The following post was published by the Economic Policy Institute, which is pro-worker, pro-union, and not funded by free-market billionaires.

As we near the end of #TeacherAppreciationWeek, it is worth remembering that one of the ways we can show our appreciation for teachers is to pay them a living salary.

EPI has been tracking trends in teacher pay for over a decade and a half. Our most recent report finds that, on average, teachers earn nearly 20 percent less than similar workers in other occupations. The size of the gap also varies across by state and can be as large as 32.7% less than other comparable college-educated workers.

Teachers typically have better benefits packages, but even after adjusting for the value of these benefits, the average compensation gap remains 10.2%.

Take a look at EPI’s map that measures the pay gap between teachers and similar workers in each state2 and then share it with family and friends.

Leslie T. Fenwick is Dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education. She is an eloquent critic of efforts to deprofessionalize teaching. She believes that teachers need more, not less, preparation for the classroom. This post appeared in Politico.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated harmful educational inequalities in the preK-12 public education system. The nation’s poorest students, Black and Latino students, and our disabled students have been the most negatively impacted by school closings necessitated by the pandemic. Black students in high poverty schools have been especially hard hit because of the racialized, historic and ongoing disinvestment in the education of Black children and youth.

One of the most obvious — and dangerous — ways this inequality shows up is by channeling a proportionally larger share of less qualified or alternatively credentialed teachers to schools with higher percentages of Black, Latino and disabled students. Black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be taught by teachers in training who are in alternative teacher preparation programs. These alternative route programs differ from traditional teacher preparation programs in at least one significant way: Most alternative route teacher interns become teachers of record prior to completing any teacher training. This means that as teachers in training, they are not profession-ready on Day 1. They are training on the backs of our neediest students — the students who most need a profession-ready teacher.

The pandemic and racial unrest have revealed just how much further the nation has to go to fulfill children’s constitutional right to equal educational opportunity. State constitutions define this right to an education in beautiful and compelling language as a “democratic imperative,” “fundamental value” and “paramount duty.” Yet, despite these powerful phrases, nearly 30 years of research shows that in schools serving students of color where 50 percent or more are on free or reduced lunch (one indicator of poverty status), these students are 70 percent more likely to have a teacher who is not certified or does not have a college major or minor in the subject area they teach. This finding holds true across four critical subject areas: mathematics, English, social studies, and science.

A review of the typical requirements for traditional teacher preparation and alternative programs — especially those that are not based at universities — reveals just how different the programs are in terms of substantive coursework and the length of time spent devoted to reflective and supervised practice under a fully certified and prepared preK-12 teacher (usually with at least three years of successful teaching experience) and university faculty member. It is clear that these two routes are not producing similar calibers of teachers and, even if they did, the alternative route program places an undue burden on the preK-12 students who are assigned a teacher-in-training as their full-time teacher of record.

This trend of placing untrained and uncertified individuals as teachers of record in schools serving the urban poor and disabled students is accelerating during the pandemic as states utilize more back door routes into classrooms through emergency certificates — in some states, these are granted to individuals with only a high school diploma. This practice is generating a new wave of uncredentialed teachers.

This reality is ill-matched to another circumstance: high stakes standardized tests and graduation examinations are more often used in states with higher percentages of Black and Latino students. How can we continue to educationally malnourish students, raise the bar on what they are expected to know and demonstrate on standardized tests, and lower the standards for the adults who teach them?

Covid-19 has had a profound impact on the teacher pipeline, creating shortages that disproportionately affect Black, brown and low-income students. Are you a teacher or education professional? Tell us how you have seen the pandemic affect teacher training or certification programs and you might be invited to a private discussion with Leslie Fenwick, PhD, and reporter Carly Sitrin.

Teacher quality is clearly tied to opportunity to learn in four categories: the quality of resources, school conditions, curriculum and the teaching that students experience. Yet the data about each of these opportunity-to-learn categories reveal alarming trends. According to the Schott Foundation, which researches and advocates for racial justice in the public school system, Native American, Black and Latino students have just over half the opportunity to learn, compared to white non-Latino students in the nation’s best supported and best performing schools. Additionally, the Schott study found that low-income students of any race or ethnicity have just over half of the opportunity to learn, compared to the average white, non-Latino student. Therefore, the availability and placement of fully credentialed, profession-ready, caring and effective teachers for students of color and poor students is especially acute.

