The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented economic and policy challenges to the United States and other countries. Navigating out of the pandemic slowdown is another novel experience, which makes it more difficult to answer the question addressed each year in the "State of Working Pennsylvania": How is the Pennsylvania economy…

The United States and Pennsylvania economies are at a pivot point: Will we build forward better or will we build back the same? Will we make things even worse? This report revisits the policy choices that lie ahead. Most of this annual checkup on the Pennsylvania economy, the 26th "State of Working Pennsylvania," presents labor market…

Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.9 percent smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely…

Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.3% smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely drives…

This article explores narratives of how COVID-19 impacted the performing arts sector, by drawing on interviews with creative workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite the late exposure to COVID-19 and the adoption of an elimination approach that afforded opportunities for performing arts to continue to varying extents between 2019 and 2022,…

Shifting realities across the world have emphasized the need to change early childhood systems thinking. Specifically, a quality early childhood workforce was in high demand before the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be in demand until sustainable recruitment and retention efforts are achieved. Encouraging more professionals to enter and…

The labour market outcomes for native- and foreign-born adults during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic vary considerably across countries -- with inequalities in employment even falling in some cases compared to 2017. In contrast with the 2008 financial crisis, greater educational attainment does not seem to have had a clear protective…

This position paper reviews four intersecting trends impacting the burnout and turnover of clinical staff in counseling centers in the 2020s: ever expanding service demand, mismatched clinical models, the emergence of third party vendors, and uncompetitive salaries. The authors provide a framework and make recommendations for institutions to take…

"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2022" centered on the continued recovery from the COVID-19 recession, highlighting that Pennsylvania was at a policy crossroads: would political leaders embrace policies to strengthen the individual and collective worker power evident a year ago? Or would austerity and anti-worker policies after the…

Direct support professionals (DSPs) and frontline supervisors (FLSs) have critical roles in home and community-based services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Low wages and high levels of responsibility created a long-term crisis in recruitment and retention and are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A national…

Early childhood education and care is critical to Wisconsin's families and businesses, offering a safe place for children to grow and learn during formative years while parents and other guardians participate in the workforce. Despite its importance, child care can be prohibitively expensive for some Wisconsin families, and the industry operates…

For more than a decade, academics and education policy experts have raised concerns about a widespread shortage of teachers in the United States. The first wave of warnings came in response to the drastic cuts in state and local spending on education following the Great Recession. In this report, the authors use data from a wide range of sources…

Over the last 18 years, Economic Policy Institute has closely tracked trends in teacher pay. Over these nearly two decades, a picture of increasingly alarming trends has emerged. Simply put, teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened…

It is well known that there is a critical shortage of direct support professionals (DSPs) who support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live in the community. While the work is high-skilled and varied in nature, wages remain low. COVID-19 had unprecedented adverse effects on DSPs, the people they support, organizations,…

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)…