, the wage penalty increased from 9.3 percent to 14.0 percent over our timeframe. The penalty of the middle cohort increased 10 percentage points, from 9.1 percent to 19.1 percent. And the largest erosion of relative teacher wages occurred for female, senior teachers-some of the most experienced in the profession. This group experienced a 7.7 percent wage premium in 1996 that became a wage penalty of 13.6 percent in 2015.

These estimates establish that in 2015 there was a sizable and comparable teacher wage penalty ranging from 15 to 20 percent at all levels of experience, from entry-level to experienced workers. The teacher wage penalty grew the most among experienced teachers. This pattern suggests that, compared with 20 years ago, recruitment is becoming more difficult, and so is the retention of experienced and very experienced teachers.

Results by union status

Given the large and growing teacher wage penalty, it is informative to know how collective bargaining affects teachers' wages. Union density of teachers is much higher than in the general workforce. In our sample, 72 percent of public school teachers are either union members or covered by a union contract. This compares with just 13 percent of non-teacher workers in our analysis. In general, union density has been on the decline in the United States. This section examines the level and trend of the teacher wage gap among those covered and not covered by collective bargaining.

Here we run the same regression analysis as explained above but we include an additional control for collective bargaining coverage. A dichotomous collective bargaining indicator is defined in the affirmative if a worker is either a member of a union or covered by a union contract, as opposed to not being affiliated with a union. The collective bargaining variable is then interacted with the indicator variable on public teachers. In this way we estimate wage gaps separately for teachers who collectively bargain for their wages and teachers who are not covered by collective bargaining-both groups again compared with other similar college graduates.

Focusing our analysis on 1996-2015, Figure E shows that teachers not covered by collective bargaining faced a larger wage penalty than teachers who benefit from collective bargaining. Teachers without collective bargaining had a teacher wage penalty 7.0 percentage points greater than teachers with collective bargaining, on average, from 1996 through 2015. Both groups of teachers, however, faced a substantial and growing teacher wage penalty over the last two decades. In 1996, the wage gap for union teachers was ‑10.9 percent, compared with ‑18.5 percent for non-union teachers. The difference between the teacher wage gaps for unionized versus non-unionized teachers has narrowed slightly over time-the gaps grew to ‑19.6 percent (union teachers) and ‑25.5 percent (non-union teachers) in 2015.

Figure E

Figure F shows that the mitigating effect of collective bargaining on relative teacher wages is larger for female teachers compared with all teachers. Over 1996-2015, the wage penalty of female teachers with collective bargaining was 7.5 percent, less than half the 18.8 percent wage penalty experienced by female teachers lacking collective bargaining. This means collective bargaining reduced the wage penalty for female teachers by 11.3 percentage points. In 1996, the wage gaps were ‑4.8 percent and ‑15.1 percent for union and non-union female teachers, respectively. The wage gaps, while growing more negative over time, sharply declined in the latter years, with the sharp decline beginning in 2010 for non-union teachers and after 2012 for union teachers. The wage gap for union-affiliated female teachers doubled from ‑6.5 percent in 2012 to ‑13.2 percent in 2015. The gap increased by 6.3 percentage points for non-union teachers from 2010 (‑16.1 percent) to 2015 (‑22.4 percent).

Figure F

State wage analysis: Ratios overall and by state

To this point our analysis has focused on average teacher wage gaps for the United States, but there are differences across states. The data employed here do not allow for a robust regression analysis for each state, but simple within-state ratios of public school teachers to other college graduates are informative. We used pooled 2011-2015 CPS-ORG data to calculate state wage ratios shown in Figure G.12 The ratio for the overall United States is 0.77, meaning that, on average, teachers earn just 77 percent of what other college graduates earn in wages. Arizona (0.63) has the lowest ratio, while Wyoming (0.99) has the highest. In 18 states, public school teacher weekly wages lag by more than 25 percent. In contrast, there are only five states where teacher weekly wages are less than 10 percent behind, and no state where teacher wages are equal to or better than those of other college graduates. Appendix C lists state ratios and reports weekly wages for teachers and other college graduates by bachelor and master degree.