As citizens and leaders, we can certainly tinker around the edges of the current order and attempt to return to a pre-Covid sense of normalcy, but this will not serve the nation well. One reason is that students of color are now the majority of our public school population, which means the majority of today’s public school students have probably not benefited from the prevailing order. In sustained and systematic ways, the new majority of public school students have had their education and life chances stymied by a social contract that consistently ensures lack of access to the best educational resources: namely, teachers.

The federal courts have recognized this reality. Nearly a decade ago, in a case known as Renee v. Duncan, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the practice of disproportionately placing uncertified teachers, teachers in training or teacher interns in classrooms serving poor and minority students is “discriminatory” and “does harm.” Further, the court indicated that the appellants in the case provided evidence that 41 percent of interns in California taught in the 25 percent of schools with the highest concentration of students of color. Further, 61 percent of California’s teacher interns taught in the state’s poorest schools. The court starkly stated: “We conclude that the appellants established injury in fact. This disproportionate distribution of interns … results in a poorer quality education than appellants would otherwise have received.”

Not only is a disproportionate share of students of color saddled with teachers in training, remarkably, nearly 40 percent of special education teachers are coming from alternative preparation routes. This means that while these students come to school ready to learn, their teacher is not fully prepared to teach. They are learning. To teach. On them.

Clearly, the proliferation of ill-credentialed “teachers” and their placement in schools serving the urban poor is linked to a broader issue of the devaluing of public education and the students of color and poor students who have become the majority constituency of public schools. Unfortunately, common sense has not gotten us to equality of educational opportunity and educational equity. Research has not gotten us there. Court decisions and decrees have not gotten us there. State and federal policymaking has not gotten us there. Time has not gotten us there. And, though the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing us to reconfigure and recalculate how to deliver schooling, we should not revert to a “normal” that continues to disadvantage our students who are most in need.

So, what can be done to rectify these problems? There are at least three policy responses that will help:

— Enforce through federal and state statutes and regulations the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Renee v Duncan.

— Incentivize states to approve only those teacher preparation programs — whether they are university-based or not — that meet national accreditation standards.

— Incentivize states to work with districts to develop plans that equitably distribute fully certified, profession-ready teachers.

Ultimately, there are larger questions at stake. Are we as a nation prepared to confront our beliefs about whose children we deem worthy and unworthy of investment? Are we willing and able to dismember the infrastructure, mechanisms and policies that have us ideologically and financially disinvesting from children of color and children from families experiencing poverty? What state, district and school policies and practices routinely privilege white and affluent students and disenfranchise students of color and poor students? How do we move past a deficit perspective about Black and other students of color and create teaching and learning environments that affirm the intellectual capacity and cultural heritage of all students?

In the unfolding pandemic, economic crisis and reckoning on race, governors and mayors are shaping our shared future. Who are the power players, and how are they driving politics and influencing Washington?Full coverage »

The Black Lives Matter movement and protests continue to rightly place structural racism front and center, reinvigorating discussions about diversity in the teacher workforce, the need to change curriculum content imagery and authorship so that it is not exclusively white, and the equitable assignment of teachers so that more students have access to profession-ready teachers.

The Black, Latino and poor children who are languishing in too many under-resourced schools will soon be the majority of adult Americans. They already constitute the majority of public school students. What will it mean for American democracy when these young people — many of whom have been pushed and held at the margins of the social, political and economic order — are the majority of adult citizens? Will their commitment to democracy and public schooling be resonant or absent? What we do now will answer this question in the near future.

The executive director of StudentsFirstNY, Jenny Sedlis, has taken a leave of absence from her job to manage a fundraising PAC for Eric Adams, one of the leading candidates for mayor. The election is this November.

Sedlis previously was the lead spokesperson for Success Academy, Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain.

The new entity plans to run digital and TV ads supporting Adams’ candidacy, without being beholden to the strict spending limits imposed by the city’s Campaign Finance Board. Ahead of Sedlis establishing the PAC with the Board of Elections, StudentsFirstNY released a poll showing Adams closing the gap with frontrunner Andrew Yang. A poll published yesterday showed Adams in the lead.

Sedlis has not begun raising money yet, but the group is hoping to secure $6 million — matching the stated aim of political consultant Lis Smith in her fundraising effort for Andrew Yang, Adams’ chief rival in the race…

“New York City’s comeback starts with Eric Adams as mayor,” Sedlis said in a prepared statement. “He’ll make our streets safer, bring real police reform and get COVID under control so we can get the city back open for business.”

