In 2018, a wave of educator strikes called Red for Ed swept through several states. Educators in Arizona won additional funding from the state legislature, supposedly for teacher salaries, which school boards could spend as they chose. This article quantitatively examines the participation and results of the 2018 Arizona educator strike, using…

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4)…

The abrupt closing of college campuses this spring due to the spread of COVID-19 upended the lives of students and their families and disrupted the higher education sector. The impact of these closures and the questions of whether and how to reopen campuses this fall have been widely discussed. Less attention has been paid to the potential…

An all too common complaint in the early childhood field is that low salaries for preschool teachers and lack of pay parity with K-12 teachers in the public schools creates serious problems. These include low morale and difficulty recruiting and retaining strong preschool teachers. State policies can contribute to or resolve these problems in…

This is the executive summary for the report, "From Unlivable Wages to Just Pay for Early Educators." Teaching in early care and education (ECE) programs is one of the lowest-paid occupations in the United States. Low wages for early educators are not a new challenge. Compensation has been low in this field since its inception, but only…

This Perspective summarizes recent trends in young peoples' entrance into and completion of postsecondary educational programs. Education is an important pathway into well-paying jobs and the American middle class. Education levels have been rising for the past 50 years, including large gains for many demographic groups. But declining public…

"Education at a Glance" is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of accession and partner countries. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication -- as well as links to…

Government backed income contingent student loans are an increasingly being used to fund higher education. An income contingent repayment plan acts as an incremental marginal tax on labor earnings, which could cause individuals to distort their work effort. This paper uses an administrative dataset from the UK that links student loan borrowers…

This report provides a closer look at the well-being of the early care and education (ECE) workforce in California, using data collected by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) through the 2020 California Early Care and Education Workforce Study. For decades, low levels of public investment in this sector have kept the ECE…

Cities in the United States dramatically expanded spending on public education in the years following World War I, with the average urban school district increasing per pupil expenditures by over 70 percent between 1916 and 1924. We provide the first evaluation of these historically unprecedented investments in public education by compiling a new…

The State Indicators Database (SID), which is the School Finance Indicators Database's (SFID) primary product, includes approximately 125 variables, but this report focuses on three key school finance measures: fiscal effort, adequacy, and progressivity. This report discusses how states' systems tend to mediate the impact of economic downturns and…

While state appropriations are the largest revenue source of the U.S. public university systems, they have declined significantly over the past several decades. Surprisingly, there is little empirical work on the effect of state appropriation cuts on the research productivity of public universities. Helping fill that gap, this paper is the first…

Early educators are the best spokespeople about the conditions under which they work and what they need in order to thrive. Policy leaders have much to gain by actively engaging educators in identifying workable solutions to the child care crisis. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) believes that educators have the right to…

When it comes to American education, few policy areas are as misunderstood -- or as crucial -- as school finance. Over the past several years, a political and empirical consensus has emerged about the importance of equitable and adequate school funding for high quality K-12 education. In other words, the evidence is clear that money does, indeed,…

This paper engages with current debate on the role of the university following COVID-19, exposing the ongoing corruption of traditional values of the tertiary sector, and the shift in teaching and learning expectations across the academy. It highlights the negative impact of the huge decline in government funding since the 1990s, salary inequity,…