Figure G

Adding benefits to the picture

Our analysis of relative teacher pay thus far has focused entirely on the wages of teachers compared to other workers. Yet benefits such as pensions and health insurance are an increasingly important component of the total compensation package. Teachers do enjoy more attractive benefit packages than other professionals; thus, our measure of relative teacher wages overstates the teacher disadvantage in total compensation. The different natures of wages and benefits should be kept in mind, as it is only wages that may be spent or saved. Thus, the growing wage penalty is always of importance.

This section examines how our estimates of relative teacher wages should be adjusted to reflect differences in total compensation; that is, it measures the size of the advantage teachers have in benefits, relative to other professionals, and adjusts the wage penalty to derive an overall compensation penalty. We draw heavily on our prior work analyzing the "benefits bias" (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004, 2008) and update our calculations to 2015.

Basic facts on non-wage benefits and the "benefits bias"

Table 1 provides the basic information necessary to compare benefits packages-as a share of overall compensation-of primary, secondary, and special education teachers and comparable workers (specifically, professional workers).13 This table uses the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) series to disaggregate the overall cost of compensation into its various components, such as wages, benefits, and employer taxes. These shares allow us to estimate the benefits advantage not taken into consideration in the wage-only comparisons presented earlier. This section presents estimates of the benefits advantage for 1994-2015 to enable estimates of the overall teacher compensation (wages and benefits) penalty.

Table 1

Table 1 divides total compensation into several categories, including wages, benefits, and payroll taxes. (Although workers do not perceive payroll taxes as "compensation," they do represent a part of an employer's labor costs; hence, they should affect the overall compensation package a worker receives.) Wages, in turn, are divided into two components. The first is "direct wages," defined by the BLS as "regular payments from the employer to the employee as compensation for straight-time hourly work, or for any salaried work performed." This definition of wages is what the ECEC refers to as wages. "Direct wages" exclude the second component-"other wages"-which includes "supplemental pay" (including premium pay for overtime, bonus pay, and profit-sharing) and "paid leave." The sum of basic and other wages is identified as "W-2 wages," a wage measure that corresponds to the wages captured in the CPS data used above and is the wage reported to employees and to the Internal Revenue Service. It is important to note that one will obtain a different teacher wage differential depending on which wage measure is employed. This follows from the fact that "other wages" are a larger part of compensation for other professionals (9.4 percent in 2015) than for teachers (4.7 percent), as teachers rarely receive bonuses or paid vacation (although they may receive additional wages for extracurricular activities). Consequently, analysis of direct wages alone will tend to understate the teacher wage differential disadvantage by 5 percentage points relative to an analysis of total (W-2) wages.

Table 1 also presents the shares of the two main non-wage (or fringe benefit) components of compensation-insurance and pension benefits-as well as payroll taxes (i.e., Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation). Teachers have a greater share of their compensation in insurance (which is nearly entirely health insurance) and pension benefits, comprising 21.7 percent of overall teacher compensation, versus 15.1 percent of professional compensation. One reason health and pension costs are higher for teachers is that teacher health benefits are provided for a full year for workers who receive salaries for less than a full year. These greater costs would also reflect teachers having better benefit packages.

Note that payroll taxes, on average, are also less for teachers nationwide, the result of some teachers not being in the Social Security system. This is an important observation, as recent claims of "excessive" teacher pension costs (e.g., Roza 2007 and Tucker 2007) do not take into account the fact that some teachers have lower payroll taxes because they are not in the Social Security system and will not earn Social Security benefits based on their work as a teacher. Pension plans where participants are not also covered by Social Security will necessarily have higher pension costs. This is why pension costs should not be considered without also examining Social Security at the same time.