Though the promotions will not address charters, Adams has been an ally of the well-heeled movement to expand the schools.

“We need to identify those charter schools that are failing and those are the schools we need to replace with the schools who are doing a good job. The goal is to scale up excellence,” Adams said following an endorsement on Monday. “We have too many charter schools and district schools that are not meeting the standards that are needed … to talk about caps and non-caps is just the wrong conversation. What we’re capping is excellence.”

Meanwhile, Adam’s chief rival is Andrew Yang, who gained attention because of his failed candidacy for president in 2020. Yang won the endorsement of major Orthodox Jewish groups by agreeing with them that their Yeshivas should not be required to meet state standards or to teach the courses in English, instead of Hebrew.

Yang is advised by venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, who previously worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and is an avid supporter of charter schools.

The outlook for public schools in New York City is not good.

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This is a deep dive into a serious problem in Texas. An employee in the Special Education division was upset by a no-bid contract to an inexperienced, unqualified company. She filed a whistleblower complaint to the Office of the Inspector General. She was fired. A lower court upheld her appeal for compensation and protection. An appeals court rejected her claim.

Parents in Texas of children with special needs should be outraged. The employee did her duty to protect their children. The fired whistleblower said, “The allocation of funding for the education of the most vulnerable children in the state should not be left to its most corrupt people.”

The Wyoming Legislature passed a charter law that allows new charters to open wherever they wish, without the approval of the elected local school board. Governor Mark Gordon neither signed nor vetoed the law, expressing confidence that kinks could be fixed in the future.

The legislation allows the State Loan and Investment Board to approve a charter school. Typically, local school districts have approved charter schools in the state.

The law allows charter schools to potentially be exempt from teaching standards requirements and oversight from the State Board of Education.

“This bill seemingly makes it easier for charters to be established outside the state’s rigorous educational parameters,” Gordon wrote.

I like to follow the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily report of the gains and losses of the biggest billionaires in the world.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon “lost” $4.31 billion yesterday. But don’t worry about Jeff. He’s the richest person in the world, and his fortune is edging closer to $200 billion.

With a fortune so staggering, it makes you wonder why he fought so hard to prevent Amazon workers from joining a union.

Remember when his ex-wife McKenzie Scott gave away $4 billion? She’s already recovered more than that.

Nancy Bailey believes that parents owe a debt of thanks to the valiant teachers who taught online and in person, doing whatever was needed during the year of the pandemic.

She reminds us that tech vultures are waiting in the wings, hoping that the pandemic has set the stage for “reimagining” education without buildings.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. In this post, he demonstrates how a proposed federal program could crush the liberal arts and humanities.

He writes in the Boston Globe:

A bipartisan group of senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, are backing a bill called the College Transparency Act. It would require public and private colleges around the country to report how many students enroll, transfer, drop out, and complete various programs. Then that information would be combined with inputs from other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, so that the “labor market outcomes” of former students could be tracked.

In other words, the act would create a system that publicizes how much money students make, on average, after going through particular colleges, programs, and majors.

According to Senator Whitehouse, “Choosing a college is a big decision, and yet too often families can’t get the information to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the costs and benefits of attending different schools.” The purpose of the College Transparency Act is to allow people to make these comparisons. Its other sponsors are Republicans Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Unfortunately, the College Transparency Act could reshape how students, families, policymakers, and the public view the purposes of higher education.

To be sure, privileged students will still be able to pursue their academic passions, but many students will be channeled into paths with a higher payoff upon graduation. Many students who might want to explore geography, philosophy, or the fine arts will be advised to stay away from such majors that do not appear lucrative.

Allison L. Dembeck, vice president of education and labor advocacy at the US Chamber of Commerce, applauds the act for ensuring that “American students have access to accurate information on college affordability, employment, and income data by major.” And the text of the bill says that this system will “focus on the needs of the users of the information.”

But which needs are we talking about? The system would publicize only some outputs of college — especially how much money students make — and not, for instance, surveys of graduates’ satisfaction. This would have the effect of nudging students and families into viewing college as being primarily about making money.

As a college professor, I have talked with students who wanted to major in political science but who pursued a business degree because of parental pressure. I fear that the College Transparency Act would steer many more students toward majors that lead to more money.

