A new report by Sylvia Allegretto at IRLE and Lawrence Mishell at EPI finds that in 2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17% lower than those of comparable workers (a gap that has widened from 1.8% in 1994). There are many reasons for the pay gap between public school teachers and similarly-educated workers, including the…
Category: Education
Public and private money in San Francisco schools
Unlike some California school districts, which centralize and redistribute funds raised by parents, San Francisco so far has permitted all money raised at a school to stay there. This gives some schools an enormous advantage. School district data show that in 2011 (the most recent year tax records were available), parents of children at just 10 elementary schools…
When universities go bankrupt…
LSU and many other public colleges in Louisiana might be forced to file for financial exigency, essentially academic bankruptcy, if state higher education funding doesn’t soon take a turn for the better. Louisiana’s flagship university began putting together the paperwork for declaring financial exigency this week when the Legislature appeared to make little progress on…
Watchdog: Borrowing Trouble – Chicago Tribune series
A great series finished last month on the Chicago Public Schools district’s engagement in complex bond deals, the lack of public oversight, and the high costs of many of those deals. I’ve been researching interest rate swaps for over a year, and I’m impressed with the thoroughness of the reporting here. THIS is why we…
Fat-Cat Administrators at the Top 25 – NYTimes.com
It’s not hard to find examples of the uneven implementation and consequences of austerity. A great study out last week by the Institute of Policy Studies looks at several indicators at public universities and finds some interesting correlations. The student debt crisis is worse at state schools with the highest-paid presidents. The sharpest rise in…