The "memo" line at the bottom of Table 1 shows that combined pension and payroll tax costs as a share of overall compensation for teachers exceeds that for professionals but to a lesser degree than looking at retirement benefits alone. Non-wage compensation as a whole was more important for teachers (26.6 percent) than for professionals (21.6 percent).

Table 2 uses the data in Table 1 (and comparable ECEC data for earlier years) to compute the "benefits bias" or the "benefits advantage." This estimate tells us to what extent an estimated relative wage disadvantage will be offset by a relative benefits advantage. Table 2 updates the analysis presented in Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008).

The analysis is presented for several years between 1994 and 2015 so that we can identify the changes in both the benefits advantage and the wage penalty to derive the overall compensation disadvantage faced by primary and secondary school teachers. We rely on the analysis presented in Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008) for the trends from 1994 to 2004 and update them to 2015. The first step is to use the ECEC series to compute the ratio of overall compensation to W-2 wages. We benchmark teacher compensation trends to those of professionals so that the benefits advantage of teachers captures the degree to which their benefits exceed those of other professionals. As Table 2 shows, compensation exceeds wages more among teachers than professionals (36.2 percent versus 27.5 percent in 2015) and more so now than in earlier years. That means primary and secondary school teachers have a benefits advantage that somewhat offsets the wage disadvantages they face. The total teacher compensation penalty was a record-high 11.1 percent in 2015, as depicted in Figure H (composed of a 17.0 percent wage penalty plus a 5.9 percent benefit advantage).

Figure H

We estimate that in 1994 there was essentially no compensation penalty for teachers, as the 1.8 percent wage penalty was fully offset by a benefits advantage. The wage penalty grew substantially since 1994, as noted above, rising 15.2 percentage points by 2015 (bottom row of Table 2). However, the 4.2 percentage-point increase in the benefits advantage partially offset the wage trends so that the overall compensation penalty grew by 11.0 percentage points.14 The compensation penalty actually subsided a bit in the early part of the Great Recession and recovery, from 2007 to 2012, as the increase in the wage penalty by 1.1 percentage point was more than offset by the increased benefits advantage of 1.8 percentage points. Between 2012 and 2015, however, the faster growth in the wage penalty, 2.9 percentage points, was only slightly offset by a growing benefits advantage.

These trends in wages and benefits are probably related. Recent years have seen extreme pressure on school district budgets to curtail hiring and costs. It may be the case that teachers and school districts have sought to preserve benefits by restraining wage costs. If this were the case relative to the employers of professionals we would observe a greater teacher wage penalty with a partially offsetting increased benefits advantage. The bottom line is that since 1994 there has been an erosion of teacher compensation of 11 percentage points relative to other college graduates and professionals.

Conclusion

The opportunity cost of becoming a teacher and remaining in the profession becomes more and more important as relative teacher pay falls further behind that of other professions. The large negative wage gap for male teachers likely is a key reason why the gender mix of teachers has not changed much over time. That women, once a somewhat captive labor pool for the teaching profession, have many more opportunities outside the profession today than in the past means that growing wage and compensation differentials will make it all the more difficult to recruit and retain high-quality teachers. Moreover, the ever-increasing costs of higher education and burdensome student loans are also a barrier to the teaching profession in light of a widening pay gap.

The recent trends we document represent only a small part of a much larger long-run decline in the relative pay of teachers. U.S. decennial Census data show that the wage gap between female public school teachers and comparably educated women-for whom the labor market dramatically changed over 1960-2000-grew by nearly 28 percentage points, from a relative wage advantage of 14.7 percent in 1960 to a disadvantage of 13.2 percent in 2000. Among all (male and female) public school teachers, the relative wage disadvantage grew almost 20 percentage points over 1960-2000 (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008, 7). Our results show that the teacher wage penalty grew an additional 7.0 and 9.6 percentage points, respectively, for all and female teachers since 2000.15

Improvements in the non-wage benefits of primary and secondary school teachers partially offset the worsening wage disparities: The weekly total compensation (wages plus benefits) disadvantage facing teachers in 2015 was about 11 percent, or roughly 6 percentage points less than the 17 percent weekly wage disadvantage estimated for that year. It is good news that teachers are able to bargain a total compensation package-as it seems they may have forgone wage increases for benefits recently. But, as we've documented, teacher wages have been stagnant since the mid-1990s. This makes the wage gap, on its own, critically important, as it is only earnings that help to make ends meet regarding pecuniary expenses such as rents, food, and paying off student loans.