The increased pressure may not come from parents alone. The College Transparency Act could lay the foundation for the government to eventually refuse to pay for programs with modest student economic outcomes.

The Obama administration tried to create the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System, which would have rated colleges on graduates’ income earned and then steered federal financial aid to students in schools that fared well on this measure. The administration went so far as to create a College Scorecard that reports median alumni earnings in the year after graduation for students who received federal financial aid. The College Transparency Act would capture much more detailed data, which could give Congress the ability to create a high-stakes accountability system in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

States could go this route even if the federal government doesn’t. The act would require the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics to provide a report to each state’s higher education body. In Florida, the legislature is considering a bill that would waive state university tuition and fees for students enrolled in academic programs that align with the state’s “economic and workforce needs.” The proposed data system would give states information that could be used to determine which majors to fund or not.

College can be a wonderful chance to explore academic options. Sometimes there is a direct link between a student’s major and their career. But not always. Often enough, English majors go to veterinary school, theology majors go to law school, political science majors become priests, and cultural anthropology majors go into venture capital. If students learn to read complex texts and write research papers, practice public speaking, find a mentor, and make friends, then they often do well after college regardless of major.

American higher education’s commitment to academic freedom means that professors get to choose what to teach and research, and students have options about majors and courses. There is a buzz on American campuses as professors and students do what they are passionate about.

Passion is not frivolous. Students who are fired up about learning go on to start businesses, become intelligence analysts or Peace Corps volunteers, raise families, and do other meaningful things. Do we really want central planners to set up a system that leads students to think more about their anticipated income? I agree with Stanford University Professor David F. Labaree that American higher education is “a perfect mess” and that this messiness contributes to it being “the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world.” Who knows what is the next major that America will need in the future, regardless of how well it pays now?

Does anybody doubt that engineering graduates earn more than comparative literature graduates, at least shortly after graduation? Most students already have a decent idea about what they will be able to do with their degrees. The College Transparency Act is not just about collecting and providing data. It is about building a higher education system in the image of economists and businesspeople.

Charles Siler had excellent credentials to work in the privatization movement. In this article, he explains why he switched sides. To learn more about Charles Siler, watch this video in which I interviewed him.

Confessions of a Former Privatizer Why I Don’t Want to Eradicate Public Schools Anymore

I spent years working to privatize public schools. I realized that I was wrong, and am now proud to call myself a public education advocate.

By Charles Siler

Nearly all my life I believed public schools were obstacles to success, achievement, and social mobility for individuals and our society as a whole. And it wasn’t just schools. This was my belief about nearly all government activity. I saw government agencies as little more than hives of self-serving bureaucrats looking for ways to increase their budgets by robbing more and more money from taxpayers, all while standing in the way of innovation and success.

My view of government, including “government schools,” was in many ways a reflection of my upbringing. I was raised by evangelical Christians, with a father who descended from slave owners and who attended schools in Mississippi before the state had fully integrated them. The words “[Robert E.] Lee surrendered, but I didn’t!”were emblazoned on a trinket that hung off the family car keys. This tongue-in-cheek joke that wasn’t entirely a joke captured the ethos of our familial and social circles.

As we saw it, a strong government meant outsiders imposing limitations on us and got in the way of people living their lives. A strong federal government, after all, had freed our slaves. That same strong federal government told us how to run our elections and forced us to integrate our schools.

I left home and joined the military before heading to college. By that time my anti-government views had transitioned from general critiques steeped in the Lost Cause myth I’d grown up with to economic and social policies that I could back up with evidence and reasoned philosophy. I was drawn to libertarianism, so I headed to George Mason University to study economics. It was a fitting choice, as the department had been designed to develop young talent who could recast the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, including the school choice fight against desegregation into clinical academic language, bolstered by dispassionate “evidence.”

I was only 30 years old but I’d already had a lifetime of conditioning, some I was born into, much I’d sought out on my own. I was convinced that people were their most liberated and most able to define their own lives when they were given as much individual freedom as possible without the intervention of governments or the “whims” of majority rule. A common refrain I heard and was fond of repeating was that “Absolute democracy is four wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.” Unions were just as much part of the problem as far as I was concerned, as they enabled people to form large groups and decide what others could or couldn’t do.