If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the level of teacher compensation, including wages, is critical to recruiting and retaining higher-quality teachers. Policies that solely focus on changing the composition of current compensation (e.g., merit or pay-for-performance schemes) without actually increasing compensation levels are unlikely to be effective. Simply put, improving overall teacher quality requires correcting the teacher compensation disadvantage.

- The authors thank Saika Belal and Jessica Schieder for their valuable contributions to this report.

About the authors

Sylvia A. Allegretto is a labor economist and chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, which is housed at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and is co-author of many EPI publications, including past editions of The State of Working America, How Does Teacher Pay Compare?, and The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Lawrence Mishel, a nationally recognized economist, has been president of the Economic Policy Institute since 2002. Prior to that he was EPI's first research director (starting in 1987) and later became vice president. He is the co-author of all 12 editions of The State of Working America. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and his articles have appeared in a variety of academic and non-academic journals. His areas of research are labor economics, wage and income distribution, industrial relations, productivity growth, and the economics of education.

Appendix A

In this appendix we provide a summary of the data used in this analysis. Further documentation of each can be found in Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008).

We use individual data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), specifically the "Outgoing Rotation Group" sample, or CPS-ORG. The teachers studied here are elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers (teachers not included are kindergarten, early-education, and special education teachers). The CPS is the monthly survey administered by the BLS to more than 60,000 households to measure and report on unemployment. The CPS-ORG data used here are based on reports from nearly 145,000 workers each year. The CPS-ORG is one of the data sources most widely used by economists to study wages and employment. The CPS-ORG data are particularly useful due to their large sample and information on weekly wages. Since 1994, the CPS-ORG survey has asked respondents to report their wages on a weekly, biweekly, monthly, or annual basis (whichever the respondent finds most appropriate), from which the BLS then derives the weekly wage. More than half of teachers report an annual (as opposed to a monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly) wage to BLS. Respondents also report the hours they worked the previous week.

This analysis restricts the sample to all full-time workers between the age of 18 and 64 (defining "full time" as working at least 35 hours per week). Teachers are identified using detailed Census occupation codes, and include only elementary and secondary teachers (pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers, adult educators, and special education teachers are excluded). This analysis also only focuses on public school teachers (private school teachers-who on average earn less than public school teachers-are excluded).16

There are several measurement issues that require some further discussion. First, as in our earlier work, we limit our analysis to workers whose wage data were provided by the respondent and not "imputed," or assigned by the Census Bureau, who imputes earnings for the BLS. Second, we justify our choice of comparing weekly, as opposed to annual or hourly, earnings. Lastly, several coding changes over the period under study are worth noting.

Imputations

The CPS-ORG data used in this analysis are non-imputed data. When a survey respondent fails to report any earnings, the BLS imputes his or her earnings. The imputation procedure is based on a Census Bureau "hot deck" methodology that finds a respondent or "donor" in the survey who closely matches the non-respondent in characteristics such as location, age, race, and education. The problem arises here because occupation is not necessarily one of the criteria used in imputing earnings-non-responding teachers are more often than not assigned the average earnings of non-teacher college graduates. Given differences in the earnings and work year of teachers and non-teachers, this procedure creates a systemic bias in the comparison of teacher earnings with that of other professionals, as imputed teacher earnings are systemically overstated.17

In addition, the share of CPS earnings data that are imputed has grown markedly over time; hence, the bias has worsened. In 1979, imputed earnings data in the CPS were 17 percent; by 2000 imputations accounted for 33 percent of the sample, and in 2015 they made up 41 percent of the sample. The implications for our analysis of the teacher wage gap are significant. In the early years, 1979 through 1993, the teacher wage gap differential between using all the data available (without regard for imputations) and analyzing only non-imputed observations was at most a 2 percentage-point difference-meaning that the inclusion of imputed data lessened the teacher wage gap by 2 percentage points or less. But, post 1996 the gap steadily grew, and in 2015 the differential is larger than ever. For all teachers, the teacher pay gap of 17 percent reported in Figure B (estimated without imputed data) would be mitigated to a 10 percent gap had imputations been included. The bias in closing the gap is 6 and 9 percentage points for female and male teachers, respectively.

Imputed data are not available in 1994 and only for the last four months of 1995. Thus, we extrapolate results for these two years by comparing output from using all the data available to output from using non-imputed data only. We do this comparison for the years just prior to and just after 1994 and 1995. Comparing the results gives us a reasonable rough estimate of what may be expected if non-imputed data were available for 1994 and 1995.

Weekly wage

This analysis of the relative wage of teachers relies on comparisons of weekly earnings, rather than annual or hourly earnings, the approach taken by some authors (e.g., Hanushek and Rivkin 1997; Greene and Winters 2007). As discussed in our prior work, we elect to use weekly wages to avoid measurement issues regarding differences in annual weeks worked (teachers' traditional "summers off") and the number of hours worked per week that arise in many studies of teacher pay. It is often noted that the annual earnings of teachers cannot be directly compared with those of non-teachers, given that teachers are typically only contracted to work a nine-month year. But differences arise over exactly how much time teachers devote to their position outside of their nine contracted months of teaching. Teachers spend some of their summer months in class preparation, professional development, or other activities expected of a professional teacher. Teachers who may wish to earn additional income during the summer months can often do so, but are unlikely to be able to earn at the same rate of pay as in their teaching role. Similarly, attempts to compare the hourly pay of teachers and other professionals have resulted in considerable controversy by setting off an unproductive debate about the number of hours teachers work at home versus other professionals.18 Such decisions regarding pay interval (weekly, annual, or hourly) become mostly irrelevant when considering changes in relative pay over time.

Changes in relative wages can be expected to be similar as long as the relative work time (between teachers and comparable professionals) remains constant. For example, if the ratio of weekly hours worked by teachers relative to those worked by comparable workers remains constant over time, then estimates of changes in hourly wages will be the same as for weekly changes. Similarly, estimated changes in relative annual earnings will parallel those for weekly earnings as long as the annual weeks and hours worked by teachers have not changed relative to those of comparable workers.

Some researchers (e.g., Podgursky and Tongrut 2006) have contended that the use of the CPS-ORG data downwardly biases teacher earnings. This issue is particularly relevant to CPS data prior to the 1994 CPS redesign (more on this below). In Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008) we benchmarked the CPS-ORG data to annual data from the March CPS. This extensive benchmarking exercise provided validation that the CPS-ORG data are consistent with annual March data, which Hanushek and Rivkin (1997, 2004), Temin (2002, 2003) and Podgursky and Tongrut (2006) have used in their analyses of teacher wage trends. As expected, the annual wage gap is just the weekly wage gap multiplied by the ratio of teacher and non-teacher annual weeks worked, with the caveat that we have more confidence in the post-redesign CPS data. Our benchmarking exercise leaves little doubt that there has been deterioration in the relative earnings of teachers over time. Moreover, our use of weekly wage comparisons in all of our work on teacher pay allows us to avoid unproductive discussions of work years, summers off, and so on. Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008) also show in Chapter 2 that the long-term trends in the March CPS, decennial Census, and CPS-ORG data all yield similar findings regarding the relative erosion of teacher wages.