To me, public school represented everything that was wrong with our society. Our K-12 schools were a massive government bureaucracy staffed by union members that children were compelled to attend and adults were forced to pay for with their taxes. If I was going to help make the country a better place for everyone, I had to pitch in and help take down public schools. 

By now you’ve probably noticed that I brought a certain arrogance to my mission. That’s because I was convinced that I was working to make people better off. But I was also frustrated by the positive opinions that so many people seemed to have about public education as well as government programs, including Social Security and Medicare. People didn’t understand what was truly best for them. And that arrogance defined my work and the privatization movement more generally.

Even as I pursued my mission with zeal, I was beginning to experience doubts about whether the policies I was pushing really were improving people’s lives. For one thing, the “evidence” that I was so fond of pointing to when I argued with public school defenders was actually pretty hard to find. That’s because pro-privatization groups like the ones I worked for and alongside fight with incredible vigor to block any efforts to collect data on privatization programs. When data was available, I could see for myself that the programs I was selling rarely seemed to produce academic benefits for students, even as they increased inequity. I knew that data could always be cherry-picked to make pro-privatization arguments—it was what I did for a living—but it was increasingly hard for me to deny what I could see with my own eyes: privatization is bad for students, for communities, and economies.

Confronting the reality of the work I’d been doing in conservative/libertarian policy circles wasn’t easy. Fortunately I had a network of friends who supported me through my crisis of conscience. But it was a chance encounter that really pressed me to deepen my reexamination of my beliefs and would lead me to become an advocate for public schools. One evening I dropped by a public debate on privatization in order to catch up with a former colleague who advocated for school vouchers. I ended up running into Dawn Penich-Thacker, my former supervisor when I’d worked in public affairs for the military who’d since gone on to co-found Save Our Schools Arizona. 

More than a decade had passed since we’d worked together, and here we were on opposite sides of school voucher expansion in Arizona. That encounter marked the resumption of my friendship with Dawn. It also forced me to engage in a much more critical examination of school privatization than I’d ever done before. Here was someone who I liked and respected, and who believed passionately that privatizing schools wasn’t empowering parents at all, and had reams of data to back up her argument. Study after study showed a lack of academic improvement for students in school privatization programs, school privatization programs increased segregation, they increased discrimination, they were more succeptible to fraud, and so on. I had no choice but to admit that I’d been wrong.

I’d reached a turning point in my life. When Arizona legislators passed a universal school measure, something I would have cheered as a privatization advocate, I joined the opposition. I signed up with Save Our Schools Arizona, becoming one of the countless volunteers who helped defeat the voucher measure at the polls in 2018 by a 2-to-1 margin. I also did what I could to support Save Our Schools’ policy efforts, using the lobbying and communications skills I’d honed as a privatization advocate on behalf of public education.

Working with SOSAZ was profoundly inspiring to me. It is an incredible organization of volunteers, and seeing so many people pouring so much of themselves into fighting for their communities has galvanized me to become more deeply involved. It has also been incredibly frustrating to encounter the political machine I used to be a part of. The movement to privatize schools and indeed all public goods can feel overwhelming with its persistence, its reach, and its political influence.

Despite this, I have a lot of hope for the future. The politicians that the privatizers bankroll have gone too far, and people are getting more engaged, not to mention enraged, as a result. In other words, I am seeing cracks in the privatization army that I used to be part of. And as grassroots resistance gets stronger, the movement is gasping for wins. They’re also having to attack democracy itself in a more coordinated effort just to hold onto the gains they’ve made. Sensing that the door is closing, they are grasping for as much as they can before it’s too late. That’s why there is so much frenetic activity at the state level right now. These are the desperate reaches of a movement in crisis. 

I’m convinced that the pendulum is set to swing back in support of public institutions and public schools. While the fight is exhausting and often dispiriting, this is actually an exciting time to be an advocate for public schools. Diverse communities are more engaged than ever and are helping shape conversations about the future of public education. People are paying more and more attention to local elections, including school board races.

There are many of you reading this who have been fighting for public schools way longer, and more effectively, than I have. While I can’t know the exhaustion and despair many of you must feel at this point, I hope that you see the light ahead. Hopefully together we can turn the tide on school privatization. I’m proud to finally join you in fighting for our communities and our future.

Charles Siler formerly worked for the pro-voucher Goldwater Institute in Arizona. He now advises pro-public education groups and candidates.