CPS 1994 redesign

The CPS was redesigned in 1994. The change in the CPS survey question on earnings appears to have resulted in a significantly higher weekly wage among teachers, as teacher wages rose 10.2 percent between 1993 and 1994 (the year the redesigned survey was first used)-far faster than the 2.2 percent increase among non-teacher college graduates. The additional 8 percent wage growth among teachers appears to represent the effects of a correction for the underlying bias in the pre-1994 survey. Consequently, our estimates incorporate the pre-1994 data in a way that does not allow this bias to be built into our results.

A second issue concerns the coding schemes regarding education. Prior to 1992 the survey asked for the "highest grade of school attended," and in 1992 the question was changed to "highest level of school completed or the highest degree received." Thus, degrees are not known prior to 1992 even as a best guess crosswalk is used. For more information on CPS coding schemes and the 1994 redesign, see Cohany, Polivka, and Rothgeb (1994).

Appendix B

Appendix C

Endnotes

1. We hear often that a strong teacher is the single biggest within-school factor influencing learning and student achievement, and both research and common sense affirm this. It is important to keep in mind, however, that teachers operate within a complex ecosystem of fellow teachers, school leadership, curriculum, standards, and a range of resources, including parent and community engagement, all of which have major impacts on teacher effectiveness. Indeed, as Anthony Bryk and his colleagues found in their research on school reforms in Chicago, school improvement-and thus increased achievement-is akin to baking a cake, with five essential ingredients that constantly interact (Bryk et al. 2010). So while it's critically important to design policies to strengthen the teacher corps, that effort must be complemented by larger work to improve school ecosystems as a whole.

2. The official Teacher Shortage Area list, which tracks open teacher positions across the United States, and by state since 1991, is available at http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/pol/tsa.html#list. In short, compared with the early 1990s, the list is growing (Strauss 2015). For many schools the start of the school year has the added stress and pressure to fill vacant teacher positions. At the last minute, many vacancies are filled with less-qualified teachers or administrators.

3. NEA survey found that 75 percent of teachers are satisfied with their jobs (Walker 2014). Despite the high level of overall satisfaction, nearly half (45 percent) of surveyed member teachers have considered quitting because of standardized testing. For insights into the trends in teacher satisfaction, see Richmond (2013), which presents data from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, conducted by Harris Interactive, which has been published annually since 1984 through 2012.

4. Gould (2015) estimates that due to the Great Recession and the ensuing austerity at all levels of government, public education jobs are still 236,000 fewer than they were seven years ago. The number of teachers rose by 41,700 over the last year. While this is clearly a positive sign, adding in the number of public education jobs that should have been created just to keep up with enrollment, we are currently experiencing a 410,000 job shortfall in public education.

5. See Darling-Hammond et al. (2016)

6. See Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2011).

7. To find out more about public versus private school teachers, see an in-depth paper by Allegretto and Tojerow (2014).

8. In Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008), we compared the relative hourly pay of teachers using CPS data on hourly wages and found no qualitative differences in our results.

9. In Appendix A in Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008), we benchmarked CPS-ORG weekly wages to annual wages in the March CPS and found the two measures to be consistent.

10. Recall that the dotted lines are guesstimates, and CPS underwent a major redesign in 1994.

11. Additionally, the smaller sample size of male teachers makes it hard to break out the sample further by age groups and get precise estimates; however, the general pattern matches that of overall teachers (although the negative pay gaps are more negative for male teachers, as depicted in Figure A).

12. State totals are weighted averages of the B.A.- and M.A.-level weekly wages where the weights are the shares of teachers with a B.A. or M.A. This ensures that the distribution of education among teachers and other college graduates does not affect the comparison.

13. The ECEC provides compensation data for primary and secondary school teachers and for a broader category of "teachers." We analyze the narrower category, which matches closely our definition of teachers in our ORG data, except that the ECEC includes private school and special education teachers.

14. As reviewed in Allegretto, Corcoran, Mishel (2008), there are discontinuities in the occupational codes in the ECEC series for both teachers and professionals. The data for teachers in 1994-2003 is for all teachers, not just primary and secondary school teachers, and the definition of professionals differs from the data starting in 2004. We use the changes in 1994-2003 and add them to the 2004-2015 period to obtain the long-term change in the benefits advantage. This implicitly assumes no change over 2003-2004. That is, the benefit bias grew by 0.1 percentage points from 1994 to 2003 for teachers overall (K-12, university, and others). We assume that was the change among primary and secondary school teachers and therefore subtract 0.1 percent from the benefit advantage in 2004 to obtain our estimate of the 1994 benefits advantage.

15. As measured from 1999 to 2015 to reflect the 2000 Census data measuring 1999 wages.

16. To find out more about public versus private teachers, see Allegretto and Tojerow (2014).

17. For more on imputations see Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008, 10).

18. In Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (2008) we compared the relative hourly pay of teachers using CPS data on hourly wages and found no qualitative differences in our results.

References

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Ilan Tojerow. 2014. "Teacher Staffing and Pay Differences: Public and Private Schools." Monthly Labor Review, September.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2004. How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2008. The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2011. The Teaching Penalty: An Update Through 2010. Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief No. 298.

Bryk, Anthony S., Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton. 2010. Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. 1994-2015. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor.

Cohany, Sharon R., Anne E. Polivka, and Jennifer M. Rothgeb. 1994. "Revisions in the Current Population Survey." Employment and Earnings, February.

Corcoran, Sean P., William N. Evans, and Robert M. Schwab. 2004. "Women, the Labor Market, and the Declining Relative Quality of Teachers." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 23, 449-470.

Current Population Survey basic monthly microdata. 1979-2015. Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics [machine-readable microdata file]. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau.

Darling-Hammond, Linda, Roberta Furger, Patrick M. Shields, and Leib Sutcher. 2016. Addressing California's Emerging Teacher Shortage: An Analysis of Sources and Solutions. Learning Policy Institute.

Gould, Elise. 2015. "Disappointing Jobs Numbers and Not Enough Teachers." Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), October 2.

Greene, Jay P., and Marcus A. Winters. 2007. How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid? New York: Manhattan Institute.

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Hanushek, Eric A., and Steven G. Rivkin. 2004. "How to Improve the Supply of High-Quality Teachers," in Brookings Papers on Education Policy, ed. D. Ravitch. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Ingersoll, Richard, Lisa Merrill, and Daniel Stuckey. 2014. Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force. Consortium for Policy Research in Education Research, Report #RR-80.

Podgursky, M., and R. Tongrut. 2006. "(Mis-)measuring the Relative Pay of Public School Teachers." Education Finance and Policy, vol. 1, no. 4, 425-440.

Richmond, Emily. 2013. "Teacher Job Satisfaction Hits 25-Year Low." The Atlantic, February 21.

Roza, Marguerite. 2007. Frozen Assets: Rethinking Teacher Contracts Could Free Billions for School Reform. Washington, D.C.: Education Sector.

Strauss, Valerie. 2015. "The Real Reasons Behind the U.S. Teacher Shortage." Washington Post, August 24.

Temin, Peter. 2002. "Teacher Quality and the Future of America." Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 28, no. 3, 285-300.

Temin, Peter. 2003. "Low Pay, Low Quality." Education Next, vol. 3, 8-13.

Tucker, Marc. 2007. Tough Choices or Tough Times. Hoboken, N.J.: Jossey-Bass.

Walker, Tim. 2014. "NEA Survey: Nearly Half of Teachers Consider Leaving Profession Due to Standardized Testing." NEA Today, November 2.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Think teachers aren't paid enough? It's worse than you think.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everybody knows that nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but teachers don't expect to be penalized for their chosen profession. A new study finds that what is called the "teacher pay penalty" - the difference between teachers and comparable public workers - is bigger than ever.